A record number of Indigenous women are running for office in Sunday’s election — for state legislatures, for congress, for the vice presidency — as part of a concerted effort to increase Indigenous representation in government.

Scores of Central American women who — after fleeing brutal violence from boyfriends, spouses and others in one of the world’s most dangerous regions for women — have recently arrived at the southern U.S. border only to find they now encounter an uphill battle to be let in.

Early Monday, many subway ticket booths, which mostly operated by women, were closed. Authorities struggled to estimate how many women had participated. If all women participated, the action could cost the economy up to $1.37 billion, according to Concanaco Servytur, one of Mexico’s largest business groups.

The surge of women publicly accusing men — professors, filmmakers, novelists, journalists and businessmen among them — of mistreating them suggests that Mexico may be approaching a moment of reckoning with violence, harassment and mistreatment of women, an entrenched problem in a country that has made little space for accountability or public debates on the topic.

Ms. Jiménez, now 34, embarked on a decade-long struggle for justice that is finally moving closer to resolution. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is considering the case of Ms. Jiménez and 10 other women who were sexually abused, tortured and jailed, their lives irrevocably altered. ADVERTISEMENT In an accusation that has become emblematic of human rights violations by the police in Mexico, the women are seeking accountability from the people who ordered the crackdown on the protests and tolerated its abuses — a group they say includes President Enrique Peña Nieto. At the time, Mr. Peña Nieto was the governor of Mexico State, where the crackdown took place.