Alerta de Violencia de Género contra las Mujeres (AVGM) — Mexico's Femicide Emergency-Response Mechanism

The Alerta de Violencia de Género contra las Mujeres (AVGM) is a federal mechanism created under Mexico's 2007 General Law on Women's Access to a Life Free of Violence. It allows civil society or government bodies to request that the federal government declare an emergency in a state or municipality with persistently high rates of violence against women, triggering coordinated prevention, justice, and support measures across all three levels of government.

As of the mid-2020s, femicide-specific alerts have been activated in 19 of Mexico's 32 federal entities, with a separate 'comparative harm' alert active in two more. Yet national femicide data show little movement: the femicide rate stood at 1.5 per 100,000 women in 2022, statistically unchanged from four years earlier. Between 2013 and 2023, Mexico documented 7,246 femicides, with fewer than 25% resulting in a conviction. Between January and September 2025 alone, 2,120 murders of women were registered, but only 513 were being investigated as femicides.

Independent reviews are candid about the gap between design and delivery. Analysis by the UN Human Rights Office in Mexico (ONU-DH) and academic researchers describes AVGM responses as frequently untimely, calling the mechanism 'necessary but insufficient.' Investigative reporting by Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) found AVGM budgets opaque and difficult to track, with no open-data spending report filed for 2021, and noted that the federal Interinstitutional and Multidisciplinary Group overseeing the mechanism held no monitoring meetings in the most recent year reviewed. AVGM remains a legally significant model — now cited in comparable proposals elsewhere in Latin America — but its record illustrates how a well-designed legal mechanism can fail to translate into reduced violence without sustained funding, transparency, and follow-through.

Read the full analysis: https://hchr.org.mx/publicaciones/analisis-del-mecanismo-de-alerta-de-violencia-de-genero-contra-las-mujeres-avgm/