Defunding The Police Is A Global Movement

Article

Apr 6

"Justice for Victoria" protest in San Salvador. [AFP/ Marvin Recinos]

On March 27, a Mexican police officer kneeled on the neck of Victoria Esperanza Salazar while she screamed. Salazar died shortly after. Two days later, the Derek Chauvin trial began in Minneapolis. Chauvin, a police officer, had kneeled on George Floyd’s neck while he gasped for air. The one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death is next month.

Both victims were working-class people whose names were not known to the general public before these events. Both murders have sparked uprisings.

Ordinary people see their experiences with police reflected in the casual contempt with which Salazar, a cleaner, and Floyd, a sometimes bouncer, were treated. Mexican law enforcement has a significant record of brutality and corruption, which has provoked a recent series of uprisings against killings by the police. As one recent protest slogan goes: “The police don't take care of me, my friends take care of me.”

Salazar was also a refugee from El Salvador, where she had fled violence, and eventually found work in the Mexican resort town of Tulum. She had, in other words, come to Mexico seeking safety. The officers who killed her, those charged with protecting her safety, have since been charged with femicide, a common term in a country where nearly a thousand women were killed last year. Because women are at risk of murder from civilians and law enforcement alike, Mexican feminists today share an analysis with the defund movement in the States: not better police, but a world without them.