Breathe
By Graciela Rock, director of La Cadera de Eva.
This year, Mexico will renew around 20,000 public offices, the largest elections in our country. This is not the only reason why this electoral process is historic, also because two of the main candidates for the presidency are women, and because, at the request of the National Electoral Institute, at least 63 candidacies for federal deputies and senators should correspond to vulnerable groups systematically underrepresented and discriminated against: indigenous populations, Afro-Mexican communities, migrants and the LGBTIQ+ community.
This is not the first time that INE implements measures of inclusion, or affirmative action in the face of elections, already since 2017 they were included in the candidacies for the Chamber of Deputies. In recent years, the participation in institutional politics of people representing these groups has been increasing, not only because of measures such as the one mentioned above, but also because the public arena has had to open up to new debates, new figures of interest and opinion leaders.
In spite of this, the national political parties have not had the political will to reach the representation goals presented by the electoral authority. According to an analysis made by the feminist journalism portal La Cadera de Eva, based on the data presented by the INE itself in its platform of candidaciesbased on the data presented by INE itself in its platform of candidacies, only two parties managed to comply.
Whoever has been following the candidacy process will not be surprised that Movimiento Ciudadano is the party with the highest number of candidacies registered under the vulnerable groups parameter, followed by the Partido Verde Ecologista de México, which somehow continues to maintain registration. In the analysis carried out by La Cadera de Eva, the only category in which all the parties complied with the indicated parameter was that of migrant candidacies. In reality, there is no obligation on the part of the political parties to comply with actions that truly allow vulnerable groups to achieve political representation; and therefore, there are no sanctions either.
Despite meeting the metrics in terms of the number of candidacies, the measures proposed by INE do not consider elements of true representativeness. For the most part, the candidacies assigned are either as alternates or in places far down the plurinominal lists, that is, the people who reach these spaces actually have very little chance of reaching the position. This is the case of candidate Tuss Fernandez, a trans man who was registered by his party, Morena, in the list of women and assigned the 22nd place in the plurinominal lists, despite being the first name of the draw, according to the internal regulations of the political group.
Fernandez's assignment to the female lists provoked outrage from both the LGBTIQ+ community and female colleagues; and triggered a series of attacks, including threats against her life. According to Tuss, INE has failed to implement any protection protocol as there is none focused on the trans male community.
Beyond the so-called "quotas", it is urgent, on the one hand, the creation of electoral models and rules that guarantee the full participation of all people and the adequate representation of all groups and collectives, and on the other hand, the political will to strengthen democratic institutions.
These elections will also go down in history as a missed opportunity to be an inclusive, pluralistic, anti-discriminatory and democratic process.
You can read the full review, as well as the interview with Tuss Fernández at www.lacaderadeeva.com
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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