Marcela Lagarde

She supported leftist politics first as a member of the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), then the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM) and Socialist Mexican Party (PMS), before joining the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and being elected to serve in the House of Deputies in 2003. She served as a plurinominal representative until 2006.

In 2003, the LIX Mexican Chamber of Deputies established a Special Commission on Feminicide. Lagarde served as the president of the commission directing the research on violence against women in Mexico. After three years of work, in 2006, the commission issued 14 volumes of their research to the legislature, which adopted the term accepting that it points to the State's responsibility. In 2009 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a verdict against Mexico condemning the failure to protect hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, who were killed. The Court recognized that the homicides were gender-based even though the term femicide was not used, establishing a precedent.

Lagarde is credited with being the first person to introduce the concept of "femicide" to Latin American audiences. Originally coined in the United States, Diana Russell had defined the term in a 1992 book entitled "Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing". However, the academic concept, did not take root until Lagarde used it to describe the systemic killings of women throughout Latin America and Mexico. In epidemic proportions, women were killed in numbers far exceeding what was to be expected by drug violence or internal conflict. In Lagarde's concept, feminicide refers to the abduction, death and/or disappearance of women and girls which is allowed by the state, or happens with impunity. In Lagarde's redefinition of the term, the state is complicit because most of the perpetrators have neither been caught nor prosecuted by authorities.

María Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos (born 30 December 1948) is a Mexican academic, author, researcher, anthropologist, feminist activist and politician affiliated with the Party of the Democratic Revolution. From 2003-2006 she served as Deputy of the LIX Legislature of the Mexican Congress as a plurinominal representative.

María Marcela Lagarde was born in 1948 in Mexico City. She earned an undergraduate degree in ethnology and both a Master's and PhD in Anthropology. During her university studies, she participated in the student uprisings known as Mexico 68. She has been a professor of feminist studies at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico) since 1975.