A day without women: a vast strike in Mexico

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In 2014, a missile took down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, killing everyone aboard. A long-awaited criminal trial begins today in the Netherlands. What's notable is who isn't there: none of the 4 defendants, nor the Russian government. And the Mayflower is soon to be back at sea. Nothing like the one that carried pilgrims to America 4 centuries ago, this one has no captain and no crew, but plenty of brains. We take a look at a pioneering project in autonomous ships. First up, though. Yesterday, on International Women's Day, an unprecedented number of women across Latin America took to the streets protesting against the rising violence against women. Today, millions more are expected to go on strike across Mexico and Argentina. This is the first big social movement to form in Mexico during the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing populist who took office in in 2018. It's in response to an increasing number of femicides—girls and women killed because of their gender. Today, women plan to stay home from work or school to mark what's being called a Day Without Women. The strike was planned in the wake of two especially brutal murders.

You don't necessarily need to have been abducted or to be fearing for your life to want to protest in the streets of Mexico City.

Richard Enser is The Economist's Mexico City bureau chief.

A lot of women have tales of much smaller abuses which have added up over the years. So, for example, I spoke with a woman called Sonia Barueta. Now, Sonia works at an aviation school in Mexico City. She's in her late 50s, and she told me that her experience was an experience that so many women across Mexico have, which is a lifetime of abuses at the hands of Mexican men. For 30 years, she has been wearing black pants. She says that in Mexico, you can't wear a skirt even if you would like to, because the men will chase you, they will not leave you in peace, they will try to lift it up. She counts 6 different times in her life that she has needed to pepper spray a man who has been overly aggressive towards her. She'd basically accepted this as just the way things are for women living and working and walking around Mexico. But something changed in February. First, on the 9th of February, the body of a woman called Ingrid Escamilla was found at her home. She had been raped murdered and badly mutilated by her husband. And those details, which were reported graphically in the Mexican press, really shocked society. Then less than a week later, on the 15th, the body of a 7-year-old girl was found. Now, she had been abducted from outside her school just days before, and she'd been tortured and sexually abused before she was eventually murdered. Neither murder or violence against women is unusual in Mexico. In fact, this has been happening at growing rates for years, and discontent was already bubbling. But the combination of these two brutal crimes in such a short space of time has really lit the touchpaper and possibly ignited a new social movement and a new way of talking about violence against women in Mexico. As women, we have to express that, please, this is enough. Enough.

And so what's the response to those two murders, Ben, from Sonia and women like her?

These kinds of crimes generally tend to trigger outrage in Mexico. But with this one, a single feminist group called a national strike, and that call for action and taking to the streets went viral. In a frankly unprecedented way. So yesterday we saw the first half of this protest, which was this national march against violence against women. And today we're seeing the second half, which is a national women's strike, in which the women, having already taken to the streets, now retreat from them and stay at home to protest what they see as an unacceptable manner of treatment of women in the country on so many levels.

It's clear that there is protest against this kind of violence, but are there also demands? What is it that the protesters want?

Of course, they are very upset that a lot of these murders of women don't get solved. But at the same time, the demands and the grievances go further down. Women are not happy about the way that they feel when they walk in the streets. They don't feel safe. They are harassed. They are sometimes threatened or touched in ways that they don't appreciate. So in many ways, this protest has been a message to society about the change that they want to see, as much as it has been and will continue to be a political message. And the other thing to remember about these protests is they're part of a more regional wave that we've been seeing since around about the middle of last decade. There was a movement that began in Argentina about 5 years ago, Ni Una Menos, which was aimed at this this general idea of violence and mistreatment of women, which has spread from country to country. And feminist collectives have been very good at spreading their message, learning from one another, sharing experiences, and above all, using technology to get their message out. And one of the things that has gone viral in this context is a song composed by a Chilean feminist collective, and the name of this song is "Un Viajador en Tu Camino," which means "a rapist in your path." [MUSIC] And it's a song that fulminates against the mistreatment of women, the judgments that are made against women who complain about being mistreated. And if you talk to, you know, elder stateswomen of the feminist movement, they will say quite frankly, there are a lot of things that my generation was willing to tolerate, which this younger generation of women in Latin America and indeed around the world, quite frankly, just do not want to accept or put up with.

We've heard quite a bit in recent years about femicide, women being killed because of their gender. Is that a particular problem in Mexico?

Femicide is on the rise in Mexico. The numbers have more than doubled in the last 4 years. But the thing to remember is that the overall number of murders has also doubled in the last 4 years. The number of murder victims who are women has consistently been between 10% and 15% since the 1990s. So the idea that violence against women is worsening at a quicker rate than overall violence is not necessarily shown in the statistics, but tolerance at this level of violence is rapidly falling away in certain parts of Mexican society. And this is something that is unprecedented and we really haven't seen before.

And do you get the sense that politicians, including President López Obrador, are hearing that message? Are authorities picking up on it, addressing it?

