Some Mexican women lose right to vote

She traveled to the nearest city to enroll in school, live with relatives and support herself through odd jobs, eventually graduating from college with a degree in accounting.

She is single, and in a village culture where most women wear skirts, she wears pants. Because her village has no formal jobs for women, she works as a school director in a nearby town, and returns to Quiegolani most weekends. That, authorities say, disqualified her from running for mayor because she wasn’t a full-time resident. But the man who won the race also works outside the town, and there are questions about how much time he actually spends here.

Cruz views the residency issue as a pretext, noting that authorities have also banned female candidates and anybody with a college degree from running. She said she has followed the use and custom rules as much as she was allowed to, carefully fulfilling lower-level duties that function as a means of testing people’s devotion to their village. For four years, she “carried the Virgin” in a religious procession through the town, and has helped fund or organize other festivities.

Cruz figured her case for annulling the elections was solid — after all, Mexico’s constitution guarantees both men and women the right to vote. She went first to the Oaxaca state electoral council, then to the state congress. After both upheld the election, she took her fight to the commission in Mexico City.

“I am not asking anything for myself. I am asking on behalf of Indian women, so that never again will the laws allow political segregation,” Cruz wrote to the commissioners, who may take months to investigate the case, and who could recommend that state authorities protect women’s rights to vote or hold office. She says she’ll go higher, to federal electoral authorities, if necessary.

Change tied to Zapatista rebellion
In Mexico, many local governance rules date to before the Spanish conquest and weren’t given national legal recognition until a 2001 Indian rights reform was enacted in the wake of the Zapatista rebel uprising in Chiapas.

The law states that Indian townships may “apply their own normative systems ... as long as they obey the general principles of the Constitution and respect the rights of individuals, human rights, and particularly the dignity and well-being of women.”

Despite this specific protection, about a fourth of the Indian villages operating under the law don’t let women vote, putting human rights groups in a dilemma: Most actively supported recognition for Indian governance systems, and few have therefore taken up the women’s cause.

Gregory Bull / AP Santa Maria Quiegolani Deputy Mayor Veleriano Lopez, center left, speaks on Jan. 6 about election results at the town's municipal building, where women are not allowed to attend assembly meetings.

Cruz now travels alone from one government office to another, always carrying an armful of calla lilies. “This flower grows a lot in the village. Even though we don’t water or care for it much, it flowers,” she explained. “It is a symbol for us Indian women.”

“The congress upheld the vote out of sheer laziness, to avoid stirring up the village or causing a conflict there,” said Rep. Perla Woolrich, a Oaxaca state legislator who supported Cruz’s cause. “In the past, use and customs represented something positive, but by now it violates people’s constitutional rights. Use and customs have to reviewed, and those practices that violate rights have to be thrown out.”

Cruz says she isn’t against all customs in her village. She prefers its bipartisanship to political party rivalry because it encourages close-knit Indian communities to stick together and underpins their survival.

“There are really beautiful things in use and customs, if they are applied as they should be,” she said.

“Up there in the mountains, unfortunately, nobody listens to us,” she says. “If nothing is done, we’ll go on the same way for another century in Quiegolani.”

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