[News] War on Mexican Women

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross10132009.html

October 13, 2009


"Get Your Rosaries Out of Our Ovaries!"


War on Mexican Women

By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

"Sacan Sus Rosarios De Nuestras Ovarios!" The women, some of them 
bare-breasted, linked arms and chanted at the men in suits who were 
dashing towards the barricaded doors of the colonial edifice that 
houses the local congress in the central Mexican city of Queretero.

Indeed, some of the men were so eager to get to their desks on the 
floor of the state legislature that they squeezed through basement 
windows, risking wrinkles to duds that had been freshly pressed for 
the occasion.

By 9 AM September 1, in a classic "madruguete" (early morning vote 
behind locked doors to exclude dissenters), all 21 members of the 
all-male Queretero congress had unanimously passed a bill 
criminalizing abortions for all women with the exception of rape 
victims (but not victims of incest) and those whose lives would be 
put at risk for carrying to full term.  Any other woman who so much 
as inquired about the availability of abortion at a hospital or 
clinic could now be imprisoned for up to a year.

According to news reports, a week after the law was passed and signed 
off on by the rightist Queretero governor, one unfortunate and 
unidentified woman was in fact arrested for soliciting an abortion, 
held in jail overnight, and forced to pay a 4000 peso fine.

Queretero was the 15 Mexican state to criminalize abortion.  Days 
later, the conflictive southern state of Oaxaca became the 16th 
entity in the Mexican union to ratify what pro-choice organizations 
label "La Ley Machista" that defines life as beginning at 
fertilization and imposes prison sentences on women seeking to 
terminate unwanted pregnancies.  As in Queretero, the measure was 
vociferously dissed by pro-choice advocates and the legislature was 
forced to relocate to a secure alternative site to vote the Oaxaca 
version of "The Macho Law" up.

Criminalization of abortion bills are also pending in Michoacan, 
Sinaloa, Veracruz, and Mexico state.  With half of Mexico's 31 states 
plus one now on record, the machos are assured that a constitutional 
amendment criminalizing abortion can be passed and such legislation 
is expected to be introduced in a coming session of the new Mexican congress.

Criminalization of abortion is turning Mexico into "a totalitarian 
state", opines Diego Valades, a former attorney general and dean of 
the National Autonomous University (UNAM) law faculty - such 
legislation "cedes control of a woman's body to the state and is 
itself unconstitutional."  Valades proposes instead a constitutional 
amendment that would guarantee a woman's reproductive rights.

The anti-abortion putsch is being orchestrated by the ruling 
right-wing PAN party in connivance with the Princes of the Catholic 
hierarchy. One goal is to force repeal of Mexico City's free 
abortion-on-demand law.  Since the pro-choice legislation was deemed 
constitutional by a ten to one vote of the nation's Supreme Court two 
Septembers ago after the law had been challenged by then-attorney 
general Eduardo Medina Mora, a proxy for President Felipe Calderon, 
and the National Human Rights Commission ombudsman Jose Luis 
Soberanes, an Opus Dei intimate, the city has provided free 
interruptions of unwanted pregnancies during the first 12 weeks of 
gestation to more than 30,000 women, an average of 41 a day, 
according to the Mexico City Womens' Institute.

Abortion on demand has incurred the fierce wrath of Mexico City 
Cardinal Norberto Rivera, the most powerful Churchman (there are no 
Churchwomen) in the land, who ordered all church bells in the capital 
rung in mourning to mark the court's decision.  The Mexico City 
archdiocese has since bought a plot in the Dolores Cemetery where it 
stages funerals for aborted fetuses.

The 102-member Mexican Bishops' Conference (CEM) is equally as 
obstreperous in its condemnation of Mexico City's free abortion 
services, even those few liberationist bishops who have a voice and 
vote oppose the leftist capital government's pro-choice initiative - 
San Cristobal de las Casas bishop emeritus, an apostle of liberation 
theology, once exhibited gory blow-ups of aborted fetuses on the 
esplanade outside the "Cathedral of Peace" in that Chiapas city.

"I am appalled by the CEM's position.  The separation of Church and 
State is the foundation of the Mexican constitution," an indignant 
Diego Valades reminded attendees at a recent National University 
academic conference.

