CNN
By Caitlin Hu and Melissa del Pozo, CNN | Video by Lali Houghton, Ladan Anoushfar and Estefania Rodriguez, CNN
Mexico City (CNN) — Ruth Rojas got a flat tire almost as soon as she picked us up, so she slowed her little red car to a crawl. There was a tire shop four blocks away, an interminable distance at that speed with the evening heat and rush hour exhaust pouring through the open windows.
By the time we reached the tire shop, the sky was darkening and the sidewalk in front of the little shop partially blocked by a group of drunken men, one quietly vomiting between his knees.
The tire was just bad luck. After everything she’d seen on the road, Rojas was cool about it; we’d be back on route soon, she assured. A punctured tire is the least of the concerns of a female cabbie in Mexico City.
In a country where thousands of people disappear every year and mass graves keep turning up, surviving a night of work as a driver for hire can feel like a roll of the dice. A string of gory killings and assaults on both drivers and passengers in rideshare vehicles and taxis has focused national attention on the issue, with tabloid frontpages recounting women fatally jumping out of moving vehicles, abandoned on the side of the road by drivers, and raped by passengers.
Rojas let CNN ride along for an evening of driving. She tries to pick her rides as carefully as she can based on scant profile details and has an idea of high-crime “red zones” to avoid across the sprawling Mexican capital – but nevertheless she says she has already been assaulted multiple times, including at gunpoint, in seven years.
“I go into neighborhoods like Chimalhuacán, Ixtapaluca, Cuautitlán Izcalli, Atizapán and see people selling drugs or robbing others on the street. It’s very complicated and scary, but I’ve learned it’s part of my job,” she said.
After two hours at the shop watching the nearby pharmacy, chicken rotisserie, taco stand and ice cream shop shutter around us, the tire was finally patched. Her black hair pulled tightly back in the humidity, Rojas counted out 300 pesos (about $16 USD) to the mechanic sweating under a single bare lightbulb, and we set off again in the dark.
Taxis for women, by women
Married at 17, Rojas spent most of her adult life raising kids, the youngest of whom had health problems that saw them in and out of hospital. Now 49, she finally has her own income and her own car, a carefully polished four-door Chevrolet watched over by a painted wooden folk-art dog glued to the dashboard. A feathered dream-catcher sways from her rearview mirror.
“I love to drive, I love to meet people in the car that I call my little cherry. This for me is my safe place, It’s one of my safe places. There I cry, scream, sing, dance, cry out loud, everything and anything I feel like,” she said.
Three years ago, Rojas and her daughter Karina Alba, 29, decided to start their own driving business. Confident there would be demand for a safer service, they founded a collective of female cabbies called AmorrAs – a play on the Spanish words for love and women – which serves only female passengers.
AmorrAs is part business, part solidarity group. In addition to drivers, some of its members are lawyers and psychologists, who offer pro-bono counsel for women navigating a dangerous city. Since launching in 2023, the group has cultivated a loyal following and now averages over 100 rides per month, according to Alba. Clients can book their services online or by phone, and every ride is monitored by a real person at the collective, who tracks the car’s real time location and is available to respond in case of any issue.
It’s hardly competition for the big ride apps – all of the group’s 23 drivers also drive for various rideshare platforms on the side – but they prioritize AmorrAs bookings, at the relatively competitive rate of 5 pesos per kilometer, or 3 pesos per minute, with no surge pricing. According to Rojas and Alba, the collective has not experienced any dangerous incidents since it began operating.
One AmorrAs regular, entrepreneur Dulce Navarro, 41, books the service for monthly long-distance rides to visit her family out of town, and for late-night events like concerts.
She told CNN that she avoids public transport after a series of traumatic incidents. In 2021, her 21-year-old niece was found dead in a vacant lot shortly after boarding a bus in the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City. Then last year, she found herself yanking on the emergency alarm in a women-only subway car at Mexico City’s Ciudad Azteca stop, after feeling the sting of a sudden injection – part of a trend of subway thefts involving forcible drugging, she believes.
“Luckily, I was able to pull on the car’s emergency lever and the driver of the train helped me,” Navarro said.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has declared her term a “time for women” and vowed to crack down on gender-based violence, while Mexico City in August launched a new division of police focused fighting on women-targeted crimes. Still, stories about friends or family members attacked or disappeared while trying to get somewhere are common here.
“I know friends whose mothers have disappeared, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were involved in something bad, but rather that they went out to the store, to study, to work. Suddenly, your mother can disappear, or your niece from school,” Navarro said.
Local and national authorities did not respond to CNN’s requests for updated statistics on violence in public and private transport in the country, but according to a 2018 UN Women report, nearly nine out of 10 women polled said they had experienced violence in public transportation or public spaces in Mexico City. In 2021, a Mexican government survey also found that 10% of women polled had experienced physical violence within the past year.
Last month Mexico City officials announced plans for a new gender police unit, which will include 438 officers, who will carry out “preventive patrols, respond to emergencies, accompany victims, supervise protective measures in cases of femicide risk, and conduct door-to-door visits in high-incidence areas,” the city’s head of government and secretary of citizen security said in a statement.
It added that over the coming months, more than 3,000 officers from different sectors will be trained up in cases of domestic violence – enabling “any police officer to respond to emergencies with a gender perspective.”
The aim was “mainstreaming” the “marginalization that is often given to issues of gender,” Michelle Guerra Sastre, head of the Specialized Gender Unit at the Secretariat of Citizen Security, Mexico City, told CNN in an interview. She added that they were “improving efficiency” of “first responders” to crimes – including “gender-based violence in public transport.”
