Mexico divided as president presents controversial candidate

As it became clear last fall that Mexican Senator Félix Salgado Macedonio would run for governor of the state of Guerrero, Basilia Castañeda decided to make his rape accusation public.

She told police that in 1998, when she was a 17-year-old political activist, she found herself alone with him at her home in Acapulco.

“Without saying anything, he started attacking me,” she explained to the newspaper Milenio, adding that, when it was over, he threw a 100 pesos bill – about $ 10 at the time – in her face.

Four other women also came forward to charge Salgado with sexual assault, including one who told police she was drugged and raped by the politician in 2016.

These allegations did not prevent Mexico’s political party from officially making Salgado its candidate for governor this month.

In the face of feminist opposition, Salgado’s candidacy became a major political responsibility for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who defended his longtime friend and political ally.

The accusations bitterly divided Morena – the center-left party founded by López Obrador in 2011 – with hundreds of members, including many of its higher profile women, demanding that the party withdraw its support and Salgado be removed from the polls.

“Stay on the side of history, on the side of the victims, on the side of women,” a coalition of female party leaders said in a statement last week.

But López Obrador refused to budge, echoing Salgado’s claim that the charges are nothing more than partisan political attacks.

“When there are elections … it is about discrediting the opponent in one way or another,” said the president, widely known by his initials, AMLO, in a recent press conference, describing Salgado as a victim of “media lynching”.

Asked about the rape charges during another press conference, López Obrador was furious, shouting, “That’s enough!”

His swift rejection of allegations of sexual violence by women infuriated members of Mexico’s increasingly visible feminist movement.

The president is in the habit of rejecting any criticism as an unwarranted attack by his political enemies. But that kind of response falls apart when criticism comes from women complaining about violence, political analyst Denise Dresser recently wrote in the Americas Quarterly.

The growing number of women calling for an end to gender violence in Mexico represents “the real thorn in AMLO’s side: a singular political movement that he seems not to understand, cannot control and will be unable to suppress,” she wrote. .

Carlos Bravo Regidor, a professor at the public research center CIDE in Mexico City, said the president is under increasing pressure to acknowledge his complaints and respond to his demands.

“Feminists inside and outside Morena are struggling to make the president feel that if he doesn’t back down, he will have to pay a price,” said Bravo.

Many feminists had high hopes for López Obrador. The long-battered leftist, who ran for president twice before winning the 2018 elections, promised full gender parity in his office – a promise he kept.

But months after taking office, he angered activists by closing shelters for victims of domestic violence and closing public daycare centers, part of a broader austerity plan.

Then, a series of horrific incidents in Mexico City pushed the issue of violence against women into the national spotlight.

A teenager said she was raped by four policemen. A man apparently killed and skinned his 25-year-old girlfriend. And then the body of a 7-year-old girl named Fátima who had disappeared was found disemboweled in a garbage bag.

López Obrador attributed the crimes to the “neoliberal” government model of his predecessors.

Not recognizing the national crisis – an average of 11 women are killed each day in Mexico – he also downplayed the increase in calls to a government hotline for women victims of violence, saying that 90% of those calls “are fake”.

In response, hundreds of thousands of women from across the political spectrum demonstrated in Mexico City in March. The next day, women across the country missed work on a national strike, with some of Mexico’s largest companies showing their support by giving employees time off.

After protesters took control of Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission in the fall, tearing paintings of revolutionary heroes off the walls and declaring that the building would become a haven for women victims of violence, López Obrador was furious.

“Of course I don’t like it,” he said of the protest, highlighting the disfigurement of a particular painting by the protesters.

Activists said the president’s focus on destroying property, not his demands, simply proved his point.

Protesters say they have taken more and more militant actions because they have yet to see a real change. Although the #MeToo movement in the United States has encouraged many women here to denounce men in positions of power for alleged aggression, few of these cases have resulted in layoffs or other important consequences.

An investigation by the news website Animal Politico found that, from 2014 to 2018, only 5% of allegations of rape and sexual assault resulted in a criminal sentence.

Salgado was not charged with any crime. The charges against him began to surface at the end of last year, when he was preparing to accept the nomination as candidate for governor of Morena in Guerrero.

Born in a notoriously lawless region of the state known as Tierra Caliente, or Terras Quentes, Salgado is an extravagant character, known for driving a Harley-Davidson and being interested in music – he recorded a famous cumbia in 2012 for López Obrador.

In a radio interview in 2017, Salgado described himself as a “womanizer, party-goer, player [and] drunk ”, saying he was too old to change:“ A tree that grows crooked never straightens its trunk ”.

During his political career of more than 30 years, he was mayor of Acapulco, state deputy, federal deputy and senator.

Basilia, the woman who said Salgado raped her in 1998, said she tried to report the assault at the time, but that a prosecution clerk advised against it.

“That person is very influential, very powerful,” she said the man told him, according to his interview with Milenio. “Go home, live calmly and forget about it.”

She became a prominent leftist activist in Guerrero, helping López Obrador establish his party as a powerful political force there. Salgado joined the party in 2018 and won a Senate seat again.

In the fall of last year, as soon as it became clear that Salgado would try the government, Basília went to the police. At that time, newspapers started publishing news about another rape charge against Salgado.

A woman who worked for Salgado when he briefly ran a newspaper in Acapulco went to the police in 2016 to say that he had drugged and raped her. She said Salgado recorded a video of the first attack and used it as blackmail to rape her on at least two more occasions.

The investigation got nowhere. The state’s top prosecutor at the time, Xavier Olea, recently told reporters that his office dropped the case after the state governor asked him not to arrest Salgado. The prosecution has since reopened the case.

Other allegations have also been made public in recent months, including a complaint of sexual harassment made by a woman who worked for Salgado when he was mayor of Acapulco in 2007.

Well-known Guerrero writer Marxitania Ortega wrote a Facebook post in which Salgado assaulted her at a book event several years ago.

“He was drunk and when he approached me he did it in the worst way, obscene and with an inappropriate hug, to say the least,” she said. She said she saw Salgado do the same thing to a friend on another occasion.

As the accusations against Salgado increased, anger grew within Morena about Salgado’s appointment.

The party “cannot remain silent in the face of possible cases of rape,” said Citlalli Hernandez, Morena’s general secretary.

The decision was even criticized by López Obrador’s interior secretary, Olga Sánchez Cordero, who is known for being extremely loyal.

“Unrestricted respect for women’s right to live without violence is a necessary condition for an elected official,” she said.

Women play an increasing role in Mexican politics. Thanks to a 2014 constitutional reform that called for parity in the legislature, just under 50% of the elected leaders in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies are now women.

Paola Zavala Saeb, a human rights lawyer and feminist activist, said that representation means that, for the first time, women are being heard.

“We couldn’t do that before because we didn’t have these microphones,” she said.

Aimee Vega Montiel, a researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de México, said that after decades of activism – spurred in part by the murders of hundreds of women in the border town of Juarez in the early 1990s – Mexican feminists have finally shown “that violations of women’s rights are not normal and are not natural ”.

For his part, Basilia said he hoped López Obrador would abandon support for Salgado. She also supported López Obrador loyally throughout her political career.

“I hope the president … can understand that this is not a lie,” she said.

So she made a direct appeal: “Mr. President, don’t protect a rapist. “

Cecilia Sanchez, from The Times’ Mexico City office, contributed to this report.