The campaign to criminalize abortion is only one front in the war on 
women being waged by the PAN, the Roman Catholic Church, and their 
political allies.  Last month (September), the Mexican Senate 
confirmed Arturo Chavez Chavez, Calderon's handpicked designee, as 
the country's new attorney general over the intense objections of 
feminists and human rights activists.  As chief prosecutor in the 
northern state of Chihuahua during the mid to late 1990s, Chavez 
Chavez was charged with investigating the murders and disappearances 
of 192 women in the gritty border city of Juarez.  Mothers of the 
dead women - "Las Muertas" - accuse Chavez Chavez of gross negligence.

In testimony at his confirmation hearing, the future attorney general 
insisted that he had cleared 60 murders during his years as 
Chihuahua's chief prosecutor but the truth is more diffuse - Chavez 
Chavez prosecuted one suspect, an Egyptian chemist Omar Latif Sharif, 
for 60 killings.  Sharif, however, was convicted of only one murder, 
that of a sometimes girlfriend, and is currently serving a 30 year 
sentence in a Chihuahua penitentiary.

Paula Flores, whose murdered 17 year-old daughter Maria Sagrario has 
become an icon for the mothers of Las Muertas, recalls a less than 
empathetic Chavez.  When 11 years ago she went down on her knees 
before him to plead for justice for Sagrario, the aspiring attorney 
general just walked around her as if she didn't exist.  Later, Chavez 
Chavez's investigators mistook Sagrario's tomb and opened up an 
adjoining gravesite, carrying off the remains of another Muerta for an autopsy.

Such confusion tainted the Calderon nominee's years at the helm of 
the investigation.  In 1999, United Nations rapporteur for 
extra-judicial killings Asma Jahangir denounced Chavez Chavez's 
"arrogance" when she sought to question him about the 
investigations.  A second UN rapporteur  on judges and judicial 
processes, Dato Parran, who visited Juarez in 2002, doubted that any 
of the more than 100 remaining cases had even been investigated.  In 
2003, Amnesty International found "intolerable negligence" in the 
investigations of the dead women's murders carried out by Chavez 
Chavez and his successors - autopsies did not meet international 
legal standards and inquiries were only initiated after pressure from 
grieving families.  Many of the disappeared women were dismissed as runaways.

Jurist Eduardo Buscalgia, who headed a UN commission that reviewed 
the violent deaths of 258 women in Juarez between 1993 and 2003, 
uncovered what he recently described as "procedural horrors" in the 
investigations of the deaths of Las Muertas.  Many of the victims had 
apparently been tortured and some of their bodies burnt.  Eight women 
had one breast cut off and were bitten by their attacker(s) and their 
remains thrown out on the same desert lot, evidence that suggested a 
serial killer was at large yet no serious investigation was ever 
launched by Mexican authorities.  Instead, Chavez Chavez blamed the 
women for their own grisly murders, intimating that they had provoked 
their killers by wearing mini-skirts.  "Only bad women go out at 
night," he concluded  - many of the victims like Maria Sagrario 
Flores had been working late night shifts at Juarez maquiladoras and 
were still wearing their "batas" (work smocks) when their bodies were 
discovered.

Despite overwhelming evidence of Arturo Chavez Chavez's inept, 
misogynist investigation into the deaths of Las Muertas, he was 
confirmed September 24 by the Mexican Senate as the nation's top law 
enforcement officer.  When, in protest, the mothers of the dead women 
painted 106 pink crosses (the number of unsolved cases) on the walls 
of the prosecutor's offices in Juarez, they were investigated for the 
destruction of federal property.

In another notorious case of violence against women, 11 victims of 
sexual abuse during police raids in the farming village of San 
Salvador Atenco May 3-4, 2006 have once again been denied 
justice.  This September, the Special Prosecutor for Violence Against 
Women (FEMIMTRA), which operates under Chavez Chavez's jurisdiction, 
rejected their claims that they had been sexually manhandled and 
penetrated during their arrests and turned the cases back to Mexico 
state authorities that had already vindicated the police. Charges 
against 22 state cops were dropped, five are pending while the 
accused are out on bail (if previous accusations of sexual battery 
against the police are any precedent, they will never be prosecuted), 
and one police agent who was sentenced to three years imprisonment 
paid a $400 USD fine and is now reportedly back on the Mexico state 
police payroll.

Violence against women is spiraling in Mexico.  On the day Arturo 
Chavez Chavez was confirmed (September 24th), five women were shot 
and killed in the Sierra of Petatlan in Guerrero state where army 
troops have been pursuing purported guerrillas for months.  One week 
later, four women - one a police domestic violence investigator - and 
a little girl who was playing nearby were gunned down in Ciudad 
Juarez.  According to a grim roster held by the group "Justice For 
Our Daughters", 67 women have been murdered or disappeared in Juarez 
in the first nine months of 2009 - 28 bodies remain unclaimed in the 
city morgue.

