By Miguel Rapetti
23 Sep 2023, 17:53 PM EDT
The Pachuca midfielder in the Liga MX Femenil, Nailea Vidrio, revealed this Saturday in an interview the difficult moment she experienced in 2021 when the soccer player was threatened with death and her club at that time, León, ignored the complaints.
The story, told by Vidrio herself in an interview for EFE, reveals how she received constant threatening messages on social networks, the worst of all being the one she saw when a fan said that a home game against Tigres would be the last one she played.
“In a León match against Tigres in León they told me on my Instagram that that would be my last match. They told me ‘we are going to kill you’. Nobody did anything about it. I told my club, but they took it lightly because ‘it was on a social network’. They have to kill us for something to happen,” he commented.
Vidrio is one of the soccer players in the local league who are digitally harassed every day. The attacks expelled Scarlett Camberos, then forward of the Águilas del América, from Mexico last March.
Like Camberos, who was followed home by a stalker, Vidrio’s attacks went from the virtual to the real world.
Also when she was a member of León, the former player went to support the men’s team in a Concacaf Champions League match against the Seattle Sounders, and received multiple whistles and sexual comments about her body from fans.
The former Cruz Azul soccer player has even received rape threats on her social networks and due to the lack of guarantees from her teams, she has reached the point of having to carry knives to defend herself.
“That day against Tigres I was seeing who was aiming something at me. You live in fear. I had a knife in my car in case something happened. At night I slept afraid that someone would come to my door,” he added.
Vidrio explained that in León the support they gave him was moral, but they never offered him to go and file a complaint.
When she went to try to file the complaint without support from León, she encountered the impunity that reigns in Mexico, which causes more than 10 femicides a day and thousands of attacks on women who go unpunished.
“In León I went to the authorities and they told me that there was no evidence. We really just need to be believed. “Until they kill us is when they will do something,” reiterated the Guadalajara native.
The midfielder recognized the efforts that the Mexican league has made, such as the protocol to prevent gender violence that they launched last July, however she asked for greater measures such as laws that punish aggressors more severely.