This is the rap lyrics of the album Supera Joven, which will be released in May 2019 and is a product of the work of the organization Supera A.C. in polygons of poverty in Monterrey, Mexico. The project "USAID: Youth transforming young people" (Jóvenes transformando jóvenes in Spanish) is working on preventing crime, among them femicides, which has risen in the last five years in Mexico. They work with rap, painting of murals, sports but also workshops on empowering women and reeducation on masculinity. In one of these neighbourhoods, where the shortcomings and the war against drugs meet, a wall reads: "Violence is not my heritage", there, young men are challenging the notions of masculinity.

"If we really want to lower the rates of gender violence, we have to work where the violence is generated. Not when the crime is already committed" says Rafael Limones, coordinator of the project. In Mexico, 9 women are killed every day just for "being a woman," according to Amnesty International. Femicide, a legal term to explain a gender-based homicide in Mexico, has had a rising tendency rate in the last five years (2015- 2019) according to the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System of Mexico. In 17 states of Mexico gender alerts (a public policy) have been applied to address this problem, but the numbers do not diminish. "They have not been effective or efficient," said María Ochoa, the new head of the National Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Violence against Women (Conavim).

Femicide is a multifactorial problem that has it roots in the question: why do men kill women in Mexico? Some of the answers are inclined to isolate the cases, that is, to present them as a social anomaly: to say that he killed her out of jealousy, because he had a mental illness or because she was in a vulnerable situation (at night, alone or in a state of drunkenness). That analysis revictimizes the victim. There are also two latent narratives: a macho Mexican culture and the failures of the Mexican government to deal with the crisis.

Nevertheless, although 98% of perpetrators of femicides are men, according to Amnesty International, the discussion systematically excludes them. Mexico has a culture where there are social inequalities between men and women, and since the War on Drugs (2006 - ) men have been exposed to changes in their day to day and a human rights crisis. There are social characteristics that point that men in Mexico have developed a pedagogy of cruelty; a process of using the women's body as a battle change, a theory developed by the Argentinean anthropologist Rita Segato. To understand the condition of the femicide in the Mexican this theory will be used and also Rafael Limones and his team's experiences working with men would guide the article.

The body is the starting point of this social order between men and women, for Pierre Bourdieu. Male domination is perpetuated in the division of the sexes and the categories that it triggers: inside / outside, private / public, up / down. The strength of the male domination lies in its cyclical condition: "it legitimizes a relationship of domination by inscribing it into a biological nature that is in itself a naturalized social construction", wrote on this book The male domination (1998).

Even this vision created by the division is translated into the division of labor. An example of this is how inequalities between genders are expressed worldwide. Perhaps the most obvious is that no country in the world has managed to eliminate the gender pay gap (OECD, 2017). We can also find it in an epidemic of violence against women globally: "It is estimated that 35 percent of women around the world have suffered physical and / or sexual violence from a partner or sexual violence by someone other than their partner (these figures do not include sexual harassment) at some point in their lives" (UN, 2013). Which was also evidenced by the #MeToo movement in just over a year. Through the globe we can see that no country, north or south or no matter what place it occupies in the GDP escapes the presence of a #MeToo, as its possible to see in the interactive map created by Google trends called: Me Too Rising.

The male domination in the Mexican society can be present in several aspects: Mexico is placed in position 32 of the 33 nations of women in the work force (PwC, 2019) or that 17 hours weekly women work more in domestic activities than men, according to National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). An historical characteristic is linked Segato's theory about the war against women and the pedagogy of cruelty. The men negotiated and made war with the colonizers. In this negotiation, the antagonistic division between private and public (characteristic of the West) was established, which "a depoliticization the domestic space makes it vulnerable and fragile at the time" (pg. 122). There they are vulnerable to attacks because the attacks become personal, that is, they lose their political character. This could explain the first dominant narrative regarding femicides. Segato explains that the indigenous men of Latin America experienced a fragmentation in their masculinity with the era of colonization, and even argued that it is a process still in development.

The pedagogy of cruelty is a theory developed in 2006 by Segato in the context of the femicides of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where approximately 400 women were killed from 1993 - 2009, Segato argues that the killing of women is not product of mental illness but a deep violent social structure. Segato's interpretation of the femicides is that the men from different drug cartels were sending messages of terror through the public display of the violence exerted on the bodies of the murdered women, as form of expropriation of body and space. A way to exercise the male domination that Bourdieu speaks of in turning women into objects, to take over by withdrawing their status as subjects with rights, including the right to life. The violence exerted against women by men has an expressive rather than instrumental function for Segato: "To ask oneself, in these cases, why one is killed in a certain place is similar to wondering why a certain language is spoken". She argues that femicides can be interpreted as a language because it is a pedagogy that is taught and learned. In Mexico, three elements of the theory are present: an unsafe society for women and a war that has led to the human right crisis. Not only the violence against women has risen but the impunity about it has risen; the reproduction of the system, the establishment of a pedagogy of cruelty that prevents the proper function of Gender Alerts, which triggers a crisis of femicide.

