The president of Mexico had a confession to make. The women on social media held placards that said, “President, break the pact” and Andrés Manuel López Obrador was confused.
He turned to his wife to put him straight. The women described the pact of patriarchy, he told her.
But he dismissed the plea.
The expression, he stated at a press conference last month, was imported. “What should we do with this if we are respectful of women, of all human beings?” He said.
For weeks, the president, commonly known as Amlo, has faced growing anger over a candidate for governor of his party facing five charges of sexual abuse, including rape. Disgust has spread to prominent women in the party, who last month called on her leadership to withdraw the candidate.
Behind the furor over the candidacy, however, is a women’s movement that poses an inflexible challenge to Amlo’s claim to be the champion of the dispossessed of 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 rid the country of its deep-rooted corruption and lead a social transformation.
Although Amlo has appointed women to powerful positions, including much of his cabinet, his policies have failed to address the widespread violence that kills more than ten women a day and forces many more to live in fear.
Instead of acknowledging her concerns, she has suggested that her conservative enemies manipulate groups of women. He even questioned the increase in domestic violence rates recorded during the pandemic closure, suggesting that most emergency calls were fake.
“It has positioned the feminist movement as the number 1 public enemy,” said Arussi Unda, a spokeswoman for Las Brujas del Mar, a feminist group based in the state of Veracruz on the Gulf Coast, which organized a women’s strike a year ago after International Women’s Day.
“We don’t ask for crazy things,” he said. “We are asking for women to get to work, for women not to be murdered and for girls not to be raped. It’s not crazy, it’s not eccentric, it’s human rights.”
The new wave of feminism comes from a younger generation of women, many of them outside of Mexico City, who have experienced more direct violence than women’s rights advocates in the 1970s and 1980s.
Many of those older generations have joined Amlo’s government or represented his party, Morena, in Congress, seeing it as the way forward on a progressive agenda.
But younger activists believe women’s voices have been obscured 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 filled the streets with a vast, mostly peaceful, protest against violence. Ahead of this year’s march, authorities have erected steel barriers around the national palace, creating what appears to be a symbol of the divide between the president and the women’s movement. Saturday night, activists covered the wall with names of femicide victims.
“It’s the best articulated movement in society,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst who has written about social disorder. He considers the current women’s movement to be a turning point comparable to the student movement in Mexico in 1968 and the indigenous Zapatista insurrection in 1994.
Since the movement focused on violence against women, the election of Felix Salgado Macedonio to run for governor of Guerrero seemed almost a deliberate provocation.
In a letter to party leaders last month, 500 supporters of Morena, including prominent female senators, wrote: “We are clear that there is no place for Morena in the aggressors” and called for the withdrawal 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 extends so deeply to the party that no one has dared to criticize the president’s tacit support for the candidate. “You know we won’t be able to fight the president,” a female Morena member said.
Salgado Macedonio has a long legislative career and, as mayor of Acapulco from 2005 to 2008, cultivated an image of harsh machismo, riding a motorcycle and surrounding himself with very young women.
Late last year, Basilia Castañeda went to Morena on charges that she raped her in 1998 when she was 17 years old. In response, he has faced party attacks and said in a video last week that he fears for his safety.
The attitude of the president and his supporters has been a shock, said one of his lawyers, Patricia Olamendi.
“Personally, I am tremendously surprised by his speech. It seems that there is no one to clarify the situation, “said Olamendi. “It was expected that when someone rules, he rules for everyone.”
Salgado Macedonio faces a second charge of raping a woman who said he abused her in 2016 while working as a journalist for a newspaper where he was the editor. That investigation stalled.
Through his lawyer, Salgado Macedonio has denied the allegations.
A Morena party commission ruled the allegations unfounded, but said it would repeat the selection process to choose Guerrero’s candidate.
Before that happened, Salgado Macedonio stepped forward and registered his candidacy for election authority on Thursday.
If he continues in the race, the message will be sent that “impunity is being institutionalized, not just in Guerrero, but in Mexico,” said Marina Reyna Aguilar, a lawyer in Chilpancingo, the state capital.
Nestora Salgado, a senator from Morena de Guerrero who is still waiting to run for the party, called on the women to speak. (It is not related to him.)
“As fighters, I think it’s time to appeal to women and take them into account,” she said. But he refused to condemn Amlo’s tacit support for the former mayor of Acapulco.
This reluctance seemed to find an echo among other Morena women who had called for Salgado Macedonio’s withdrawal.
“The president has been very congruent in his speech,” said Aleida Alavez, a congresswoman, though she condemned the party leadership for limiting women’s participation.
Lorena Villavicencio was one of the few lawmakers willing to talk about the president’s response. “It’s been a very tricky time for a lot of Morena women,” she said.
“There is a long pending conversation with the president of the republic,” he said. “Feminism is the most transformative movement in the world and I think it has not been properly understood.”