Murder in Mexico of Claudia Tacoronte, Spanish Erasmus student

"This is not fair. My sister was 21 years old and was studying Early Childhood Education in Granada. Three weeks ago she went to Mexico to do an academic period abroad... A man followed her and stabbed her several times in the abdomen, for no reason... And now she is out there, free... When she left Spain she did not know that other young women from that university had been murdered."

Lara cannot hold back her tears, but she talks non-stop in a video that has gone viral and in which she tells how her sister, Claudia Tacoronte Aguilera, died, murdered in the Mexican state of Morelos, where she had just started an Erasmus outside the European Union.

"How can it be normalized that in just a few months four young people from the same university have been murdered and no one does anything?" Lara asks between sobs. What security guarantees should a European university offer when it sends its students abroad, to countries where violence and crime are so widespread? These are questions that many parents are now asking. In Mexico, for example, 11 femicides occur every day.

Claudia had traveled full of enthusiasm, like so many young people her age, to live an experience on the other side of the Atlantic. She wanted to be a teacher and had applied to participate in an international academic program. However, it was not she who chose destiny. The University of Granada—which has now suspended the exchange with Mexico—assigned him to the Autonomous University of Cuernavaca, in the capital of the state of Morelos, one of the most violent territories in the country, where drug trafficking gangs and common criminals dedicated to extortion and robberies operate.

Since the beginning of the year, local authorities have recorded 21 femicides. Four of the victims were university students.

Before Claudia, in February, Kimberly Yoselin Ramos Beltrán, 18, was murdered, whose body was found ten days after her disappearance. In March it was Carol Toledo Gómez's turn, also 18 years old. In May, Michelle Itzayana Fuentes Calderón died, just 15 years old and the daughter of a teacher.

According to the first investigations, Claudia was attacked in the middle of the street, in Cuautla, where she had gone to attend the Medicinal Plant Festival. A man identified by the Police - although he has not been arrested - as Francisco Javier, alias El Trompas, tried to steal his mobile phone. Then he hit her and chased her to the local Cultural Center, where Claudia tried, unsuccessfully, to ask for help.

"And that's where that guy finished her off. Can you die like that?" cries her sister. "We live in a sick society, full of inhumane people."

The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, has promised that "the culprit will be found." But impunity continues to be one of the country's great problems, as Sergio González Rodríguez already denounced in Bones in the Desert, an investigation into the wave of femicides in Ciudad Juárez.

The beginning of the book is forceful: "Neither the State nor the governments... have ever faced the situation at the level of their responsibilities. The machinery of extermination in oblivion has continued its march, unstoppable."