How come the murder of the man in this video stirs no outrage?
AFP: Mexico music video showing woman murder sparks outrage
Mexico City (AFP) – A man finds his lover in bed with another man. He pulls a gun, shoots the rival dead, ties up the woman, drags her to a car, stuffs her in the trunk and smiles as he sets it on fire.
“Fuiste Mia” (“You were mine”), a slick music video by the Mexican-American singer Gerardo Ortiz, has garnered more than 25 million views on YouTube — and provoked a furious backlash in a country that suffers from an ingrained culture of sexual violence and where killings of women have surged.
The 25-year-old Ortiz has a long list of “narcocorridos” — or “narco ballads” — to his credit, a controversial yet hugely popular genre that celebrates the feats of Mexico’s drug lords and is banned from the airwaves in many places.
But none of his videos has attracted as much attention as “Fuiste Mia,” which appeared just as two high-profile sexual harassment cases were making headlines in Mexico — and prompted him to cancel several concerts.
Stuffing a woman in a skimpy nightgown into a trunk is reminiscent of the tactics of Mexico’s drug gangs, who often dump bodies, sometimes hacked to pieces and with notes attached to them, inside cars.
Speaking at a press conference from southern California, where he lives as a US citizen, Ortiz said the “horrible publicity” surrounding the video had the merit of raising awareness of femicide, or the violent killing of women.
But his argument did little to appease critics in Mexico.
Videos like this one “objectify women, glorify violence, and reaffirm stereotypes about women causing problems for men and therefore deserving punishment,” said Lucia Lagunes, head of Women’s Communication and Information, a rights NGO.
The subject is highly sensitive in a country where nearly half of all women over the age of 15 — 47 percent — have suffered some form of sexual violence, according to government statistics.
The Mexican interior ministry condemned the singer by name in a statement expressing “profound rejection of this type of content, and in particular, the video of singer Gerardo Ortiz.”
The video “clearly invites violence against women, in addition to minimizing and normalizing this social scourge,” it said.
Ortiz’s video also caught the attention of officials in the western state of Jalisco, who issued a summons for the singer for questioning. Two years ago police seized six AK-47 assault rifles and a grenade launcher at the upscale home in Jalisco where the video was filmed.
