There are people in the United States who share the arrogance with which Republican primary nominee Ron DeSantis views his neighbor to the south. In a recent debate between candidates from his party, the Florida governor assured that the first measure as president would be to send troops to Mexico to fight the cartels that produce fentanyl, the opioid causing an epidemic of deaths in the United States. country (including Canada), with or without the permission of the Mexican authorities. An act of war, in other words. As your country recedes into fundamental rights and ideological polarization, Mexico is showing opposing signals, with the decriminalization of voluntary termination of pregnancy upheld by the Supreme Court and a woman in the lead ahead.
On Wednesday, Mexico’s Supreme Court declared the criminalization of abortion in the federal penal code unconstitutional and upheld the action of an activist group, GIRE. The same court had already ruled in 2021 that state law’s total ban on abortion is unconstitutional. However, few states complied with the decision: 20 of the 32 states did not allow termination of pregnancy.
The decision of the Mexican judges follows an international trend. In the past 25 years, more than 50 countries, including Portugal, have passed laws to decriminalize abortion. With the Supreme Court leaning toward the conservative camp thanks to Donald Trump’s nominations, the United States followed the opposite path, ending five decades of constitutional abortion rights last year, leaving the decision to each of the states .
Since then, more than 20 of the 50 states have banned or severely restricted voluntary termination of pregnancy, sparking protests and some related defeats in last November’s midterm elections. Mexico could become a destination for North American women looking for a legal and safe way to have an abortion.
In the United States of America, if the leadership of the country has not yet been entrusted to a woman (apart from the fact that the reins of the presidency were in the hands of Vice President Kamala Harris for 85 minutes in 2021 when Joe Biden underwent a colonoscopy ), neither seems to be in the next election cycle, in the United Mexican States it will be a woman who will succeed Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO, as he is also known). On Wednesday, as leader of the left-wing Movimento Nacional Regeneração (Morena) party, he announced that Claudia Sheinbaum is the one chosen by the activists to run for president in June 2, 2024.
The candidate, who also has the support of the Labor Party and the Ecological Green Party, received nearly 40% of the vote among the 12,500 activists, leaving in second place former head of diplomacy Marcelo Ebrard, who was undiplomatic. way to accept defeat. . First he challenged the legitimacy and fairness of the election process, then he left the party open. “We are not going to submit to that lady,” he stated, quoted by El País.
Claudia Sheinbaum called for unity, but mainly looked to the future: ‘Mexico is ready for a president, an astronaut, an engineer. Mexican women have been ready for a long time,” she said, emphasizing that a woman will. be head of state.
In a country where, by 2021, 42.8% of women said they had been victims of some form of violence in the past 12 months, and is recognized as sexist in polls, gender equality reform is on the rise. First in Congress and the Chamber of Deputies, with a law from 2014 and since 2019 with the introduction in the constitution of the so-called ‘parity in everything’, which provides for equal numbers of men and women in all power and decision-making bodies. to make.
Mexican electoral law allows any president to serve a six-year term. AMLO will be happy to have its old ally as a possible successor and staunch supporter of the “fourth transformation,” the name given to Morena’s political project.
Sheinbaum, 61, was environment minister for the Federal District when Obrador headed Mexico City’s government and later served as a spokeswoman for the first of his three presidential bids. With a degree in physics and a PhD in energy engineering, she also began her political activism at university.
Engineer vs engineer
Sheinbaum, who stepped down as head of Mexico City’s government in June to contest the election, is a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Bulgaria. She will compete with the daughter of an indigenous person, Xóchitl Gálvez. The 60-year-old senator from the National Action Party was confirmed as a candidate on the 3rd by the Frente Amplio, which aligns its conservative party with the center of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which dominated Mexican political life for 70 years. , and the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, split from the PRI.
Gálvez rose to prominence thanks to AMLO, who repeatedly belittled Gálvez during his daily press conferences. The senator eventually filed a complaint with the National Electoral Institute on Gender-Based Violence. Obrador, the first Mexican president with a joint government, was banned from discussing the election candidates after saying the Frente Amplio candidate is a puppet of oligarchs. But he returned to the charge by claiming to be a victim of gender-based violence himself, due to Gálvez’s criticism.
The candidate, whose first name means flower in the Nahuatl language, and who dresses in native clothing, does not fit the stereotype of conservatism. The computer engineer uses colorful and colloquial language and travels by bicycle, but more so she champions policies to end fossil fuels and consolidate progress in gender equality and the rights of sexual minorities. In addition, he criticized AMLO for not tackling organized crime, saying “ovaries are needed”.
Source: DN
