The President of Mexico has suggested he faces “gender-based violence” while his leadership comes under scrutiny ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
His remarks in a press conference on Wednesday received significant backlash, with some saying the incident reflects the impact of “machismo” in eliciting gender inequality in the country.
With the upcoming 2024 presidential election, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly referred to as President Amlo, faces significant threat from his main political opponent, Senator Xóchitl Gálvez.
On Wednesday, Amlo responded to questions regarding criticisms about his leadership, particularly in relation to consistent attacks against Gálvez, which Mexico’s electoral watchdog deemed as gender-based attacks.
“Everything they say to me, isn’t that gender-based violence?” he posed to journalists.
“Or is gender only female?”
Amlo’s comments were not received well by Denise Dresser, a political scientist and columnist.
“There is a pandemic of femicide, where women march to denounce the violence they experience and are ignored/disqualified/gassed,” she wrote in a tweet.
“(Amlo) has no idea what gender violence is.”
Amlo’s government is the self-proclaimed “most feminist government in history”, elected in 2018 in a landslide victory and promising to address femicides, the murder of a woman by a man based on her gender.
However, statistics show one in four female killings in Mexico are classed as femicides. In 2022, Mexico experienced a 127 per cent increase of femicides since 2015, with 968 reported cases.
Last year, nearly 3,760 women were killed. This is an average of more than 10 murders of women every day.
Feminist scholars and analysts point to “machismo”, heavily embedded in Mexican society, as the core reason for ongoing violence women face. Like “toxic masculinity”, machismo refers to the ideology that men are superior to and should exercise control over women.
In March 2020, people in Mexico took to the streets calling for the government to address and end the ongoing violence against women.
The large feminist movement was described by Amlo at the time as part of a “dark forces” conspiracy against the government.
A protest in Mexico city in March 2020, consisting of about 80,000 people in the streets, saw more than 60 people injured, as police launched petrol bombs and tear gas at the protestors.