The president of Mexico had a confession to make. Women on social media held placards with the words “President, break the pact” and Andrés Manuel López Obrador was confused.
He turned to his wife to enlighten him. The women were describing the patriarchy pact, she told him.
But he dismissed the appeal.
The expression, he said at a news conference last month, has been imported. “What do we have to do with this if we respect women, all human beings?” he said.
For weeks, the president – commonly known as Amlo – has faced growing anger over a candidate for governor in his party, who faces five counts of sexual abuse, including rape. Disgust spread to prominent women in the party, who last month called on their leadership to remove the candidate.
Behind the furor with the candidacy, however, is a women’s movement that represents a relentless challenge to Amlo’s claim to be the champion of the dispossessed in Mexico.
This feminist activism has become the country’s most powerful opposition voice against the popular president, a leftist who took office in 2018 promising to free the country from its ingrained corruption and lead a social transformation.
Although Amlo has appointed women to powerful positions, including much of his office, his policies have failed to deal with the widespread violence that kills more than 10 women a day and forces many more to live in fear.
Instead of acknowledging his concerns, he suggested that women’s groups are being manipulated by their conservative enemies. He even cast doubt on the rising rates of domestic violence recorded during the pandemic blockade, suggesting that most emergency calls were fake.
“He put the feminist movement as public enemy No. 1,” said Arussi Unda, a spokesman for Las Brujas del Mar, a feminist collective based in the state of Veracruz, on the Gulf Coast, who organized a women’s strike a year ago, after International Women’s Day.
“We are not asking for crazy things,” she said. “We are asking that women work, that women are not killed and girls are not raped. It is not insane, it is not eccentric, it is human rights. “
The new wave of feminism emerges from a younger generation of women, many from outside Mexico City, who have a more direct experience of violence than women rights advocates in the 1970s and 1980s.
Many of that older generation joined Amlo’s government or represent his party, Morena, in Congress, seeing it as a way to advance a progressive agenda.
But younger activists believe that women’s voices have been silenced within the party.
“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 is the president.”
A year ago, on International Women’s Day, Mexican women took to the streets in a broad and peaceful protest against violence. Before this year’s march, officials erected steel barriers around the national palace – creating what appears to be a symbol of the division between the president and the women’s movement. On Saturday night, activists covered the wall with names of victims of femicide.
“It 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 an inflection point comparable to the Mexican student movement of 1968 and the 1994 Zapatista indigenous uprising.
Given the movement’s focus on violence against women, the choice of Félix Salgado Macedonio to run for the Guerrero government seemed almost a deliberate provocation.
In a letter to party leaders last month, 500 Morena supporters, including prominent senators, wrote: “It is clear to us that in Morena there is no place for abusers” and called for the removal of Salgado Macedonio.
Amlo has repeatedly said that it is up to the people of Guerrero, where the candidate is popular, to decide.
Loyalty to the president is so deep in the party that no one dared to openly criticize the president’s tacit support for the candidate. “You know that we will not be able to fight the president,” said a member of Morena.
Salgado Macedonio has a long legislative career and, as mayor of Acapulco from 2005 to 2008, he cultivated an image of rude machismo, riding a motorcycle and surrounding himself with beautiful girls.
At the end of last year, Basilia Castañeda went to Morena on the charge that she raped her in 1998, when she was 17 years old. In response, she faced attacks from the party and said in a video last week that she fears for her safety.
The attitude of the president and her supporters was a shock, said one of her lawyers, Patricia Olamendi.
“Personally, I am tremendously surprised by your speech. It seems that no one has clarified the situation for him, ”said Olamendi. “You would expect that when someone rules, they rule for everyone.”
Salgado Macedonio faces a second rape charge from a woman who said he abused her in 2016, when she worked as a journalist for a newspaper where he was an editor. This investigation has stopped.
Through his lawyer, Salgado Macedonio denied the charges.
A Morena party commission decided the allegations were unfounded, but said it would repeat the selection process to choose Guerrero’s candidate.
Before that, Salgado Macedonio took the lead and registered his candidacy with the electoral authorities on Thursday.
If he continues to run, he sends the message that “impunity is institutionalizing, not only in Guerrero, but in Mexico,” said Marina Reyna Aguilar, a lawyer in Chilpancingo, the state capital.
Nestora Salgado, senator of Morena by Guerrero who still hopes to run for the party’s nomination, asked the women to speak out. (She is not related to him.)
“As fighters, I think it is time to summon women – and to be taken into account,” she said. But she refused to condemn Amlo’s tacit support for the former mayor of Acapulco.
This reluctance seemed to find echo among other women in Morena who asked for the removal of Salgado Macedonio.
“The president was very congruent in his speech,” said Aleida Alavez, a deputy, at the same time that she condemned the party leadership for limiting the participation of women.
Lorena Villavicencio was one of the few lawmakers willing to talk about the president’s response. “It was a very difficult time for many women in Morena,” she said.
“There is a long conversation pending with the president of the republic,” she said. “Feminism is the most transformative movement in the world and I don’t think it has been properly understood.”