Desacatos 51, Agosto 2016
In this text, the author shares some reflections on the importance of the legacy of Luis Villoro Toranzo for Mexican anthropology, and in a broader sense, for the struggles of indigenous peoples across Latin America.
Publicación del Proyecto de Fortalecimiento Democrático del PNUD – Bolivia
No. 6, Julio – Octubre 2012
In this article, the author intends to share some reflections arising from the Mexican experience on the tensions between the collective rights of peoples and the rights of women, with the purpose of rethinking from a gender perspective the policies of cultural recognition of human collectives. The intensification of migratory flows from the south to the north and the emergence of important indigenous movements in the Americas have put the issue of cultural and political rights of these human groups on the table in recent decades and have come to question the universalist and liberal vision of citizenship. The demand for the cultural recognition of these groups and the reforms of the State to recognize the multicultural character of nations has reopened old anthropological debates about cultural relativism and conceptual universalism.
REVISTA TRACE 57: Junio 2010
In this article, the author reflects on the contradictory process that she has witnessed over the last decade in Mexico: on one hand there is a successful foreign policy on human rights at the international level, in which several international instruments have been ratified against of discrimination and violence against women, yet in parallel, an internal policy in which state violence is justified in the name of “social peace” and is used against female activists and members of social movements.
In These Times, 2015
It is getting harder and harder to tell the US and Mexico apart these days. Both countries’ news headlines have been dominated by stories of human rights violations by police. In the US, the police killings of multiple unarmed Black men in several states, in Mexico the police abduction and handing over to cartel gangs for assassination of 43 unarmed students, most of them indigenous. In both countries, these events made obvious the disposability of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In this article the authors compare the experiences of criminalization of social protest in Mexico and the USA.
Indian Country Today Media Network, January 2015
On January 2015 Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto utilized new presidential powers of pardon on the very day that they went into effect to free Mayan school teacher Alberto Patishtán Gómez. The authors reflect on the similarities between Patishtán case in Mexico and Leonard Peltier case in the United States. Patishtán had been imprisoned for 13 years following a trial riddled with irregularities and violations of his constitutional rights. On October 31, utilizing new presidential powers of pardon on the day that they went into effect, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto pardoned Mayan school teacher Alberto Patishtán Gómez, who had been imprisoned for 13 years following a trial riddled with irregularities. Condemned to 60 years in prison for his ostensible participation in an ambush in which seven policemen were killed, his unjust imprisonment was denounced by Amnesty International and human rights organizations throughout Mexico and the world. His case is one of many in which the legal system served the interests of groups holding political power and demonstrates how structural racism continues to generate a lack of access to justice for indigenous peoples, in Mexico and throughout the Americas.
En Atenco 6 Años de Impunidad y Resistencia Centro de Derechos Humanos Agustín Pro, México D.F. 2012
In this paper, the author reflects on the way in which gender violence has been used by the Mexican government as part of its counterinsurgency campaigns against social movements, and on the response that victims of such violence have given to this murder strategy. In the context of the government of Felipe Calderón, the criminalization of social movements legitimized through legislative reforms has been accompanied by militarization and state violence. In this chapter, I will analyze how indigenous and rural women are suffering the consequences of the militarization of the country, creating a climate of insecurity and intimidation; above all, in those regions where there is a history of political organization by the peasants.
Revista Electrónica Con la A Nº 11 MUJERES INDÍGENAS 8 de septiembre de 2012
In this dossier, indigenous women from different parts of Latin America reflect on the challenges involved in the fight for their specific gender rights within the framework of the collective rights of their peoples. Claiming indigenous feminism or rejecting self-identification as feminists, these indigenous intellectuals and activists tell us about the struggles of indigenous women in the feat of building a fairer life for themselves and their communities.
En ICHAN Año 23 No. 272, abril 2013
En las últimas semanas el debate en torno a los grupos de autodefensa que se han formado en distintas regiones del país, ha ocupado los espacios de la prensa nacional. La proliferación de grupos de ciudadanos que se organizan para defenderse ha puesto una vez más en evidencia el fracaso del modelo de seguridad del Estado mexicano. Un modelo caracterizado por la corrupción y la participación directa de las fuerzas de seguridad en las esferas del crimen organizado que dicen combatir, y por los alarmantes niveles de desprotección y vulnerabilidad que sufren las y los ciudadanos. Sin embargo, este debate se ha caracterizado por la falta de matices en torno a las experiencias de organización comunitaria, sin diferenciar los procesos institucionalizados de justicia indígena de larga data, de aquellas experiencias en las que los ciudadanos de manera espontánea deciden armarse para enfrentar la inseguridad. Las autoras de este artículo han venido analizando desde hace varias décadas el derecho indígena, y les preocupa la manera en que estas representaciones de la justicia indígena como “incivilizada” y supuestamente al margen de la legalidad estatal, puedan ser utilizadas para restringir los espacios de autonomía que se han logrado desde las luchas de los pueblos indígenas. En el contexto de este debate político tan falto de matices, se proponen aportar algunas reflexiones que han venido desarrollando en estos últimos años, en el marco de dos proyectos de investigación colectivos desarrollados en CIESAS; el primero sobre “Globalización, derechos indígenas y justicia” en donde abordamos el impacto de las políticas multiculturales neoliberales en el campo de los derechos y la justicia indígena, y el segundo “Mujeres Indígenas y Derecho en América Latina: Justicia, Seguridad y Pluralismo Legal”, en donde analizamos de manera más focalizada las tensiones entre la justicia comunitaria indígena y el modelo de seguridad del Estado mexicano.
In this chapter we will expose the criticisms raised by organized indigenous and peasant women who are making their own theorizations – based on their organic intellectuals – and who rethink not only economic policies towards Mexican agriculture but, in a broader sense, the relations of the human beings with nature and the norms of coexistence and social justice between women and men.
The voices of peasant women began to be heard in the eighties, as part of a wide range of mobilizations and struggles of urban and rural women who participated in popular movements (union, urban popular and peasant) from where they began to criticize gender inequalities and injustices. The women of the peasant movement were part of that pioneering process in the construction of a popular feminism in its rural version that had many points of tension with the so-called Mexican historical feminism – which emerged in the 1970s in urban spaces, universities, middle sectors and sometimes with a left-wing ideology – although there were also common interests that did not always converge in joint struggles. In this chapter we reconstruct the history of rural and indigenous feminisms in Mexico and reflect on their contributions to the anti-racist feminist critique.
Since the 1980s until today the mobilization of rural women has gained increasing breadth and relevance, especially following the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994, which not only led to the rise of ethnic movements, but also It triggered a process of organization and struggle of rural indigenous women that has been in existence for more than three decades. Today, they are not only supportive or silent companions in the peasant and indigenous movements but are active participants with their own visions and proposals. In this chapter, I review the history of these mobilizations and their impact on the agenda of the indigenous movement in Mexico.