Chilpancingo - And it happened again. It was 8 a.m. on Monday, November 22, when Anayeli, 15 years old, left her home in the Joya Real community in the municipality of Cochoapa El Grande, on the Mountains of Guerrero. She actually ran away. That day she would be forced to marry a 16-year-old boy.

Everything was ready. On Friday and Sunday the young man's family threw a party to agree to the marriage. They slaughtered a cow, there was beer, soft drinks, band music. The marriage was arranged for Monday.

Anayeli's mother agreed to marry her off for a payment of 200,000 pesos.

That Monday, Anayeli escaped very early in the morning. She took refuge in the house of a friend, another 15-year-old minor. The two families, Anayeli's family and that of the young man they wanted to marry her off, informed the town's police station. The police went out to look for her until they found her.

They immediately locked her up in one of the police station cells, along with the young man who sheltered her.
To free her, they demanded that Anyeli get married but, above all, that her family return the 56,000 pesos they had spent on the parties they had offered because she had "offended" the family.

The 200,000 was not given to Anayeli's family because the marriage did not take place.

This was documented by the Centro de Defensa de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, Tlachinollan.

Early Tuesday morning, an anonymous phone call came into the offices of Tlachinollan denouncing that Anayeli had been imprisoned in the Joya Real police station for refusing to get married.

Tlachinollan contacted other agencies, such as the State Attorney General's Office and the State Human Rights Commission. The delegation arrived at Joya Real.

Anayeli and the other minor were released and are in the custody of the state DIF.

"There was resistance from the community because they see it as normal. They said: 'Why did the girl do that if she already knows how things are here'; 'That was a mockery of the family'. The girl accepted,' but how can a girl have the capacity to make the decision to get married?" says Tlachinollan lawyer Neil Arias Vitinio, who intervened with the town to get Anayeli released.

A fortnight ago, in La Montaña, the Morenista governor, Evelyn Salgado Pineda, signed an agreement with various federal government agencies and the UN to combat violence against women, including forced marriages. forced marriages.

However, he did not present a concrete plan, let alone a budget. In the latter case, Arias Vitinio criticised the state government for barely reacting.

"There is no liaison, there is no interlocutor in the state government to deal with these cases," the lawyer explained.

"It is not enough to sign an agreement, it is necessary to go to the communities to talk to the people, to explain to them that marrying off children has consequences," he criticised.

The case of Angelica

On 29 September, a group of community police from the Dos Rios community, also in Cochoapa El Grande, in the Montaña region of Guerrero, arrived at her aunt's house to pick up Angelica, a 15-year-old girl.

The community members arrested her and took her away along with her aunt, a 70-year-old woman, and her three sisters: one aged eight and the other two aged six.

The five were arrested because Angélica ran away from the house of the father of the man she was forced to marry. If she did not return 210,000 pesos, double the amount paid for her, the community members warned her that she could not be released.

Angelica ran away because the father of the man she was sold to had already tried to rape her four times.

The minor was living in the house because the man she was forced to marry went to the United States to work due to the lack of employment in the mountains.

Angelica and her three sisters were held for 11 days. Days earlier, the community members had released the aunt.

Angelica's case became known until her mother, Concepción, reported it on 9 October in a hospital, hundreds of kilometres from the municipality of Ometepec, in the Costa Chica.

That day, Concepción arrived at the police station with food for her three daughters. She argued with the community members until one of them hit her. Concepción was pregnant with triplets. The assault caused her to miscarry: she bled to death in the corridor of the police station.

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