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Nov 27, 2020

Raíchali interviews journalist Alicia Fernandez about The Red Note podcast


Journalist Alicia Fernandez, who researched and conducted the interviews for The Red Note podcast, sat down with the Chihuahua, Mexico-based independent news site Raichali earlier this week to discuss the project, and the ongoing issue of the femicides in Juarez.


An English translation of Alicia's interview and Raichali's profile of The Red Note podcast is reproduced below.


You can read the interview and profile in the original Spanish by clicking on the following link: “La Nota Roja”, el podcast que mantiene viva la historia de los feminicidios en Juárez

 

"La Nota Roja", the podcast that keeps alive the history of femicides in Juárez

By Jaime Armendáriz / Raíchali


In 1993, a wave of murders of women began to be formally registered in Ciudad Juárez. Today, these types of crimes continue on the border, protected by an unpunished system that allows them.


These are the conclusions reached by relatives of women victims of violence, activists, researchers, and many other testimonies, during the 10 chapters of the podcast “The Red Note”, a product of journalistic investigation carried out by a Mexican team for several months.


It is a sound tour through more than 25 years of terror in that city, narrated by the journalist Lydia Cacho, who has lived in exile for several years for showing a network of trafficking of minors linked to businessmen and public officials of Puebla.


For Alicia Fernández, researcher from Juarez and journalist in charge of interviews for the podcast, the importance of having all these testimonies lies in evidencing a system and a structure that allows the homicides and disappearances of women, and at the same time showing the resilience of mothers and relatives of victims fighting against it all.


"It is not just that they disappear or are killed and that's it, but there is this whole system that allows it to happen, which is impunity and corruption," she said in an interview with Raíchali.


Just in the first chapter, the activist and author of the work "The Vagina Monologues", Eve Ensler, says that although at the beginning the problem is to identify the perpetrator of the femicides, it is clear that it is a combination between the corporations , the government, machismo, poverty, the maquiladoras, "all these forces have allowed women to be sacrificed on the altar of profit and poverty."


In the following chapters, the podcast walks through those episodes featuring the Mexican justice system, specifically in Chihuahua, accused of having the so-called "scapegoats", of the shortcomings in the investigation, but also of the legislative steps to try to solve those cases.


“They talk about the evolution of the prosecution, the legislation, and how the demand for justice is growing. Although right now it does not mean that the application of justice is accurate. Although there are sentences such as that of Arroyo El Navajo, there are still many irregularities in the processes,” says Alicia.


The podcast was directed by Craig Whitney, with Estefanía Bonilla as producer, and Lydia Cacho as executive producer. At the end of September, the first chapter was issued and on November 17, the tenth was published, so they can all be found in English and Spanish in the following links with links to be reproduced on different platforms:


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