Mexican Election — A Mixed Bag
Usrally when Mexico gets mentioned in this series it’s because of its serious problems of violence against women and femicide, or sometimes the results of its extreme abortion bans. So I thought it interesting that the news this week was the election of the first woman president in North America, who is also the first Jewish woman president of Mexico. Claudia Scheinbaum will take office on October 1, 2024, replacing her mentor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. She also succeeded him as mayor of Mexico City until last year. She is a climate scientist who worked with the International Panel on Climate Change, which won a Nobel Prize. She was environmental minister under Obrador when he was Mayor of Mexico City.
She is expected to continue Obrador’s policies. He has not been strong on environmental policy, and it is hoped that Scheinbaum will change this. Obrador has brought many people out of poverty with his social policies, which is one reason the Morena party was so strong in this election, winning majorities in both houses of Congress as well as many local and state posts. Obrador formed a National Guard, and was seeking to bring law enforcement under national (military) control.
But the problems of corruption and violence continued over the past six years.
Mexico currently sees at least 10 women and girls killed on a daily basis, with tens of thousands of women missing. The vast majority of femicides go unprosecuted.
Of course, the surge in femicides occurs within a general context of violence; in the first four and a half years of AMLO’s term, Mexico registered 160,594 homicides, while the estimated number of missing people has now surpassed 111,000 – a figure AMLO has preferred to drastically lowball.
www.aljazeera.com/…
The quotes below give important commentary and analysis.
Sheinbaum’s predecessor’s presidential tenure marked the most violent in Mexico's history. According to Reuters, “murders still hover around 30,000 a year and more people have been killed during his presidency than during any other administration in Mexico’s modern history.” In the six years of Obrador’s presidency, this brings the total estimated number of murders to nearly 200,000. The violence extends to government leaders at the state level: from September 2023 to May 2024, across Mexico, 34 candidates or aspiring candidates were assassinated. While voting appeared peaceful at most of Mexico’s approximately 170,000 polling places, there were incidents of violence and ballot box burning reported.
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Sheinbaum’s election has been lauded as an historic win, representing the first woman leader of a nation in North America. Still, Mexico is a country with one of the highest rates of femicide in the world, and activists and scholars are cautious that her win could be largely symbolic, after a campaign short on promises to tackle high rates of domestic violence and unequal abortion access.
"Being a woman does not necessarily embody progressiveness in the women's rights' agenda," Friné Salguero, director at the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute, a feminist civil society group based in Mexico City, told Context News. Regarding femicide, Sheinbaum’s stance continues López Obrador's plan to shift power to the military, giving them control of big infrastructure projects and a larger role in public security – a concern for researchers of gender based violence. Maïssa Hubert, subdirector at gender justice center EQUIS told Context News that hundreds of thousands of women have named soldiers as perpetrators of violence.
www.teenvogue.com/…
.You can read more about Mexico’s deadly election season here.
Women now represent half of Congress, after electoral reforms nearly a decade ago mandated gender parity in nominations to Mexico’s legislatures. And two women, Ana Lilia Rivera and Marcela Guerra Castillo, occupy the top posts in both chambers of Congress. Meanwhile, Norma Lucía Piña is the first woman to serve as chief justice of Mexico’s Supreme Court. Preliminary election night results also favor Sheinbaum’s Morena party, giving them a supermajority in Congress. As such, Sheinbaum will very likely have ample support for a feminist political agenda should she pursue one.
But electing women to high office doesn’t necessarily shift power in meaningful ways. It’s what experts on women in politics call “descriptive representation” – when political leaders resemble a group of voters but fail to set policies designed to protect them. In contrast, “substantive representation” occurs when officials enact laws that truly benefit the groups that they claim to represent.
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In other words, Mexico may have surpassed many countries, including the U.S., in promoting women to political leadership positions, but it still hasn’t shed its stigma of machismo and its history of authoritarianism.
theconversation.com/...
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As always, thanks to the WoW crew for links and discussion, which this week includes mettle fatigue, Angmar, elenacarlena, and officebss.
In Other News
The Fearless Fund
Sometimes the world goes haywire.
A panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled Monday that an Atlanta-based venture capital firm should be temporarily blocked from issuing grants reserved for businesses owned by Black women, saying that doing so would probably discriminate against business owners of other races.
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“This is the first court decision in the 150+ year history of the post-Civil War civil rights law that has halted private charitable support for any racial or ethnic group,” Jason Schwartz, a lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which is representing Fearless Fund, said in a statement emailed to The Washington Post. “The dissenting judge, the district court and other courts have agreed with us that these types of claims should not prevail.”
www.washingtonpost.com/...
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Florida (and California) Maternity Care
A new Florida law allows doctors to perform c-sections and other maternal health care at outpatient facilities called Advanced Birthing Centers. It is the first state to do so. This move was driven by private equity owned physicians groups who claim the law will reduce costs and increase patient satisfaction. Advanced Birthing Centers are different from traditional birth centers, which are staffed by midwives and have operated for decades.
In Florida, seventeen hospitals have closed their maternity units since 2019, sometimes resulting in maternity care deserts. So having more sites available for maternity care could be beneficial for Floridian families.
However, there are reasons to be wary. Private equity firms are generally focused on maximizing profits over the short-term, which can lead to financial peril for the clinics or hospitals acquired.
lowninstitute.org/…
Of course, the larger question is why are Florida hospitals closing their maternity wards? Might it have something to do with the fact that many OB/GYNs won’t work in states where ambiguous abortion laws can limit their ability to give patients optimal care?
And profits and healthcare never go well together. That’s why maternity wards are also closing in California.
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Right to Contraception Act
A bill that would codify women’s right to contraception failed to get 60 votes in the Senate. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted with Democrats and Independents, but it wasn’t enough. Part of the reason for this vote was to get Republicans on record before the election in November. And Newsweek named names.
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New Rape Courts in Britain
The Labour Party pledges 80 special courts to deal with a backlog of rape cases; police forces are also to develop specialized rape units.
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Women in Wales and England Denied New Drug
Results from the Destiny-Breast06 study, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) annual meeting in Chicago, show the drug can stall the growth of tumours by more than a year, significantly longer than standard chemotherapy.
Overall, Enhertu reduced the risk of cancer growing or spreading in patients with HER2-low breast cancer by 38% compared with those who received chemotherapy. The data will pile pressure on regulators to approve the drug for women in England and Wales.
Charities warned that women’s lives “will be cut short” with further delays as they called for Enhertu to be made available to women in England and Wales as swiftly as possible.
www.theguardian.com/...
Culture and Commentary
Rebecca Solnit on the normalization of the unspeakable.
www.theguardian.com/…
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The Guardian has 38 impactful photos of women.
www.theguardian.com/...