The President of Mexico has made a confession. Women on social media kept the signs with the caption: “President, break the treaty” and Andrés Manuel López Obrador was confused.
He turns to his wife to correct him. The women described the treaty of patriarchy, she told him.
But he waves down the plea.
The expression, he declared at a news conference last month, was introduced. “What do we have to do with this if we have respect for women and all men?” he said.
The president – popularly known as Amlo – has been confronted for weeks now with growing anger over a candidate for governor of his party who faces five allegations of sexual abuse, including rape. The disgust spread to prominent women in the party, who last month called on his leadership to remove the candidate.
Behind the uproar over the candidacy, however, there is a women’s movement that presents an unshakable challenge to Amlo’s claim that he is the champion of Mexico’s expropriated.
This feminist activism has become the country’s most powerful opposition voice against the popular president, a leftist who took office in 2018 and promised to free the country from its entrenched corruption and lead a social transformation.
While Amlo appointed women to powerful positions, including a large part of his cabinet, his policies could not address the pervasive violence that kills more than ten women a day and forced many more to live in fear.
Instead of acknowledging their concerns, he suggested that women’s groups be manipulated by his conservative enemies. He even doubts the rising rate of domestic violence locked up during the pandemic, suggesting that most emergency calls were false.
“He has placed the feminist movement as the No. 1 public enemy,” said Arussi Unda, a spokeswoman for Las Brujas del Mar, a feminist collective in the state of Veracruz, Gulf Coast, a women’s strike a year ago after International Women’s Day said.
“We’re not asking for crazy things,” she said. “We demand that women work, that women are not killed and that girls are not raped. It’s not insane, not eccentric, it’s human rights. ”
The new wave of feminism is emerging from a younger generation of women, many of them outside Mexico City, who have a more direct experience of violence than women’s advocates of the 1970s and 1980s.
Many of those older generations joined the Amlo government or represented its party, Morena, in Congress and saw it as the way to advance a progressive agenda.
But younger activists believe that women’s voices in the party are muzzled.
“There is nothing feminist about Morena,” said Yolitzin Jaimes, an activist from the state of Guerrero, one of the country’s poorest and most violent regions. “The Conservative one is the president.”
A year ago on International Women’s Day, Mexican women filled the streets in a large, mostly peaceful protest against violence. Ahead of this year’s march, authorities erected steel barriers around the national palace, symbolizing the divisions between the president and the women’s movement. On Saturday night, activists covered the wall with names of women slaughtered.
“This is the best articulated movement in society,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst who wrote about social upheaval. He sees the current women’s movement as a turning point comparable to the student movement of Mexico in 1968 and the indigenous Zapatista uprising in 1994.
Given the movement’s focus on violence against women, the choice of Félix Salgado Macedonio to run for governor of Guerrero was almost a deliberate provocation.
In a letter to party leaders last month, 500 supporters of Morena, including prominent female senators, wrote: “It is clear to us that there is no place for abusers in Morena” and asked that Salgado Macedonio be removed.
Amlo has repeatedly said that it should decide to the people of Guerrero, where the candidate is popular.
Loyalty to the president lies so deep in the party that no one dared to directly criticize the tacit support of the president for the candidate. “You know we will not be able to fight the president,” said one female member of Morena.
Salgado Macedonio has a long career in law, and as mayor of Acapulco from 2005 to 2008, he cultivated an image of rough machismo, rode a motorcycle and surrounded himself with beautiful young women.
Late last year, Basilia Castañeda went to Morena with the accusation that he raped her in 1998 when she was 17 years old. In response, she faced the party’s attacks and said in a video last week that she feared for her safety.
The attitude of the president and his supporters came as a shock, said one of her lawyers, Patricia Olamendi.
“Personally, I was very surprised by his speech. “It seems that no one has explained the situation to him,” Olamendi said. “You would expect that if someone rules, they rule for everyone.”
Salgado Macedonio faces a second charge of raping a woman who said he abused her in 2016 when she worked as a journalist for a newspaper where he was the editor. That investigation got stuck.
Salgado Macedonio denied the allegations through his lawyer.
A Morena party commission ruled that the allegations were unfounded but said it would repeat the selection process to select Guerrero’s candidate.
Before that happened, Salgado Macedonio went ahead and registered his candidate with electoral authorities on Thursday.
If he continues the race, it sends the message that ‘impunity is being institutionalized not only in Guerrero but also in Mexico’, said Marina Reyna Aguilar, a lawyer in Chilpancingo, the state capital.
Nestora Salgado, a Morena senator from Guerrero who still hopes to run for the party’s nomination, has appealed to women. (She is not related to him.)
“As fighters, I think this is the moment to appeal to women – and that we need to be taken into account,” she said. But she refused to condemn Amlo’s tacit support for the former Acapulco mayor.
This reluctance seems to be echoing among other women in Morena who have called for Salgado Macedonio to be removed.
“The president was very congruent in his speech,” said Aleida Alavez, a congresswoman, even as she condemned the party’s leadership for restricting women’s participation.
Lorena Villavicencio was one of the few lawmakers willing to talk about the president’s response. “It was a very complicated moment for many women in Morena,” she said.
“There’s a long conversation going on with the president of the republic,” she said. “Feminism is the most transformative movement in the world, and I do not think it is adequately understood.”