 From July 2007 thru June 2008, 227 "feminicides" were recorded in 13 
northern Mexican states by the private Citizens Observatory on 
Feminicides and 1014 counted nationally.  60per cent of the killings 
occurred in and around the womens' homes.

Despite the on-going slaughter, the central Mexican state of 
Guanajuato, which has long been under the thumb of the Catholic 
Church and the PAN, is the only one of Mexico's 31 states that has 
not enacted a law to protect women from domestic 
violence.  Guanajuato is home to the extreme right-wing "El Yunque" 
(The Anvil), a secret organization with roots in the 1926-29 Cristero 
uprising against the anti-clerical president Plutarco Elias Calles, 
founder of the modern PRI party that ruled Mexico for 71 years until 
displaced by the PAN's Vicente Fox, a Guanajuato native, in 2000 - 
three members of Fox's cabinet were reportedly affiliated with El Yunque.

When the school term began this fall in Guanajuato, first year high 
school students found themselves without biology text books because 
books published by the federal Secretary of Public Education (SEP) 
had been withdrawn under orders from PANista governor Juan Manuel 
Oliva who adjudged that they contained "perversions" - the biology 
books included anatomically-correct reproductions of human genitalia 
and addressed birth control, even daring to use the two dread words 
"condom" and "abortion."

Instead, the Guanajuato Education Secretariat (SEG) distributed 
114,000 of their own biology textbooks that demonized masturbation 
and homosexuality, skipped any mention of AIDS prevention, and 
advocated abstinence as the only method of avoiding unwanted pregnancies.

When the federal SEP (ironically controlled by the PAN) insisted on 
teaching the original biology texts, a group of women in Leon, the 
state capital, headed by a local rightist councilwomen burnt hundreds 
of the SEP books in the central plaza of the city.  "They want to 
make my son wear a condom," explained the councilwoman Hortencia Orozco.

The PAN is hardly alone in its pogrom against women.  The Chavez 
Chavez nomination was voted up by the PRI and the Mexican Green 
Environmental Party (sic) that together hold an absolute majority in 
the Mexican congress.  Eight of the 16 states that have criminalized 
abortion are governed by the PRI whose party president is a woman.

600,000 abortions are performed in Mexico each year according to the 
Secretary of Public Health, 100,000 of them under dangerous, 
clandestine circumstances.  The prohibition of legal abortion stirs 
the specter of the dark ages of back alley butchers scraping women 
with clothes hangers. In six of the 16 states that have criminalized 
the interruption of unwanted pregnancies, maternal mortality is five 
times the national average.

Both local and national legislatures in Mexico are male 
dominated.  The number of women holding congressional office (27 per 
cent) is well below Cuba (43 per cent), Argentina (40 per cent), 
Costa Rica (39per cent) and African nations such as Mozambique, 
Tanzania, and Rwanda (49 per cent.) Only 15 per cent of high echelon 
executives in the Calderon government are women in a country where 
women (52per cent) are the majority - in Ecuador 35 per cent of all 
executive positions are held by women and Argentina and Chile have 
women presidents.

Two years ago, Mexico revised its electoral code to insure that women 
would comprise 40per cent of the federal congress but this September 
2nd when the recently elected Chamber of Deputies met for the first 
time, eight recently elected women rose from their desks one by one 
and asked for permanent leaves of absence.  Their seats were then 
delegated to their all-male substitutes ("suplentes"), at least one 
of who was the husband of an electee.  Denouncing violation of the 
so-called "Equanimity of Gender" clause of the reformed code, 
feminist Gabriela Rodriguez, writing in the left daily La Jornada, 
blasted the flimflam as "nothing less than electoral fraud against 
women."

John Ross's "El Monstruo - Dread & Redemption in Mexico City, "a love 
letter" to the most contaminated, corrupt, and conflictive city in 
the Americas (Kirkus Reviews), will be published next month by Nation 
Books. His "Iraqigirl" (Haymarket), the diary of a teenager growing 
up under U.S. occupation is now in the stores.  The author is 
scouting venues for a 2009-2010 book tour. Any ideas? Contact 
<mailto:johnross at igc.org>johnross at igc.org




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20091013/eefa454d/attachment.htm>