In El laberinto de la soledad, Octavio Paz argued that Mexican men were emotionally distant and sexually aggressive because they descended from the union between conquerors and indigenous people. The notion of Mexican male virility is intimately entrenched in the machista national identity, which guarantees the superiority of males over women and, as we shall see in this chapter, over other men and boys.

Other crucial issues in the country, such as structural poverty and violence, exacerbate this ideology. For example, the intense activity of drug cartels is mainly led by men; their actions, according to government reports and inter-national organisations, mainly affect men. Less prominence is given to the alarming rates of violence affecting children and women, the femicide phe-nomenon and the increasing vulnerability of migrant girls and women, many of whom go missing on their way to the US and/or are prostituted or trafficked. Mexico also tops the world ranking of gender crimes, with 97,778 women vic-tims of crimes against their lives and integrity in Mexico during 2020.

Let us pause on the alarming incidence of domestic violence against wom-en and children in Mexico. The National Survey of Urban Public Security (ENSU) reported that 9% of households experienced family violence between January and August 2020. Cohabitants suffered offence and/or humiliation, threats to kick them out, beatings or other types of physical assault, and sexual abuse, among others. Of course, 2020 was an unprecedented year due to the confinement and isolation measures adopted by the national and State govern-ments to protect the population from the Covid-19 pandemic. Economic stress and family tension aggravated a bad situation, with adverse effects for women, girls, boys and adolescents at home.

I have referred to the connection between the notions of virility and the ‘real man’ (‘hombre de verdad’), as well as their association with the machis-ta ideology in Latin America. This ideology, which is often linked with male chauvinism, appeals for the predominance of male power over women in all spheres of life. This impacts the nature of what constitutes ‘benevolent patri-archal nuclear families’, which pivot around authoritarian husbands and fa-thers. In their role as ‘providers’, authoritarian husbands and fathers exercise their sense of ownership over their partners and descendants. In this sense, masculinity serves as a problematic, if seldom questioned, core of models of Latin American identity.