The Criminal Code of the State of Oaxaca stipulates a sanction of up to eight years in prison for any person who “by any means discloses, shares, distributes, publishes and/or requests images, audios or videos of a person partially or totally naked with intimate, erotic or sexual content, whether printed, recorded or digital, without the consent of the victim.” This reform to the Penal Code was approved last year by the 64th Local Legislature to classify crimes against sexual privacy, which was an initiative presented by then-deputy Hilda Graciela Pérez Luis and promoted and driven by feminist collectives from Oaxaca. According to the Oaxacan collective, Marea Lila, it would not have been one image, but dozens of sexual photographs of more than 15 women that a resident physician in anesthesiology from the Oaxaca Civil Hospital allegedly shared on his Telegram channel. “Today we accompany three sisters to present their complaint to the Oaxaca Prosecutor's Office. For us, this is a great step, as we are not a collective that stays only on social networks,” said the members of this collective, who for security reasons omitted their names. The women recounted that on Tuesday they received more than 15 young people who denounced the third-year anesthesiology resident physician for exerting violence against them in the form of threats, insults, psychological manipulation, and sexual and physical harassment, as well as threatening to kill ex-partners or share intimate material if they do not give in to what he demands. They said that the resident physician “for a couple of years now has been publicly accused of sharing intimate material of young women in Telegram groups.” Likewise, the members of the Marea Lila collective said that the resident physician has harassed his colleagues at the same hospital, and has also photographed and filmed women patients at the General Dr. Aurelio Valdivieso Hospital under the justification that it is “material for professional medical purposes.” “We demand that the hospital directors implement the law, this physician is a danger to women, it is not right that they continue to cover up and conceal aggressors within the public health institutions of the State of Oaxaca,” they said. They warned that they are not a collective that stays only on social networks, but rather they validate and verify the information, as they have no intention of “burning” anyone, as is often called in society. The activists warned that this omission puts both female medical staff and social service students, as well as the patients themselves who come for care, at serious risk. “We demand the Governor of Oaxaca, Salomón Jara Cruz, and the Attorney General, Bernardo Rodríguez Alamilla, […] their immediate intervention and […] a formal audience to deliver the collected evidence and for this physician to pay for what he is doing, as it is a crime,” they said. The Olimpia Law was published in the Official Gazette on August 24, 2019. The first case that was judicialized was in 2020 in the Central Valleys region of Oaxaca. In addition to the Lila Collective, the DLR collective led by hacktivist Andy Torres has also denounced digital violence in Telegram channels.
