[Translation of a guest editorial from the Spanish publication La Nueva Tribuna for August 21. The writer is a Mexican political scientist.]
By César Morales Oyarvide
Guanajuato is a state in central Mexico, in the region known as El Bajío. Famous as the birthplace of independence – it was in the small town of Dolores that the armed struggle against the crown began – it has also been the birthplace of several movements of a reactionary nature, like sinarquismo, a proto-fascist political movement which developed from the cristero rebellion (1) and that was the enemy of the government that resulted from the Mexican revolution.
The bastion of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) since the 1991 accession, it was governed by Vicente Fox before he was president. When his successor, Carlos Romero Hicks, took power in 2001, he proceeded to change laws and policies, particularly on matters of sexual education and reproductive rights, with the aim of harmonizing them with the Roman Catholic notions of Guanajuato’s leaders and of the PAN. One example is the famous elimination from natural science textbooks of drawings showing male and female genitalia. Later, when the federal government responded to protests from several parts of the country by requiring Guanajuato to issue the students the original science books from the Public Education Secretariat, with drawings intact, some of these books were burned in a public square by Catholic citizens of Guanajuato.
During the administration of Romero Hicks there was also a determined campaign against the use of condoms and other contraceptives. Better publicized perhaps was his brother, Eduardo Romero Hicks, mayor of the state capital – famous for an alley known as “The Alley of the Kiss” – who in January, 2009, honored accepted custom by prohibiting kisses in public places, among other things, making them punishable by fines and even jail sentences.
As part of Romero’s efforts, in 2001 abortion, of any kind, was criminalized – voluntary or involuntary, spontaneous as a result of malnutrition or any other physical limitation or illness, regardless of whether the pregnancy resulted from rape by some malefactor or by some disciple of Marcial Maciel (2) – and was made punishable by 15 to 30 years in prison. According to the Guanajauto law, abortions are “homicide of a family member by injury to a product of gestation.”
The serious consequences of this nineteenth-century style government, which, in the words of Arnoldo Kraus, “has made vileness its flag, mediocrity its modus operandi, injustice its creed, and stupidity its way of life,” have surfaced in the form of six young indigenous poor women who are in prison for this new crime.
They aborted involuntarily ( probably because of the extreme poverty they live in, as does a large portion of the population of Mexico), they were turned in by relatives, neighbors or doctors and they are facing sentences of more than 25 years in jail. The oldest, at 26, has been a prisoner for nine years, that is, she was jailed when she was still a minor.
All of them are prisoners for no other reason than the religious prejudices that those who govern Guanajuato have made into law. They all have in common the fact that when they arrived at public hospitals gushing with blood and emotionally devastated, the doctors considered it their first duty to call agents of the Public Ministry to report them before giving them medical attention.
They all also share the frustration resulting from the impossibility of paying for access to justice, for a lawyer who will represent them and take their cases to the Supreme Court of the nation.
One of them, Susana Dueñas, suffers from “lack of intellectual resources, psychological disturbances and retardation and mental insufficiency.” This woman has been sentenced to five years by a judge who omitted the results of psychological tests that revealed her condition. “I did nothing to make the baby come… It’s just that that day my stomach and my back hurt and when I went to the bathroom the baby came,” the young woman said in her statement, made, of course, without the presence of a lawyer.
All this is now known by South Korean Kyung-wha Kang, United Nations deputy high commissioner for human rights, despite the fact that, as journalist Jaime Avilés reports, the public safety secretary for Guanajuato forced four of the prisoners to sign a document asking that they no longer to be interviewed by the press. A United Nations rapporteur is investigating the case.
Meanwhile, the state government of Guanajuato has not backed down one inch: the local police have been carrying out investigations in clinics and hospitals to find a pattern among pregnant women in the area of Apaseo with the goal of locating as soon as possible a woman who aborted a four-month-old fetus that was found on Friday in the municipal garbage dump in Apaseo el Alto so they can charge her criminally. On another front, their efforts are also being directed at the closing of an NGO called “Centro de los Adolescentes de San Miguel de Allende,” which serves as a school by professional midwives, with 20 years experience, dedicated to providing sexual education and distributing birth control to young people in rural communities in the area.
