Mexico splits as president stands by controversial candidate

When it became clear last fall that Mexican Senator Félix Salgado Macedonio was running for governor of the state of Guerrero, Basilia Castañeda decided to go public with her accusation of rape.

She told police she was alone with him in his home in Acapulco in 1998, when she was a 17-year-old political activist.

“Without saying anything, he started attacking me,” she explained to the Milenio newspaper, adding that he threw a 100-peso bill – about $ 10 at the time – in her face.

Four other women also came forward to accuse Salgado of sexual assault, including one who told police she was drugged and raped by the politician in 2016.

These allegations did not stop Mexico’s ruling political party from officially making Salgado its government candidate this month.

In the face of feminist opposition, Salgado’s candidacy became an important political responsibility for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who stood by his longtime friend and political ally.

The accusations bitterly divided Morena – the center-left party that López Obrador founded in 2011 – into hundreds of members, including many of his top-profile women, and demanded that the party withdraw its support and remove Salgado from the vote.

“Side to history, side to victims, side to women,” a coalition of female party leaders said in a statement last week.

But López Obrador refused to move, reiterating Salgado’s claim that the accusations were nothing more than biased political attacks.

“When there are elections … it’s about discrediting the opponent in some way,” the president, widely known among his initials, AMLO, told a recent news conference, describing Salgado as the victim of ” media-lynching ‘.

Asked about the rape allegations during another news conference, López Obrador became angry and shouted, “Enough!”

His swift dismissal of women’s sexual assault angered members of the increasingly visible feminist movement in Mexico.

The president has the habit of rejecting criticism as an unfounded attack on his political enemies. But that kind of reaction falls flat when the criticism comes from women complaining about violence, political analyst Denise Dresser recently wrote in Americas Quarterly.

The growing number of women seeking to end gender-based violence in Mexico is ‘the only thorn in AMLO’s side: a single political movement he apparently does not understand, cannot control and cannot suppress’ , she wrote.

Carlos Bravo Regidor, a professor at the CIDE Public Research Center in Mexico City, said the president was under increasing pressure to acknowledge their grievances and respond to their demands.

“Feminists inside and outside Morena are fighting to make the president feel that if he does not resign, he will have to pay a price,” Bravo said.

Many feminists had high hopes for López Obrador. The long-bound leftist, who voted twice before the 2018 election, has promised complete gender equality in his cabinet – a promise he has kept.

But months after taking office, he angered activists by closing shelters for victims of domestic violence and closing public day care centers, part of a broader austerity plan.

Then a series of gruesome incidents in Mexico City put the issue of violence against women in the national spotlight.

A teenage girl said she was raped by four police officers. A man apparently killed and mutilated his 25-year-old girlfriend. And when the body of a seven-year-old named Fatima who went missing was discovered in a garbage bag.

López Obrador blamed the crimes on the ‘neoliberal’ model of government of his predecessors.

Because he does not acknowledge the national crisis – an average of 11 women are killed every day in Mexico – he downplayed an increase in calls to a government hotline for women victims of violence, saying 90% of these calls were “false”. . “

In response, hundreds of thousands of women from across the political spectrum demonstrated in Mexico City in March. The next day, women across the country skipped jobs in a national strike, with some of the largest companies in Mexico showing their support by giving up female employees that day.

After female protesters took control of the National Human Rights Commission in Mexico in the fall, ripped paintings of revolutionary heroes off the walls and declared that the building would become a shelter for female victims of violence, López Obrador was incensed.

“Of course I do not like it,” he said of the protest, emphasizing that the protesters desecrated a particular painting.

The activists said the president’s focus on destroying property rather than on their claims merely proved their point.

Protesters say they have taken increasingly militant action because they have yet to see real change. While the #MeToo movement in the United States has encouraged many women here to expose men in positions of power over alleged assaults, few of the cases have led to layoffs or other major consequences.

An investigation by the news website Animal Politico found that only 5% of the charges of rape and sexual assault from 2014 to 2018 resulted in criminal convictions.

Salgado was not charged with any crime. The accusations against him came to light late last year, just as he was ready to accept the nomination as Morena’s government candidate in Guerrero.

Salgado, born in a notorious lawless region of the state known as the Tierra Caliente, or Hot Lands, and is a flamboyant character, known for driving a Harley-Davidson and for the addiction to music – he died in 2012. recorded a cumbia for López Obrador.

In a radio interview in 2017, Salgado describes himself as a “woman, party, gambler [and] drunk, saying he was too old to change: A tree that grows crooked never straightens its trunk. ‘

During his political career of more than thirty years, he was mayor of Acapulco, a state representative, a congressman and a senator.

Basilia, the woman who said Salgado raped her in 1998, said she tried to report the assault at the time, but that a clerk with the prosecutor advised against it.

“This person is very influential, very powerful,” she said, the man said according to her interview with Milenio. “Go home, live quietly and forget it.”

She became a prominent left-wing activist in Guerrero and eventually helped López Obrador establish his party as a powerful political force there. Salgado joined the party in 2018 and again won a seat in the Senate.

In the fall of last year, when it became clear that Salgado would seek governorship, Basilia went to police. By that time, newspapers had begun to carry stories about another rape charge against Salgado.

A woman who worked for Salgado when he briefly ran a newspaper in Acapulco went to police in 2016 to say he drugged and raped her. According to her, Salgado recorded a video of the first attack and used it as extortion to rape her at least twice more.

The investigation went nowhere. The then state prosecutor, Xavier Olea, recently told reporters that his office dropped the case after the state governor asked him not to arrest Salgado. The prosecutor’s office has since reopened the case.

Other allegations have also been made in recent months, including a claim of sexual harassment filed by a woman who worked for Salgado while he was mayor of Acapulco in 2007.

Well-known Guerrero author Marxitania Ortega wrote in a Facebook post that Salgado assaulted her at a book fair a few years ago.

“He was drunk, and when he approached me, he did it in the worst way, disgracefully and with an improper hug, to say the least,” she said. She said she saw on another occasion how Salgado was doing the same to a friend.

As the accusations against Salgado increased, anger arose within Morena over Salgado’s nomination.

The party “cannot remain silent in the face of possible rape cases,” said Citlalli Hernandez, Morena’s secretary general.

The decision is even under criticism from the interior secretary of López Obrador, Olga Sánchez Cordero, who is known for being very loyal.

“Unrestricted respect for the right of women to live without violence is a necessary condition for an elected official,” she said.

Women are playing a growing role in Mexican politics. Thanks to a 2014 constitutional reform calling for parity in the legislature, just under 50% of the elected leaders in the Senate and House of Representatives are now women.

Paola Zavala Saeb, a human rights lawyer and feminist activist, said representation meant women were being tried for the first time.

“Before, we could not do it because we did not have these microphones,” she said.

Aimee Vega Montiel, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Mexico, said that after decades of activism – partly fueled by the killing of hundreds of women in the border town of Juarez in the 1990s – Mexican feminists finally showed “that violations of women’s rights not normal and not natural either. ”

From Basilia’s side, she said she hoped López Obrador would drop support for Salgado. She too was a loyal supporter of López Obrador during his political career.

“I hope the president … can understand that this is not a lie,” she said.

Then she made a direct plea: ‘Mr. President, do not protect a rapist. ‘

Cecilia Sanchez in The Times’ Mexico City office contributed to this report.