Feminicidio, Transnational Legal Activism and State Responsibility in Mexic

This dissertation uses the concept of transnational legal activism to analyze the mobilization of international human rights law as a multi-scalar process that produces and is shaped by gendered political and discursive opportunities. I apply this framework to examine how feminist grassroots activists engaged with supranational human rights institutions, especially the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, to hold the Mexican state responsible for the murders of three young women in Ciudad Juarez, an industrial city that borders the United States, in the case of Gonzalez and Others "Cotton Field." The Court declared that Mexico had failed to act with due diligence to prevent, investigate, and punish these crimes. These murders epitomize what activists identified as feminicidio, the systematic killing of women in a context of institutionalized gender discrimination sanctioned by the state; this phenomenon has prevailed in the northern state of Chihuahua where Ciudad Juarez is located since the 1990s. The dissertation also investigates how federal and local state actors responded to grassroots activists' claims and the judgment of the IACtHR, including the criminalization of feminicidio. Through interviews with Mexican activists and frame analysis of the IACtHR judgment and of federal and local parliamentary debates, I argue that grassroots activists' involvement in transnational legal activism contributed to expanding and rearticulating the meaning of women's human rights and state responsibility at the domestic and supranational levels. Throughout, I highlight activists' agency in this process and in their interactions with transnational organizations specialized in human rights advocacy and supranational litigation. Thus, I challenge assumptions in the literature on human rights and social movements that imply that grassroots actors have a limited access to international law and avenues to participate in transnational advocacy. Last, I suggest that the actions of Mexican grassroots activists extend a Latin American approach to international human rights law.