Politicians are making promises to address it. Sometimes these are very populist. You are hearing, of course, calls for the death penalty for any crime of femicide, which is its own crime separate from homicide in Mexico and much of Latin America. There are lots of calls and above all problems with a president who promised to be a progressive president, to be a left-wing leader. A lot of feminists are not happy with what they're hearing from this president, who seems to regard femicide as a distraction from his domestic agenda. He doesn't necessarily seem to see a difference between femicides and violence against women and the overall climate of violence in the country. And for many feminists, this is a problem because they think that you can't solve this problem unless you see that it's a different kind of problem to the overall challenge of violence in Mexico.

And so do you think that the strikes that have been going on, are going on, will bring that to wider attention? That the protests could focus minds in a helpful way here?

Yeah, I do think that this march is going to leave a legacy. It's probably the biggest mobilization for a feminist cause in the history of Mexico. And it's a chance to vote with your feet and vote with your voice. And these things get heard. It starts a lot of conversations in family homes. It sends a message that social change from, you know, from a very young age in the school all the way up to men sitting around in bars. It's a challenge to go into these spaces and try and change the way that the conversations which form attitudes take place and to, on a really granular level, try to affect some kind of shift in the mindset, not just of women, but of men, young and old.

Richard, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

For the 298 victims on Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, even a hint of justice has been a long time coming.

The wreckage of Flight MH17 is still smoldering in the drizzle that's engulfed eastern Ukraine. Wreckage, bodies, and body parts are spread over fields and villages for miles around.

But today, a criminal trial of 4 men will begin in the Netherlands—3 Russians and 1 Ukrainian. They're accused of playing crucial roles in the decision to fire the missile that downed the plane over Ukraine in 2014. The defendants themselves won't be there, represented only by their lawyers. Russia doesn't extradite its nationals. But the biggest absence will be that of the Russian government, which bears the ultimate responsibility for supplying and probably firing the missile.

We have definitive proof the airliner was shot down by a Russian army missile system.

That same Russian mobile missile launcher in Ukraine headed yesterday for the Russian border with two of its launch tubes empty.

Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 took off from Amsterdam on July 17th, 2014, headed for Kuala Lumpur. Matt Steinglass is our Europe correspondent. And it was flying over East Ukraine, which at the time was immersed in a guerrilla war between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists. The plane crashed in a field in eastern Ukraine, and what we now know is that it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. We now know the type of missile that was— it was a Russian Buk missile. Russia has always denied any involvement, but an international investigation team was set up composed of researchers from the 5 countries most involved. The Netherlands was the country with the most victims on board. About 2/3 of the passengers on board were Dutch.

And tell me about the court case that's opening today.

The case today charges 4 people, 3 of them Russians and 1 Ukrainian, with having command responsibility in the shooting down of the plane and being responsible for the murders of those on board. It doesn't charge them with pressing the button that fired the missile. No one is sure who did that, but it does charge them with having— playing responsible roles in requesting that the missile be deployed and that it be used. It's being held in a courtroom next to Schiphol Airport, where the plane took off. And it's expected to run for at least the rest of the year. There will have to be a tremendous amount of evidence presented. The accused themselves are not there. Russia does not extradite its own nationals, and the Ukrainian who is accused is on the lam. Nobody is sure where he is, but families of the victims will be there, and there's been time set aside for them to address the court.

And how strong is the evidence against the accused?

We're pretty sure we know by this time what happened. Right after the plane was shot down, intercepted mobile phone calls began to emerge, which seemed to show Russian-speaking officers talking about requesting a Buk unit to be used to stop the Ukrainian Air Force. And they seemed to discuss the launching of the missile and then their dismay when they began to realize that it was actually an airliner that had been shot down rather than an Air Force plane. Over the years since then, tremendous amounts of research have been done. The Joint Investigation Team, the official researchers, had the wreckage of the plane shipped back to the Netherlands and reconstructed so that ballistic experts could look at what exactly had shot it down, and those ballistics experts determined that it was an anti-aircraft missile and eventually the type of missile that it was. Meanwhile, a digital forensics outfit called Bellingcat was gathering tremendous amounts of social media evidence, pictures from people's mobile phones and from dashboard cameras, which recorded a convoy leaving the 53rd Russian Army Anti-Aircraft Brigade base in Russia, driving down to the border with Ukraine and crossing into the disputed territory. And then returning the day after MH17 was shot down with one of its missiles missing. The coup de grâce was in 2018 when the Joint Investigation Team presented a spent Buk missile fuselage, which seems to be the actual missile that had shot the plane down, which they had recovered in a field in Ukraine.

And what has the Russian government or indeed Vladimir Putin said about this?

Vladimir Putin and the Russian government have always denied any responsibility in this entire tragedy. They claim that they had nothing to do with shooting down the plane, that they never provided military or anti-aircraft help to the anti-Ukrainian rebels in the east. At various times, they have tossed out different wild theories as to how the plane might have been shot down. They have accused the Ukrainians of shooting it down with a fighter plane. And there's no— in order to believe that Ukraine was responsible for shooting this plane down, you have to construct an insane, absurd conspiracy theory that has no rhyme or reason.

