Back in March 2020, human population geneticist María Ávila Arcos gathered her courage and filed a formal complaint of sexual harassment against a leading plant geneticist. Three other women also filed formal complaints against Jean-Philippe Vielle Calzada of Mexico’s National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (Langebio), alleging that he touched them without their consent, pressured them to enter a romantic relationship, and retaliated professionally after they rejected him. Authorities began to investigate, and more than a year later, Ávila Arcos, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Juriquilla, learned her complaint was moving forward to the next stage in the process.
But on 11 March, she received a document informing her it had been dismissed on a technicality.
“It felt like I was losing a battle,” Ávila Arcos says. But she’s pushing to get her case reopened. “Here I go again.”
Another complainant, a former graduate student of Vielle Calzada’s, received a notice dated 18 February that her case file was also being shelved, without explanation. She declined to comment.
The dismissals send “a message of impunity and permissiveness,” says Verónica Cruz, director of the Guanajuato, Mexico–based feminist organization Las Libres, which has provided legal advice to some of the women who filed complaints. She says that as long as Mexico’s science institutions don’t offer solutions to targets of harassment, “these behaviors are going to keep happening.”
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Vielle Calzada did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But he said in a previous statement to Science that all the complaints were “false, unfounded, contrived, and spurious.” He denied he had abused his power or sexually harassed anyone.
The women, who included two under Vielle Calzada’s direct supervision, shared their complaints with Science last year during a monthslong investigation. They also shared romantic poems, emails, and letters from him.
Their cases went to the Internal Control Organ (OIC), the government unit meant to investigate and sanction sexual harassment at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav), a public research powerhouse with 11 units spread across Mexico, including Langebio. In May 2021, OIC summarized its findings in Ávila Arcos’s case. The documents, which she shared with Science, say Vielle Calzada abused his position, established his power over Ávila Arcos, and then proceeded to harass her; they also indicate that his actions qualified as “serious” misconduct. “Sexual harassment committed by [Vielle Calzada] is allegedly proven,” they conclude.
The OIC unit started an administrative process against Vielle Calzada and planned a hearing to examine the evidence and weigh his defense.
This month, however, OIC notified Ávila Arcos that the hearing had not taken place and it was dismissing her complaint. The notification, which she shared with Science, explained that the sexual harassment OIC had investigated had occurred in 2016, but the law it used to classify the offenses as serious was not active until 1 year later, in 2017. (The Mexican constitution establishes that no law can be enforced retroactively.)
If something happens to [female students], I can’t protect them.
- Selene Fernández
- National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity
However, OIC could have assessed the 2016 incidents as “serious” under the previous law as well, according to Ávila Arcos’s legal team, in which case the timing problem would not have arisen.
OIC officials did not respond to requests for comment. But Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Administration, which oversees Cinvestav’s OIC, sent Science a statement saying that “although there may have been evidence or elements to prove the alleged misconduct,” OIC determined to dismiss “two related files” because of the timing issue. The secretariat did not specify which two complaints it referred to. Its statement also stressed its commitment to ensuring institutions are free of sexual harassment.
“We saw this coming,” Cruz says. She sees the dismissals as yet another example of the Mexican government’s failure to sanction sexual harassment. In 2019, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission found that, between 2015 and 2018, 399 cases of sexual harassment were reported in federal public institutions. Only 1% of them led to a sanction for the harasser, because of a lack of effective mechanisms, according to the report.
José Mustre de León, general director of Cinvestav, says he’s frustrated by the fact his institution lacks the legal authority to sanction its own researchers. It depends on the federal government, specifically OIC, to do so. The fact that OIC has not been able to determine culpability or innocence years after the complaints were filed “implies that this is not an adequate system,” Mustre de León says.
Sanctions against harassers are crucial to changing the culture at Mexican labs, says genomicist Selene Fernández, one of four female principal investigators at Langebio, out of a total of 21. “It’s as if they told you ‘don’t steal,’ but nobody [punishes] you if you do,” she says. She is no longer accepting new female students. “I don’t want them to come,” she says. “Because if something happens to them, I can’t protect them.”
Still, some say attitudes inside Cinvestav have begun to shift slightly. In a first for the 60-year-old institution, for example, authorities organized dozens of talks to educate the community on sexual harassment. They have also hired the international nonprofit Data-Pop Alliance to analyze gender disparity, discrimination, and sexual harassment at Cinvestav. Mustre de León says the findings will be presented in early April. He adds that Cinvestav this year allocated nearly $30,000 to hire staff for a new gender equity office. Its first task will be to review the institution’s regulations and see how they can be improved to protect targets of sexual harassment.
The community itself has organized around Vielle Calzada’s case. In October 2021, nearly 450 Cinvestav researchers, students, and staff urged authorities to take immediate action to protect the complainants and the community. Earlier this year, 103 current and former students at Langebio and Cinvestav’s neighboring Irapuato campus asked that Vielle Calzada be suspended until a final verdict was reached.
“We’re going to put up a fight,” says Susana Quintanilla, a historian of education and science at Cinvestav’s Sede Sur campus in Mexico City. “We are going to demand a complete reorganization of Cinvestav” so the institution can effectively prevent and sanction sexual harassment.
For now, says Angélica Cibrián Jaramillo, an evolutionary biologist who also filed a complaint against Vielle Calzada, “I can’t go back to work at Langebio.” Now on sabbatical in the Netherlands, she had planned to return to Mexico in March but will stay away for at least another year. “My physical and mental integrity is at risk because [Vielle Calzada] is there every day,” she says. She and a fourth complainant have received no updates about their cases.
As for Ávila Arcos, she and her lawyers have appealed the decision to dismiss her complaint. “I would like [them] to sanction Jean-Philippe. But more important than that is to set a precedent,” she says. “An example of what is possible.”