MEXICO CITY, Sept 9 (Reuters) – When Mexican presidential contenders Claudia Sheinbaum and Xochitl Galvez entered politics firstly of the millennium, greater than 4 in 5 senators within the nation have been males. Today, the bulk are ladies.
The rise of Sheinbaum, who was named on Wednesday because the ruling celebration’s candidate for subsequent yr’s presidential election, and Galvez, the primary opposition contender, is the end result of a speedy strategy of female inclusion in politics since 2000.
“It’s extraordinary in a patriarchal country,” mentioned Josefina Vazquez Mota, who made historical past in 2012 because the first female presidential candidate for one in every of Mexico’s fundamental events.
“I’m sure this is going to be a watershed,” added Vazquez Mota, a senator who, like Galvez, represents the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, which dominated from 2000-2012.
Confirmation that each main candidates for the June 2 election could be ladies got here inside days of the Mexican Supreme Court hanging down a federal legislation criminalizing abortion.
Many ladies in Mexico, who make up 52 p.c of the inhabitants, hope the federal government that takes workplace in October 2024 will empower them as by no means earlier than.
“Just imagine having a female president in a country as macho as Mexico!” mentioned Maria del Carmen Garcia, 70, a secretary who mentioned ladies’s pay must meet up with males’s.
Latest polls counsel both former Mexico City Mayor Sheinbaum, the present favourite and candidate of leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or Galvez, a businesswoman-turned senator, are likeliest to win the election.
Still, revered former international minister Marcelo Ebrard, who was runner-up to Sheinbaum within the ruling National Regeneration Movement’s presidential main, denounced the competition as unfair and will quickly mount a rival bid.
Almost half of continental Latin America, together with Brazil, has already elected female heads of presidency, however solely Honduras and Peru at present have ladies presidents. Victory for Sheinbaum or Galvez would make them the first lady to win a common election within the United States, Mexico or Canada.
Home to the world’s second largest Roman Catholic inhabitants, Mexico was for years a bastion of conventional values that tended to restrict ladies’s entry to a life outdoors the house.
“We’re only just starting to feel these changes now,” mentioned Angelica Rodriguez, 49, an accountant who mentioned she misplaced her authorities job twenty years in the past as a result of she was pregnant. “Because before, men just looked out for men.”
Women stay critically under-represented in board rooms, are paid considerably lower than male counterparts, and usually tend to work within the casual economic system, research present.
Forced marriages of ladies nonetheless plague Mexico, and violence in opposition to ladies has been rising.
Four in each 100 women aged 12-17 have been both married or in a voluntary conjugal union, or had been, in accordance with a 2020 census.
Meanwhile femicides, or gender-motivated killings of girls, have greater than doubled since 2015, when 427 have been recorded.
CROSSED CULTURES
Modern Mexico took form because the Church’s maintain on each day life for the reason that Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire started weakening in response to secular and revolutionary upheaval that always sidelined ladies, viewing them as a conservative constituency.
Yet no image is extra synonymous with Mexico than its patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who in accordance with custom, in 1531 appeared to an early Aztec convert to Christianity.
The Marian imaginative and prescient was central in changing Mexico to Catholicism, fusing its Mesoamerican and European cultures, and making the virgin one thing akin to mom of the nation.
“She’s the one that managed to unite the two cultures that seemed irreconcilable,” mentioned former candidate Vazquez Mota.
[1/9]Mexican senator of the National Action Party (PAN) Xochitl Galvez gestures as she arrives for her nomination because the opposition Broad Front for Mexico 2024 presidential candidate, in Mexico City, Mexico September 3, 2023. REUTERS/Henry Romero Acquire Licensing Rights
For most of Mexico’s colonial period, ladies have been largely relegated to the periphery of public affairs.
A well-known exception was 17th century nun, author and poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, an inspiration to feminists who clashed with the Church over ladies’s proper to information.
Pressure started constructing to enfranchise ladies voters within the early 20th century, notably within the southeastern state of Yucatan, mentioned Lorenzo Meyer, a historian on the Colegio de Mexico.
Clashes within the 1920s and ’30s between anticlerical heirs of the Mexican Revolution and the Church slowed the drive due to issues that ladies, who have been deemed to be extra pious than males, may hinder the federal government’s revolutionary agenda, he mentioned.
Mexican ladies didn’t win full voting rights till 1953, 33 years after the neighboring United States.
Spurred on by the tip of one-party rule in 2000 and worldwide advances in ladies’s rights, reforms to extend their political clout gathered tempo. By 2019, Mexico had enshrined parity of illustration within the structure.
If events fail to area at the very least 50% ladies candidates, they are often barred from competing.
Mexico now has the joint fourth-highest degree of female inclusion within the nationwide parliament worldwide, in accordance with the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a world physique of nationwide parliaments. It is nicely forward of Brazil, Britain and the United States, the place solely 1 / 4 of senators are ladies.
Today, Vazquez Mota mentioned, her PAN ally Galvez now not had to reply to whether or not Mexico was prepared for a female president.
“I got this question every day and every night of my campaign across the entire country,” she recalled.
Polls point out that Mexico is prepared.
A research revealed in May by nationwide statistics company INEGI confirmed over nine-tenths of the general public strongly or considerably backed having a girl president.
Mexican legislation restricts presidents to a single six-year time period.
Since the 2018 election marketing campaign, extra ladies have received state governorships than in the remainder of Mexico’s historical past; the nation has additionally appointed its first female Supreme Court chief justice and central financial institution governor. Federal Congress is now half female.
Gabriela Cuevas, a former federal lawmaker and first Mexican to go the Inter-Parliamentary Union, mentioned the political victories have been solely a part of an extended journey: “What’s been done in politics has still to be achieved in all walks of life.”
Working poverty charges have been bettering in Mexico, however on the finish of the first quarter nonetheless troubled practically 38% of the inhabitants, official knowledge present.
Think tank Mexico Como Vamos reported in May that for each 100 males in working poverty, there have been 112 ladies.
The median wage hole between ladies and men in Mexico stands at 16.7% – marginally narrower than the U.S., in accordance with knowledge compiled in 2022 by the OECD group of developed nations. But it was above Brazil (11.1%), Turkey (10%) and Argentina (6.3%). INEGI places the hole increased at 42%, based mostly on imply common revenue.
And a 2022 research of 182 listed companies by assume tank the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness confirmed that ladies occupied 11% of board seats and made up simply 4% of CEOs.
(This story has been refiled to take away the duplicate textual content after paragraph 24)
Reporting by Dave Graham; Additional reporting by Stefanie Eschenbacher and Alberto Fajardo in Mexico City; Editing by Stephen Eisenhammer and Claudia Parsons
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
