The Mexican Supreme Court made international headlines after decriminalizing abortion in Aguascalientes state on August 30th, 2023. It found that the federal penal code criminalizing abortion violates the reproductive autonomy of women and people who gestate. In the following days, both the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) and the opposition coalition nominated female presidential candidates, all but ensuring that Mexico will see its first female president come June of 2024. Though undeniably historic, the push to be seen as representing Mexican women should not be taken at face value. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo of Morena and Xóchitl Gálvez of the Broad Front for Mexico both support abortion rights, but Sheinbaum’s contentious relationship with the feminist movement and Gálvez’ instrumentalization of gender on the campaign trail cast doubt on whether either candidate will make substantive changes on feminist issues and end Mexico’s femicide epidemic.
Former mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum appears to be benefitting from her close alliance with outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), whose approval ratings exceed 60% as he enters his final year in office. Trained as a physicist and environmental engineer, Sheinbaum served as the minister of environment for AMLO’s cabinet in 2015 and has worked at some of the highest levels of environmental policy, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Her work on environmental policy speaks for itself, but Sheinbaum’s alignment with AMLO is detrimental to her popularity with feminists. The Mexican President can only be described as hostile to the feminist movement, and on numerous occasions, his comments towards feminist activism have been so out of touch that they would be comical, were it not for the severity of the gendercide.
Since the 1990s, Mexico has failed to contain a femicide epidemic that sees as many as ten women murdered a day in violent, gender-based killings. Despite nearly thirty years of transnational feminist activism, female homicide rates in Mexico have only increased in the past decade. Over 90% of femicides still go unprosecuted, creating a culture of impunity for which the Mexican state is to blame. On femicide, AMLO has blamed the neoliberal economic policies of previous administrations– a point that has been fully fleshed out by academics, but serves only to distract from his failings as president. When justly criticized for his inability to reduce femicide, AMLO also sought to deflect blame by discrediting the feminist movement, labelling it as ‘conservative’ and claiming it began only two years prior. This earned him little more than ridicule from activists and media outlets, but more egregiously, he claimed that 90% of emergency calls made concerning violence against women were false. During the pandemic, his government also published controversial advertisements suggesting that domestic violence could be prevented by abuser and victim merely counting to ten together. The backlash from feminists and political opponents was swift.
Sheinbaum has tried to distance herself from AMLO on feminist issues, arguing that during her time as mayor, Mexico City benefited from more support centres for female victims of violence, an emergency hotline where women could report violence, as well as increased street lighting, cameras, and a DNA bank to facilitate the prosecution of perpetrators. However, feminists still resent her for accusing activists of provoking authorities during a protest against alleged rapes by police. Protesters defaced the city’s Angel of Independence statue, writing slogans such as “rape state” and “they don’t care about us” on its base. Sheinbaum’s comments infuriated feminists, prompting many to claim that she was more concerned with the protection of public property than the safety of women.
Xóchitl Gálvez is an Otomi woman and self-made businesswoman running on behalf of the Broad Front for Mexico, an opposition coalition made up of the center-right PAN, the leftist PRD, and the PRI, who ruled Mexico for 71 years uninterrupted (1929-2000). Her humble origins and use of profanity, have made her popular with Mexico’s working class, while her “rags to riches” story has enamoured conservatives across the board. AMLO finds her popularity deeply threatening and has told working-class voters not to be fooled by her trickery. She denounced his comments as chauvinistic and mocked him with the statement: “You need many ovaries like the ones I have to confront such a powerful man.” She may be referencing lived experience– such as battling an alcoholic father to pursue her education– but Galvéz’ repeated references to female anatomy show that she depends on her gender identity to legitimize her stance on women’s issues.
On femicide, Gálvez again pointed to gender as though it were a self-evident weapon, claiming that ovaries are needed to combat crime. However, when asked about femicide in an interview with Noticias Univision, she notably changed the subject, choosing instead to emphasize her gender and the historic nature of the presidential race. Elsewhere, she has argued that Morena’s approach to femicide, which seeks to reduce crime by tackling poverty and inequality, has failed, and that judicial reform and better law enforcement are the only way forward. To this end, she intends to allow the US military to operate on Mexican soil to break the power of the narcos– the narcotrafficking drug cartels who have been engaged in violent conflict with the Mexican state since 2006. Such ‘tough on crime’ stances have historically only escalated violence between the government and cartels, imperiling everyone and detracting from anti-femicide activism. Mexico’s drug war has imparted many hard lessons, one of which is that femicide does not disappear in drug-related conflict, it simply becomes obscured by other forms of violence. Activists have been asking for greater binational cooperation around the US-Mexico border to bring perpetrators of femicide to justice, but Gálvez’s plan is hardly what they had in mind. Safety for women in these regions will not improve until there is knowledge sharing and institutional cooperation between municipal security forces on either side of the border, followed by a commitment to extradition.
Undoubtedly, both candidates have experienced misogyny in their careers, but will these experiences translate to the progressive gender platform that the international community has prematurely predicted? Having ovaries does not make someone a feminist, and having gender parity in Congress does not guarantee gender equality. Monumental as it will be when one of these candidates breaks the presidential glass ceiling, the struggle for women’s rights, freedoms and prosperity is far from over.
Written by: Clio Bailey
Edited by: Jamie Silverman
Clio is in her fourth year at McGill, majoring in Honours International Development and minoring in Hispanic Studies and Social Studies of Medicine. As a staff writer for Catalyst, she most enjoys writing about social movements, political violence, Indigenous rights, and feminism.