On 27 March, woman defender Teresa González suffered an armed attack by unidentified persons who broke into her home and shot at her. Five days later, on 2 April, she died as a result of her injuries. Teresa was a searching woman defender, member of the Luz de Esperanza Desaparecidos Jalisco collective; she was searching for her brother Jaime González Murillo since 2 September 2024. Teresa was also a leader of the collective of street merchants in the center of the city of Guadalajara.
Although the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office is considering various hypotheses about the motive for her murder, the Luz de Esperanza collective and other searching collectives and organizations have demanded an exhaustive and transparent investigation that does not rule out the link between the crime and her work searching for disappeared persons and defending the right to truth and justice.
This murder comes a few weeks after the discovery of an extermination camp operated by organized crime groups on a ranch in Teuchitlán, in the same state of Jalisco, which shocked the country and sparked many national and international expressions of grief and solidarity with the collectives searching for disappeared persons. Teresa’s voice was among those heard in front of the Jalisco Government Palace on 15 March, during the national day of mourning for Teuchitlán.
The level of risk faced by searching collectives in Mexico, where according to official data from the National Registry of Missing and Unaccounted for Persons (RNPDNO) there are more than 126,000 missing persons, is extremely worrying. Given the omissions, delays and negligence of authorities and institutions at different levels, these collectives – mostly made up of mothers, sisters and daughters of disappeared persons who organize themselves to find their relatives and demand truth, justice and reparation for their loved ones – carry out their own investigation and field exploration, exposing themselves to high-risk environments and situations in which they face different types of attacks with varying degrees of severity, from threats and harassment to armed attacks, forced disappearances and assassinations.
According to data from our registry, the murder of Teresa González brings to 15 the number of women defenders of the right to truth, justice and reparation murdered in different states of the Mexican Republic since 2019: Teresa Magueyal (2023), María Carmen Vázquez (2022) and Rosario Zavala (2020) in Guanajuato; Brenda Jazmín Beltrán (2022) and Aranza Ramos (2021) in Sonora; Adriana Ortiz García (2024) and Daniela Ortiz García (2024) in Oaxaca; Zenaida Pulido (2019) in Michoacán; Esthela Guadalupe Estrada Ávila (2023) in Jalisco; Melissa Abigail Rodríguez Durán (2023) in San Luís Potosí; Blanca Esmeralda Gallardo (2022) in Puebla; Rosario Rodríguez (2022) in Sinaloa; Ana Luisa Garduño (2022) in Morelos; Ángela Méraz León (2024) in Baja California.
The National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders in Mexico and IM-Defensoras lament and condemn the murder of Teresa Gonzalez, and we join the demand for a thorough and transparent investigation that does not rule out any hypothesis, especially those related to her work as a woman human rights defender.
We demand that the authorities at all levels of the State urgently take the necessary measures to guarantee the safety of the Luz de Esperanza Desaparecidos Jalisco collective members, and all searching women defenders and collectives in the state of Jalisco and the rest of the country.