Mexican Feminist Speaks Out against Trump Presidency
The backlash against President Trump is not limited to the United States – as we learned when attending a workshop in Mexico City focused on the security of activists in Mesoamerica.
“Trump represents a threat to freedom and the rights of women to have sovereignty over our lives, our bodies, and our territories,” Ana Maria Hernandez told us. Maria is the General Director of the Consortium for Parliamentary Dialogue and Equality in the Mexican province of Oaxaca, a feminist advocacy group which promotes civic engagement by women in order to protect their civil rights and realize their full potential as citizens in Mexican society.
“Trump has ignited a global backlash of millions of people who are not willing to lose what they have worked so hard to win: political rights, advances for diversity and against discrimination, and respect for human life,” she added.
Groups like the Oaxacan Consortium are willing to fight to keep his toxic brand of politics from infecting our southern neighbors.
Coordinated by Just Associates and the Fund for Global Human Rights, the Mexico City workshop focused on the security of activists, with a special interest in asserting their right to protest peacefully in designated organizing spaces.
Grassroots International has been fortunate enough to work with the Oaxacan Consortium in the past and considers the organization to be a very positive force for Mexican democracy. Maria didn’t mince words about what she considers to be a slow-motion catastrophe brewing north of Mexico’s borders.
[President] Trump represents big business interests, with the most conservative and backward positions, aiming to cheat vulnerable communities and cheapen our humanity.
– Ana Maria Hernandez
“Trump’s actions will encourage the most diverse liberation movements. Trump, let there be no doubt that we will not allow depredation, the reneging of our rights, nor the imposition of poverty,” Maria avers.
Like so many activists in the United States, Maria believes that feminists in Mexico will continue to organize for their rights and the rights of all human beings. In a call to action she said, “Us women, we say, and we yell: no human is illegal. Us women, we have made a wall – and Trump will pay for it.”