MIAMI — María de Jesús Jaime Zamudio, also known as Marichuy, died a week after falling from the fifth floor of the building in Mexico City she lived in, in the night between Jan. 15 and 16, 2016. Her mother, Yesenia Zamudio, has never believed the fall was an accident or a suicide attempt, as the local authorities suggested at the time of the tragedy. For the past four years she has insisted that her daughter was murdered.

In September 2019, Marichuy’s case was reclassified as a femicide. That makes her yet another woman among the thousands regularly killed in Mexico as a result of gender-related violence. Nothing is being done about this sad state of affairs. The attackers, for the most part, remain free.

“What I know now, from the experts’ analyses and investigations, is that Mary was a victim of gender-based violence. She was assaulted,” Yesenia told me about her daughter’s death during an interview. “She fell. No one helped her. Then, they left her to bleed out.” Marichuy, who was only 19, died in a Mexico City hospital from the multiple fractures sustained as she tried to escape her aggressors. Her family maintains that one of Marichuy’s college professors and three classmates assaulted her in her apartment after a night out, but so far no arrests have been made related to her case.

Yesenia recently gained some notoriety thanks to a video that went viral on social media. “So, what if I set things on fire, wreak havoc and raise hell in this city? What’s the problem with that?” she says in the video. “They killed my daughter! I’m a mother whose daughter was killed! And yes, I’m an empowered, feminist mother, and I have had enough. I have every right to burn down and destroy whatever I want, and I’m not going to ask for anyone’s permission. Because before they murdered my daughter, they murdered many, many others.”