METLATONOC, Mexico — Eloina Feliciano begged her mother not to sell her into marriage aged 14 under an ancestral tradition in their indigenous community in southern Mexico, but her pleas were in vain.
“I don’t want to be sold,” she remembers telling her mother at their home in the mountains of Guerrero state.
“We’re not animals. Animals are the ones who are sold,” added Feliciano, now 23, who lives in the municipality of Metlatonoc in one of Mexico’s poorest areas.
She became one of many girls from her Mixtec community subjected to a tradition that critics say traps women in abuse and leaves the groom’s family mired in poverty.
Today such agreements are still made in do…
Keep on reading: ‘We’re not animals’: The Mexican girls sold as brides