The nation’s Supreme Court has decided to televise the case of the largest serial femicide in Mexican history. The Supreme Court has announced the launch of Caníbal: Total Indignation, a documentary series about the crimes of Andrés Mendoza, a man who murdered at least 19 women over a 31-year period in Atizapán, state of Mexico. It is an alliance in which the Justice Department funds the series and Televisa, the country’s largest media company, is responsible for broadcasting on the open signal. Arturo Zaldívar, the President of the Court, foresaw the controversy, stating that the project was carried out with “tremendous seriousness and care” due to the sensitivity of the case and the media coverage at the time. “It’s not looking for morbidity, but reflection and a culture change,” Zaldívar has claimed.
The documentary will premiere on June 27 and air simultaneously on the Channel of Justice and the Channel of the Stars, the country’s most-watched open television signal. It is a series of five half-hour episodes that will show how the authorities took hold of Mendoza, give relatives of the victims their say and address the crisis of sexist violence in Mexico, where between 10 and 11 women are murdered every day for the fact to be women. Mendoza was arrested a year ago, on May 18, 2020, after an inquest into the femicide of a 34-year-old victim revealed dismembered human remains, official IDs, clothing and accessories from more women at his home.
The then 72-year-old detainee worked for the municipality of Atizapán, on the outskirts of Mexico City, and had experience as a butcher, so he knew how to cut up the bodies. Subsequent investigations confirmed that Mendoza was involved in several unsolved femicides, and he himself asserted that the actual number of victims is around 30 women. The serial killer was nicknamed “the cannibal”, “the cannibal grandfather” or “the monster of Atizapán” in the media. A few years earlier, the case of the “Monster of Ecatepec,” another city on the outskirts of the Mexican capital, surfaced. The narrative of the killer as a “monster” has been sharply challenged by feminist groups, lawyers, writers, artists, activists and authorities. “They are not monsters, they are socialized men in our society,” said Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, Argentina’s Minister for Women, Gender and Diversity. “It’s your brother, your neighbor, your father, your son, your friend, your colleague. It’s not an animal, it’s not an animal,” Gómez Alcorta added after a gang rape in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires last March.
Zaldívar said that Mendoza’s story is just “the common thread” and that the goal is to “move consciousness” to think about how these crimes were committed “without anything happening.” “He was always very perceptive, especially with women,” says a person identified as Mendoza’s lodger in the series’ trailer. A local police officer said immediately afterwards that the neighbors said that “the man was a very good person”. The show takes its title from the nickname “Cannibal”, set in a gray area between facts (the killer himself confessed to having eaten certain remains) and the allegations that have previously been and are not made about the recurring exploitation of the case’s “monstrosity”. into a real social context.
Other times, the protagonism of the perpetrator of the crimes and the lack of focus on the victims’ story has been questioned. Debate over how the story should be handled will be cleared up after the series premieres, although criticism of impunity and opposition to investigating the murder of women with a gender perspective are expected in the preview. “The justice system fails women,” says Fátima Gamboa, co-director of the organization Equis Justicia, in the trailer.
The President of the Supreme Court also justified the intention to seek an alliance with Televisa to broadcast the program because many public bodies in several countries have decided to get involved in artistic or television projects on social issues. Zaldívar has led the case of Roma, the Oscar-winning Mexican film funded by the state that touched on the issue of domestic workers; The end of ETA, a co-production between EL PAÍS and various regional TV channels, or La Jauría, the Chilean series about a rape in a school. “Today, serials are an extraordinarily powerful communication tool and it seems to me that in the face of such a sensitive and terrible problem as that of femicide in Mexico, we must all try to change things,” she commented.
The series lasted 11 months and was directed by Grau Serra, written by Ana Mata and photographed by Luis Posada and María Consuelo Saldaña. It is narrated by the journalist Gabriela Warkentin, a staff member of this newspaper. “It will shake Mexican society and make them see things differently,” Zaldívar assured.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS México newsletter and receive all the informative keys to current events in this country