MEXICO CITY – When a male driver from a popular rideshare app asked Ninfa Fuentes for her phone number during a ride through Mexico City, she froze. But when he repeatedly pressed her about her Valentine’s Day plans, a rush of terror flooded her body.
What should have been a quiet ride home at the end of the workday three years ago turned into a nightmare that many women in Mexico experience daily: holding their breath until they know they’ve made it home alive.
“I felt like I was dying,” Fuentes, 48, said. An international economics researcher and a survivor of sexual violence, she has not used public transportation or ride-hailing services since.
The conversation around startling levels of sexual harassment and gender-based violence came roaring back this week after Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, was captured in video being groped by a drunk man.
Following the incident, Sheinbaum said she had pressed charges against the man and unveiled a plan to make sexual harassment a crime across all Mexican states — a bid to make it easier for women to report such assaults in a country where an average of 10 women are killed daily.
A safe space for women
After her frightening rideshare app experience, Fuentes turned to AmorrAs, a self-managed feminist network that provides safe transportation — and support — for women in Mexico City and its suburbs.
AmorrAs seeks to offer a solution to the endemic problem of sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence that women routinely face on Mexico’s rideshare apps and public transit.
The network was founded by 29-year-old Karina Alba following the 2022 killing of Debanhi Escobar, who was found dead days after getting out of a taxi on a dark highway in the northern city of Monterrey.
Alba founded AmorrAs with the hope of providing safe rides for women, choosing her mother, taxi driver Ruth Rojas, to be the network’s first driver. The network now has more than 20 women-only “ally” drivers, serving more than 2,000 women per year.
“My dream was to contribute to society in some way,