President Claudia Sheinbaum did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on taxi and rideshare insecurity.
The rideshare apps
In some respects, Mexico leads the world in commitment to protecting gig workers like Rojas. A 2024 reform grants laborers on digital service platforms access to state benefits and rights once reserved for more traditional employees, including social security, pension, healthcare, and the right to unionize.
But guaranteeing their physical security is harder amid a wider epidemic of violence. While heavily-touristed parts of central Mexico City and coastal resort areas are carefully guarded by the country’s armed forces, extremely high rates of violent crime plague many parts of the country, with over 31,000 homicides in 2023, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography.
Rojas works on the popular DiDi rideshare app during nights and weekends – the most lucrative hours and the riskiest time. More than half of her male fares hit on her, she estimates, and it can be difficult to get problem passengers out of her car when things get uncomfortable.
“It has happened to me that when I get to my destination, I tell them to get out, and they don’t want to leave. They’ll say something like, ‘I told you we’re going to have sex,” she said.
“Or they come doing drugs. Even if I say ‘No, you can’t do that here,’ they say ‘You drive, that’s what I pay you for, right?’ I think they would respond to a male driver differently.”
Attacks have been reported on all the major ridesharing apps in Mexico, as well as in metered cabs.
Most rideshare companies offer security features like automated trip-tracking, passenger and driver ratings, and the ability to preview a destination. In Mexico, both the China-based DiDi Chuxing app and US-based Uber also include an emergency or “SOS” feature which connects users’ phones to the local equivalent of 911, the ability to make audio recordings of rides, an automated detection of “anomalies” like unusually long stops, and round-the-clock incident response teams. Both also allow female drivers to select only female passengers in certain locations.
But drivers keep dying. Earlier this year, protests erupted outside of Uber’s Mexico City offices after Uber driver Karla Patricia Cortés, a 41-year-old mother of two, was killed with a shot to the back of her head while working on a Sunday afternoon in December.
Cortés, the sole provider for her family, had access to Uber’s emergency safety features. She also used the Live360 location tracking app as a backup measure, according to her daughter Brisa García. Uber says its security alert features were not used by Cortés or third parties on the day of her death – the alarm was raised by another driver in Karla’s Live 360 group, who noticed that her location had stopped for about 20 minutes and was deactivated, according to Ivone López, a fellow driver in the group.
Her last moments were recorded on December 29 by a local resident’s security camera in the quiet Azcapotzalco neighborhood: Cortés’ white car parked innocuously in the residential street, the sudden crack of gunshots, and then her body pushed out of the passenger side onto the curb – along with a stuffed bear that she liked to keep in the car as a talisman.
It remains unclear why Cortés was killed; earlier this year, a suspect was arrested about five hours away, in the central Mexican state Guanajuato, for his “probable involvement in her death,” the Mexico City Attorney General’s office said at the time. “The now arrested individual likely took the victim’s life,” read the statement.
He has not yet been formally charged, according to García’s attorney. The Attorney General’s office did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Uber has said it is in touch with Brisa and has cooperated with local authorities about the case. In an interview with CNN, Uber Mexico’s Safety Communication Manager Cecilia Roman noted that the company offers Spanish-speaking psychology and security experts as a resource to drivers, as well as a mental health helpline versed in gender issues specifically in Mexico.
DiDi Mexico declined to comment on safety concerns about activity on its platform.
A right to work
In the dark hush of Rojas’ car, her first passenger pinged: A woman, according to her Didi profile, heading to an area on the outskirts of the city that Rojas evaluated as a “yellow zone” – not somewhere we’d want to wait around, but an acceptable level of risk for a drop-off.
“You never really know who will get in the car,” she said, her gaze fixed on the road ahead. The fare turned out to be a grandmother, her daughter, her nephew and 1-year-old baby. They hustled down the street at the sight of Rojas’ ruby-colored ride.
After dropping them off in a narrow street, Rojas started swiping through the app for a new passenger. We were far from the city center now, and no one else was on the road, but she hardly looked up. After the delay of the flat tire, her working day was only just getting started as the clock approached midnight. A plastic bag packed with sandwiches and bottles of juice waited in the trunk for Rojas’ eventual refueling.
She rejected one man in the nearby hills. “That’s a really red zone,” she muttered to herself. Then leaned back approvingly when the app next suggested a female passenger just 10 minutes away and tapped “accept.”
If it were up to Rojas’ husband, she would stop working all together.
But in the context of Mexico’s yearslong security crisis, that vein of advice taken to its logical conclusion would keep most women confined to within walking distance of their homes. Plus, Rojas still needs about four years to pay off the little red car that brings her so much joy.
Unlike her daughter and some of the younger members of AmorrAs, Rojas says she’s not a feminist – just a believer in the right to work.
“We as women go out to work because we want to be useful. When a system tells us that we can’t do something, or that we don’t know how to do what men do – it’s not self-centered to say ‘I’m going to prove that I can.’ It is simply to avoid feeling diminished,’” she said.
“Going to work is no reason for someone to come and take your life,” Rojas added.
Credits
Reporter: Caitlin Hu
Field producer: Melissa del Pozo
Camera: Lali Houghton
Video editor: Estefania Rodriguez
Editors: Sheena McKenzie, Rachel Clarke
Senior Video Producer: Ladan Anoushfar
Senior Visual Editor: Carlotta Dotto
Photo editor: Toby Hancock
Coordinating producer: Marta Simonella