Death in Ocosingo

Mariana Sánchez Dávalos, 24, was a medicine graduate at the Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, finishing Mexico’s mandatory year of rural medical service. In August 2020, she was assigned to a government health center in the small, eastern Mexican municipality of Ocosingo. The placement was allocated by the state, while the clinic and the room she lived in beside it were public facilities. Within weeks, her mother later said, a colleague began arriving drunk and forcing her door open at night. On the evening of 27 January 2021, she told her mother over the phone that the harassment at the center was continuing and that she intended to report it again. The following morning, she was found dead in her room. The Chiapas state prosecutor documented mechanical asphyxiation by hanging and treated the death as a suicide.

The Law on Paper

Years prior to this incident, femicide was written into the Mexican federal penal code as a distinct offense on 14 June 2012. Under Article 325 it became a separate statistical category that year. A homicide in Mexico qualifies as femicide when at least one of seven criteria is met. These include criteria like evidence of sexual violence before death, or recorded antecedents of workplace violence against the later victim. Mexico is also a member of the Convention of Belém do Pará, a treaty meant to protect women’s right to live free of violence. Article 7(b) of the treaty obliges states to use due diligence to prevent and investigate violence against women. The Mexican Supreme Court held in its 2015 Mariana Lima Buendía ruling that the violent death of a woman, including one recorded as suicide, must be examined considering the victim’s gender. All these legal parameters were in force in January 2021, when Sánchez Dávalos’s death was recorded as suicide.

A Complaint and Its Consequences – For Her

Sánchez Dávalos told her mother in October 2020 that a colleague at the center, Dr. Fernando Cuauhtémoc Pérez Jiménez, had been harassing her. She reported days later that he had forced his way into her room and allegedly attempted to sexually assault her. In early November, she complained to the head of the health center and sought support from the university and the state health secretariat. She was instructed to take a month of leave without pay or scholarship funds and was told that her documents could be withheld. On her return in December, the accused had been reassigned to the afternoon shift at the same center, and her own transfer request had not been acted upon. She had asked the university before the placement began to be posted nearer her mother in northern Mexico, which was refused as well.

A Body That Was Not Preserved

One day after her death, Sánchez Dávalos’s body was cremated without the consent of her next of kin. Her mother, María de Lourdes Dávalos Ábrego, was recovering from a mastectomy in Saltillo, Coahuila, and learned of the death from her daughter’s friends rather than from the authorities. Dávalos Ábrego said the cremation made exhumation impossible, foreclosing any examination of injuries that might have explained the death. The state of Chiapas had adopted a femicide investigation protocol in August 2020, five months earlier, and the state prosecutor said the case was being handled under it. Media reports on the first anniversary of the death alleged that the protocol had not been applied. The gender-perspective examination the Supreme Court requires depends on physical evidence that the cremation had removed permanently.

Legal Ramifications

The head of the health center was arrested on 6 February 2021 on charges of abuse of authority for failing to act on Sánchez Dávalos’s complaint. As for Dr. Cuauhtémoc: he turned himself in on 18 February and was held in pretrial detention on a sexual harassment charge, an offense not classified as serious. He was sentenced to three years and a fine on 25 November 2022. The state prosecutor opened a femicide investigation, but it never led to charges and the file remains open to this day. Dávalos Ábrego spent the final six months of her life contesting the suicide finding, and alleged that she had been refused a copy of the investigation file. She died of cancer on 7 August 2021.

The Bigger Picture on Femicides

Femicides accounted for 19.8 percent of female homicides in Mexico in 2015 and 24.2 percent in 2024, meaning roughly one of four killings of a woman is a femicide. Recorded femicides have risen faster than other crimes against life and bodily integrity. The National Citizens’ Femicide Observatory finds that about half of reported killings of women display femicide characteristics, while only around a quarter are investigated as such. Civil society organizations have also documented state authorities registering femicides as ordinary homicides.

Why Classification Decides the Case

Classification of a suicide, as in the case of Sánchez Dávalos, is not only a mere label applied at the end of an investigation. It determines which prosecutorial unit receives the file, which protocol governs the dead body and the scene, and whether the death appears in femicide statistics at all. A death recorded as a suicide leaves the system before the femicide framework is triggered and reversing that finding falls on the family. Irinea Buendía, whose daughter’s 2010 death was closed as a suicide, filed successive constitutional complaints alongside two civil society organizations, and litigated for more than five years before the Supreme Court ordered the case reopened. The Court’s minimum standards for protecting the scene came out of that record.

What Is Counted Is What Gets Governed on

A state that under-classifies femicide produces statistics showing fewer femicides than occur. These statistics determine budgets, staffing, specialist training, and whether a gender violence alert is declared for a given state. The count is therefore not only a record of the problem but an input into the response to it. The Mariana Lima Buendía ruling is recognized across Latin America as a reference point for investigating violent deaths of women. It places emphasis but on the administrative moment when a death is categorized as a certain type of crime or not. Killings and disappearances of women in Mexico are on the rise again, which makes that moment a highly consequential stage of the process.