In the armed conflict in Colombia the Memory and Conflict Observatory (hereinafter WTO) of the National Center for Historical Memory (hereinafter CNMH) registered that conflict two periods 2000 and 2005; 2011 and 2014 they concur with the peak of cases of sexual violence; 45.7 and 11.8, respectively. In Mexico from 2014 to 2019 there has been a rise in the rates of homicides of 88.1 per cent. At the same time, during 2015 to 2019 femicides grow in 127% in Mexico according to the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP) and also the cruelty with which they are executed according to "the degree of cruelty and violence have increased", said the Tania Reneaum, head of International Amnesty in Mexico, April 8th, 2019. The increase of this pedagogy of cruelty (its growth and instauration) It indicates that if the numbers continue to rise, it could also happen with violence against women.

For Rafael Limones, the problem is not poverty, because for him violence is widespread in all sectors of society. The problem lies mainly in exposure to violence. In the workshops he works with young people who grew up during the hardest years of the War on Drugs. A war that left a balance of 252 thousand homicides, 40 thousand missing persons, 26 thousand bodies without identifying and 9 women killed every day, according to the figures of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

"These children who had to watch shootings, hanging, deaths (...) then begin to build ideals of masculinity focused on organized crime", Limones explains. The war has not only affected the Mexican psyche and its health as the article Mexico's Epidemic of Violence and Its Public Health Significance on Average Length of Life (2017) demonstrates: "The increase of homicide rates in Mexico during 2007–2014 has had a dramatic impact on the health status of the population, for example, leading to a stagnation of the overall longevity". It has also affected in several aspects of the life: one in every two children or adolescents (in 2014) lacked the minimum conditions to exercise at least one of their social rights according to UNICEF inform. Also Mexico has one of the highest gini coefficient (inequality rates) in the OECD countries (2017). The economic impact of violence rose by 10% in 2018, reaching 5.16 trillion pesos (US $ 268 billion), equivalent to 24% of the country's GDP, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace. Masculinity then becomes a constant challenge; from youth they have challenges that multiply during adulthood.

The transformation of masculinity in this context has an element that makes it even more complicated. From a historical perspective, masculinity has a problem of definition. Emmanuel Garza, clinical psychologist, Mexican psychoanalyst and mediator of a group studying masculinity from a historical perspective, expresses that "Traditional masculinity is very elusive and it is very dark," says Garza. What is it to be a man in the Mexican violent context?

According to the experience of Limones as a man in Monterrey and also working with men in this situation, there has been a transformation. He explains that in 2000 when there were also femicides, they were different: "today, murders are more like organized crime, when they are not participating in organized crime. Their partners takes them and the same couple says "well, they took she in a car". For the team of Jóvenes transformando jóvenes, these are the effects of the post-traumatic stress of violence that young people, children and women experienced.

Although the war has been officially declared terminated by the new Mexican president at the beginning of February, this does not mean that the political, social and economic effects are also over. Mexico faces a deep crisis of human rights. Tania Reneaum, Executive Director of Amnesty International (AI) Mexico explains that femicides have an important role: "It is essential to begin to see femicides and homicides against women as part of the human rights crisis in Mexico". Addressing masculinities under this magnifying glass takes an even greater relevance, given that 98% of the perpetrators of the crimes (femicides) are male, also according to AI.

The effect of this male domination is paradoxical, says Emmanuel Garza: "a series of lines that cornered him and in that corner there are very few outputs. One of these exits and that yes is let's say accepted is aggression is violence". Bourdieu actually defines domination as a "burden".

For Limones and his team, these men who have been exposed to violence identify what they thought, what they felt, and the physical reactions of their body when they face anger, sadness or fear is fundamental, because with it men can detect the limits of their reactions: "There is a key time of violence, of the risk factors, they are around 7 minutes. "From 3 to 11 minutes where the greatest violence occurs for women", says Limones.

The effects of the human rights crisis in urban spaces remain incorporated into the life of the average Mexican without much notice: "16 a third (33%) reported the experience of a violent event in years previous to 2013 as opposed to 14% in 2013", according to the study previously mentioned. Equally they are normalized little by little like Ana Villarreal, Mexican sociologist wrote: "Fear of being caught in the range of fire between different fractions of organized crime and the military emptied the streets. Nightlife centers were shut down. Informal curfews were enforced". And in the case of women and security; 97% of people in Mexico consider that their country is violent or very violent for women, 23% think that they suffer violence because they (women) are (women) allow it, 20% for machismo and 18% for "values" and "education" , according to the Universidad del Valle de México.

This normalization has a relationship with the pedagogy of cruelty, according to Rita Segado, who indicates that cruelty is directly proportional to the isolation of citizens through their desensitization: "the repetition of the violent scene produces an effect of normalization of a passage of cruelty and, with this, promotes in the people the low- thresholds of empathy for the predatory company ". Given this possibility, Gender Alerts in the are less probable to reach their goals and lower the rates of femicide in the country.

The language of cruelty in Mexico seems to extend as the human rights crisis fails to be contained by the authorities. Although it does not have a simple solution, there is a battle going on in the polygons of poverty but now in the minds of men.