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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/ross10132009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross10132009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">October 13,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>"Get Your
Rosaries Out of Our Ovaries!" <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">War
on Mexican Women
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JOHN
ROSS<br><br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=2><i>Mexico City.
<br><br>
</i></font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">"S</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>acan 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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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." <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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." <br><br>
<b>John Ross</b>'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 <a href="mailto:johnross@igc.org">johnross@igc.org</a>
<br><br>
<br><br>
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