I mean, there seems to be a preponderance of evidence here. And equally, there is denials that haven't changed in strength over the last 6 years. I mean, what What do you expect this trial to accomplish?

It's very difficult to know what ultimate effect this trial might have, and it's difficult to know what to do with a regime like Russia's, which, when it feels like it, simply washes its hands of its responsibilities under international law. For the families of the victims, this is very important because it promises them some measure of satisfaction. Just the sense that some of the individuals who are responsible for killing their loved ones have been found guilty in a court of law would be very helpful to them emotionally. In terms of what one can do to bring those individuals to justice and to hold Russia itself to account, it's very difficult to do that. Russia will, will resist being held accountable under international law. Russia has engaged in prisoner exchanges with Ukraine in the past, and one can imagine that if these people are convicted, they might form part of such a prisoner exchange in the future. But short of something like that, it's very hard to imagine these individuals, if they are convicted, ever seeing the inside of a jail.

Matt, thank you very much for joining us. You're welcome, Jason. 400 years ago, the Mayflower left Britain and set sail for America. In September, another ship will trace the same route. But unlike the original voyage, this boat won't have any pilgrims on board, nor a captain, nor a crew. The project is a collaboration between IBM and Promare, a marine research organization, and the new Mayflower will start its first sea trials this month.

The Mayflower autonomous ship, it's of a trimaran design. It has solar panels all across the top of it for recharging the battery system. It's about 15 meters long, so about 50 feet, about 6 meters wide.

Don Scott is the Chief Technology Officer of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship.

On September 16th, it's leaving from Plymouth Sound, Plymouth, UK, sailing across the Atlantic to the Cape Cod area, to Provincetown, and then on to Plymouth itself. And there's nobody on board? It's completely unmanned. Right.

I mean, we are routinely hearing about what the challenges are, for example, for autonomous cars. And the sort of dynamic environment and pedestrians and unclear road markings and bad weather and so on. What are the challenges that are specifically relevant to the marine application? Well, it's very different.

It's a very hostile, dynamic environment. So I guess the advantage a car has, it knows the road's not moving constantly. The ocean is. And weather is a significant concern as well. And of course, you have moving navigation hazards as well. So other vehicles, ocean debris that we need to be able to sense and know what they're doing and react to them and act in a safe manner.

And so that's the part that the artificial intelligence helps with, managing that all on its own regardless of the conditions.

Yeah, exactly. So the AI-based systems, they're primarily responsible for ingesting what we call a navigation hazard map, sort of getting a sense of of what are the problem areas and how to stay away from them. And the AI system is making those decisions and deciding on a safe course and speed to follow.

How do you teach the AI what it needs to know in order to not run into trouble at sea?

So to get the AI system to work, we have collected quite a bit of training data. Everyone who's doing AI will tell you it's all about data and then have been training the models to identify navigation hazards. So that we can deploy them on the vehicle.

When you say collecting data, data of what sort?

These are tagged images, as in a picture of a container ship and we know it's a container ship, or a picture of a fishing boat and we know it's a fishing boat.

Or a picture of a rogue wave. Sorry, I shouldn't say those words in front of you.

Hopefully we won't see a rogue wave.

So it's not just about making the crossing, it's going to be gathering some data along the way.

Absolutely. It's not just about making the crossing. We are gathering data. We have 3 payload sections on board, which we've made available to the academic and scientific community. They're investigating the presence of microplastics in the ocean. There's a study about estimating sea state based on satellite imagery. There's also a great one where we're listening for whale sounds, looking, studying whale populations. These are really important experiments, a really important part of this project because there's this whole aspect about AI-based navigation. Ultimately, it's also creating a platform to perform ocean science.

Any particular advantages for the science, notwithstanding the cost or risk to human life and so on, but specifically that autonomous craft, you can imagine that makes this kind of science better, easier, more complete?

Oh, I think it probably removes the drudgery of the data collection. Most scientists I know aren't too keen on having their eye in a microscope in the middle of the South Atlantic. The interesting part is what the data is telling them. It's not the collection. You know what? It's fun and exciting the first time you do it. There's nothing like being out in the ocean in a storm or whatever. That disappears after a while. So you'd be quite happy having an autonomous system collecting your information.

That never gets bored or seasick.

Yeah, that never gets bored, doesn't get seasick, which is, you know, one of the great parts about being at sea.

And what about sort of fitting this into a wider context? Because this isn't the only autonomous ship out there or under development. How would you describe what you expect that industry to develop?

I think we're really at the forefront of a shift in this type of technology. So you're going to see a lot more of this. I mean, you do already have different academic communities that are working on this, developing swarm technology for data collection. It's still somewhat ad hoc, but it's burgeoning, it's growing, and it's only going to get bigger.

Don, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.