her name is maría de jesús patricio martínez, and:
1. for those of you who only read the headline, please note that she needs to gather 800,000+ signatures for her to actually be included in the elections. if she does not gather those signatures, her name will not appear on the ballot. last I heard, they hadn’t even gathered 10% of the signatures needed and there’s only about two months left.
it is unlikely she’ll get elected as president, and at this point it also seems unlikely she’ll even appear on the ballot. it is important to acknowledge this while also recognizing that she and the CIG (the indigenous governing council she’s representing) have always known this. their efforts to gather signatures are not in vain because it brings attention to indigenous and women’s rights and also serves to start mobilizing those who are desillusioned with the current state of politics but would have never thought to center indigenous communities otherwise.
so if you’re mexican and interested in her politics, don’t wait until the election and get involved now.
2. the CIG is not the political branch of the EZLN (zapatista army for national liberation). they do back her up, but the CIG is not synonymous with the EZLN. she’s not even from a zapatista community, she’s from jalisco (more than a day’s drive away from chiapas, where the EZLN is from). the CIG represents dozens of different indigenous communities from all over the country, only a few of which are zapatistas. it might seem like a minor error, but this kind of misinformation is actually incredibly dangerous and disrespectful to her and to the zapatistas.
here’s a link to the english translation of the zapatistas’ response to criticism of their decision to support the CIG’s desire to have someone run for president, in case anyone wants further information.
He once said “there is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work, are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do there in the United States” and generally was just a corrupt social conservative fuck who did nothing useful to deal with Mexico’s problems
He was a sort of fiscal conservative for a country that has no love for that shit and a lot of history against it. He didn’t go against LGBT people or anything but his completely fabricated image of being a salt of the earth type was extremely manipulative and poorly seen by the Mexican people who saw him for what he was, a bourgeois puppet for America.
He wanted to privatize Castillo de Chapultepec to turn it into some sort of resort??? he wanted to minimize benefits given to the elderly which was fucking utter horse shit, I believe he had problems with SEP (secretary of public education) as well as with teacher unions. I remember there was a lot of striking at the time.
He was openly religious which is terribly seen by an office holder. A president shouldn’t have the pope come in and kiss his ring, for Mexican standards this was a terrible event because it was obviously done in an attempt to appeal to the catholic majority and specifically to religious rural workers except rural workers aren’t idiots and Mexican people have no tolerance for using religion in politics.
Mexican leftist groups and Lopez Obrador himself, who was jefe de gobierno of Mexico City at the time (no idea how to translate that) criticized it very heavily.
Mexico had really hoped to abandon PRI in favour of a more left leaning part and of abandoning American influence (read: American ownership) over us but instead PAN brought us closer to America, they made the peso go up after decades of devaluation but only for the benefit of the elite which ultimately means more foreign power and less support for worker control.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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