The Mexico Political Economist Newsletter Interviews Carin Zissis
The Mexico Political Economist Newsletter Interviews Carin Zissis
Gender rights laws have "resulted in a change of thinking around violence against women in Mexico," said AS/COA Online's editor-in-chief.
It got so bad that even the person who’d sued for the punishment asked it be cut short. Too late, said Mexico’s Electoral Tribunal. Its verdict was final and unappealable after it had found Karla Estrella, described across the Mexican media as “a housewife,” guilty of political gender violence. Her crime had come in the form of a social media post where she implied that a congresswoman from the ruling coalition had only got the job because her husband is a high ranking member of the government.
If the punishment wasn’t cruel, then it was certainly unusual: Estrella would have to return to X, the social media platform where she’d published the offending post, and apologise profusely and publicly every single day for a month to Karina Barreras, the congresswoman in question. But, by day six, congresswoman Barreras was asking for the sentence to be cut short… Mexico is a rather progressive place when it comes to the high status it gives to human rights. It has one of the most gender balanced governments in the world.
“We’ve had a 30 year trajectory of incremental reforms to increase women’s political presence,” said Carin Zissis, a former Wilson Center Fellow who covered the paradoxes of Mexico’s gender parity laws, “and during that time, a series of laws focused on gender based violence were passed. So those two things went hand in hand.” [...]
Beyond the legal defense of women and other vulnerable people, Zissis, who is also editor-in-Chief, AS/COA Online at Americas Society/Council of the Americas, said “there is research that demonstrates that the passage of all these laws—and all of the publicity that goes into passing them—has resulted in a change of thinking around violence against women in Mexico,” she said. “It’s moved away from “it’s a private matter in the home” to a feeling that this is something that should not be happening.”