Faced with this, the federal administration of Felipe Calderón has remained totally silent; the National Human Rights Commission has once again demonstrated its ineffectualness and its reluctance to broach certain topics; and the Instituto de la Mujer Guanajuatense… well, you can’t expect much from an organization whose head, Luz María Villalpando, by profession an interior decorator, declared recently in an official setting that women with tattoos are responsible for the decadence and the loss of values of society, and for whom the best defense against family violence is the “Three Rs”: resignarse [resign themselves], reír [laugh] and rezar [pray], and who, according to a La Jornada correspondent, believes that at the moment they are being raped women secrete a spermicidal fluid that protects them against pregnancy, for which reason the charge that they have been impregnated through rape would necessarily be false.
Among other conventions, Mexico has signed the “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.” And in fact, from the federal point of view, abortion is not considered a crime in the country if pregnancy results from rape, takes place by accident or through an imprudent act, if it puts the woman’s life at risk, occurs through nonconsensual insemination or if the fetus is deformed (data from the Secretariat of Health: every six hours a woman dies of pregnancy in Mexico, meaning the death of a pregnant woman at any stage of gestation or during birth or as long as 42 days after giving birth.)
Nevertheless, as journalist María Julia Mayoral of Prensa Latina has reported, in 18 of the 31 states of the country, women who interrrupt their pregnancies can be treated as criminals; there is punishment for them varying from fines to years in jail, with the addition that these sentences can be doubled or tripled if they have bad reputations, hide their pregnancies or become pregnant because of an “illegitimate union” or outside matrimony.
In some regions, legal reforms to “protect life from the moment of conception” serves as a prohibition against the use of contraceptive methods like the birth control pill or the intrauterine device.
While a few kilometers away, in the Federal District, a woman can control maternity freely and voluntarily, in Guanajuato, where, according to statistics from the Secretariat of Health, in the past four years there have been 53,400 pregnancies among women younger than 19, of which 1,580 were not even 15 when they became pregnant, she can go to jail for almost half her life. Of course, the probability of that happening increases in cases of women living in areas of extreme poverty, with no education and lacking in health services.
The message seems clear. In Guanajuato, but not just there, the ideology of some politicians and the Catholic creed carry more weight than the lives of women, their sexual and reproductive rights and the principle of secularism of the Mexican state.
Beyond the urgency and the relevance of these cases, and the fact that this kind of legislation will not keep abortions from happening but will force them to be practiced in secret under dangerously unhealthy conditions, besides adding to the weight of this difficult decision the threat of prosecution, I believe that the topic is part of a broader discussion, of what Foucault and his followers understand as “bio-politics.”
Political technologies that are not meant to reform the individual organism, to domesticate it, but that seek to regulate large-scale biological processses that affect a population and that possess their own intrinsic normativity (birth, death, morbidity, old age), a power that is coextensive with life and has been linked to eugenics as well as to racism and childhood vaccination…
But back to Guanajuato. The predicament of Araceli Camargo, Susana Dueñas, Yolanda Martínez, Ana Rosa Padrón, Ofelia Segura Frías and Liliana Morales, although it is the best known case, is not the only one. According to data by journalist Jaime Avilés, there are now 166 other women in Guanajuato also reported to the police by their doctors. Of them, 43 are under court jurisdiction awaiting criminal trial. Now that their existence and their suffering are known, we should not allow them to remain in jail. As someone has already said, it is not just a matter of the six young women prisoners, nor of those who are waiting their turn in this state of medieval backwardness, but of all Mexican women, and by extension of everyone.
In the face of this systematic violation of human rights by the state in the name of religious prejudice, free them now!
(1) The Cristero rebellion was an armed uprising by reactionary Catholic laity, with the tacit support of the clergy, against anti-clerical measures following the revolution. Centered in the states of Guanajuato and Jalisco, it lasted from 1926 to 1929.
(2) Marcial Maciel was a Mexican-born priest, founder the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi movements, who was convicted of abusing young boys sexually and of fathering up to six children, some of whom he also allegedly abused.