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It’s official: Mexico will elect its first feminine president subsequent yr.
One of many two prime contenders within the June vote is 61-year-old Claudia Sheinbaum, the previous mayor of Mexico Metropolis, a detailed ally of present President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and a member of his Nationwide Regeneration Motion (MORENA). The opposite is 60-year-old Xochitl Galvez, the candidate for the opposition Broad Entrance for Mexico coalition.
On the floor, in fact, the prospect of a feminine head of state would seem like an undeniably constructive milestone. However will the association truly do something to resolve the existential challenges confronted by girls in Mexico?
In contrast to the coalition headed by Galvez, which incorporates tiresomely right-wing forces, MORENA identifies as leftist, that means that Sheinbaum seems higher positioned to information the nation in a extra progressive course when it comes to girls’s rights. And but her mayoral reign within the Mexican capital, which lasted from 2018 to June this yr and coincided with the majority of AMLO’s presidency, was not precisely empowering for ladies.
In spite of everything, you can’t actually declare feminine empowerment throughout an epidemic of femicides, which skyrocketed 137 percent in Mexico from 2015 to 2020. At the least 10 women and girls are killed daily within the nation though just about all statistics regarding femicides are presumed to be underestimates on condition that many crimes go unreported or are reported as common homicides. Tens of thousands of girls are lacking.
The overwhelming majority of femicides usually are not prosecuted, and impunity stays the legislation of the land. Final yr, Mexico’s Nationwide Institute of Statistics and Geography estimated that greater than 70 p.c of Mexican girls and women over the age of 15 had skilled some type of violence.
In March, Sheinbaum came under fire from feminists in Mexico Metropolis who not solely decried authorities inaction on femicides and feminine disappearances but additionally its price range cuts for programmes benefitting girls, together with girls’s shelters and sexual and reproductive well being initiatives.
June, the month Sheinbaum ended her time period as mayor, was by the way the bloodiest month of the yr to date for recorded femicides. This isn’t to suggest, clearly, that she is one way or the other essentially guilty for the violent panorama. It’s quite to rain on the parade of those that contend {that a} Sheinbaum presidency would represent an awesome victory for ladies despite the persistence of a panorama wherein girls are repeatedly reminded that their lives imply nothing.
For his half, AMLO is keen on patting himself on the back for presiding over a gender-equal cupboard and railing against machismo, which actually earns him aesthetic factors however does little to change the patriarchal substructure.
It’s much less charming, to make sure, when he does issues like argue that feminist protests in Mexico are a part of a right-wing plot to take down his administration or that victims of home violence ought to merely take a deep breath and count to 10. Ditto for when he complains that discussions of femicides are distracting from different necessary issues of enterprise, similar to a raffle his administration organised across the sale of the presidential aeroplane.
I chatted just lately with Mexican author and researcher Irmgard Emmelhainz, creator of The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Publish-Neoliberal Conversion, who wagered that, if elected, Sheinbaum wouldn’t defy the celebration line established by AMLO, who has demonstrated spectacular devotion to “the neoliberal machine” even whereas purporting to be in opposition to neoliberalism.
Working example: Emmelhainz famous that Sheinbaum’s buddy had “intensified the extractivist complicated” in Mexico throughout his presidency, prompting a “dramatic enhance in gender violence, femicide, pressured disappearances, organised crime and persecution of territorial land defence motion leaders, lots of them girls”.
In the long run, sexist violence is a really neoliberal factor – simply recall the surge in deadly violence in opposition to girls that attended the implementation of the United States-imposed North American Free Commerce Settlement in 1994.
Naturally, the grim state of affairs going through girls in Mexico would hardly be ameliorated by a Galvez presidency. In a September Univision interview with Galvez, interviewer Jorge Ramos started by invoking Mexico’s rising numbers of femicides and disappeared girls juxtaposed with the historic risk of Mexico’s first feminine president: “Why you and never Claudia?”
For the following 12 minutes, Galvez neither answered that query nor addressed the femicide/disappearance phenomenon – though she did handle to state that as president she would enable brokers of the US authorities to function in Mexican territory for the aim of combating drug trafficking.
By no means thoughts the gringo observe document in such endeavours. Take, for instance, the US-backed “drug war” in Mexico, which has since its official launch in 2006 killed hundreds of thousands of individuals, lots of them girls.
Galvez claims to determine along with her Indigenous ancestry on her father’s aspect though it’s protected to imagine that many Indigenous Mexican girls going through institutionalised discrimination and violence will discover little in widespread with this aspiring head of state.
In considering the 2024 Mexican presidential election, one can’t assist however assume again to the 2016 US presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who was marketed as a feminist icon regardless of having helped perpetrate all manner of harmful policies for ladies worldwide.
Earlier than that, in fact, there was Barack Obama, whose assumption of the US presidency in 2009 because the nation’s first Black head of state had been heralded as a second of nice change and progress – besides that it wasn’t, and the nation’s love affair with inflicting violent oppression at dwelling and overseas continued apace.
Now as Mexico prepares for its personal milestone amid a raging femicide epidemic and different violence, it’s value reflecting on simply how harmful a facade of progress could be.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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