A look at Mexico’s new Women’s Secretariat

Feminists took to the streets on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in Mexico City on November 25, 2024. Photo © María Ruiz.

Reportage • Melissa Amezcua • February 7, 2025 • Leer en castellano

When discussing his political movement, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador often made reference to a “peaceful revolution of conscience,” and a variation of this slogan reappeared at the launch of the new Women’s Secretariat in Mexico City.

During President Claudia Sheinbaum’s term, we’re more likely to hear about a “women’s peaceful revolution,” or at least that’s what was suggested by Clara Brugada, the current head of government of Mexico City’s government, in remarks at the first citizen’s forum organized by the Secretariat on January 14.

It is paradoxical that officials are evoking a peaceful revolution, when violence against women is an urgent and pressing problem. According to the Peace Index, sexual violence increased in 32 states and domestic violence in 23 states over the last three years.

Time for listening?

Members of civil society organizations, congresspeople, senators, academics and political actors packed the first citizens' forum held by the Women’s Secretariat at the Contemporary Mexico Cultural Center in Mexico City.

The event kicked off with a protest during a speech by Bertha María Alcalde, the new Attorney General of Mexico City, when activist Natalia Lane interrupted to demand justice. Three years ago, she survived an attempted transfeminicide when a man attacked her with a knife. The court granted her attacker a special dispensation last year that could allow him to remain free during his trial.

Lane's protest took the forum—and the officials in attendance—by surprise. Some audience members clapped supportively, while others made transphobic remarks. Using López Obrador’s style of making verbs into adjectives, Brugada commented that “shouts and hat-throwing” were to be expected during a feminist forum.

Although there had been an online process through which anyone could propose a public policy idea, only ideas that Equis Justicia and the Information Group for Reproductive Choice collected were shared during the forum. The directors of both organizations had seats on the stage.

This led some attendees to remark that not everyone's proposals were being heard. Organizers held a second forum in Ciudad Juárez on January 15.

Former Morena Party senator Citlali Hernández, who is 34, leads the Women’s Secretariat. She founded the Feminist International, which Mexico’s ruling party created in 2023. Hernández has deep roots in Morena circles in Mexico City.

Housing, economic autonomy and the wage gap are among issues that the Secretariat will have to address. During its first public event, representatives of the Women’s Secretariat stated that 24.8 million Mexican women live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in rural areas.

According to Mexico’s federal budget this year, the Women’s Secretariat will have almost three billion pesos (US$146.3 million) to spend. Official sources indicate that the 2024 budget for women was 75 million pesos (US$3.65 million) higher than what the new secretariat has been assigned.

What remains to be done

Those in power approach issues of gender equality and women's rights in accordance with their political ideology. Feminists are still waiting for the legalization of abortion at the federal level, which is considered a debt left by López Obrador’s administration. Abortion is still a crime in 11 states, and the next step for activists is to press for the removal of abortion from the Federal Criminal Code.

López Obrador committed to the creation of a national childcare system, but the promise went unfulfilled during his six-year term. By using the concept of “care work” the governent acknowleded how it is connected to inequality, and though it launched the Care Map and Observatory, a national childcare system was never consolidated.

In 2019, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard declared that Mexico’s government is feminist. This prompted Virginia Romero and Ramón I. Centeno, research professors at the University of Sonora, to begin analyzing gender policies on a program-by-program basis. In a forthcoming article, they share alarming figures and underreporting in official data. 

They identified cases in which changes in statistical methods have erased instances of violence. For example, the government oversight report for 2018–2024 prepared by the Institute for Women (which the Women’s Secretariat replaces) states that rates of feminicide dropped by 35.6 percent between December 2018 to June 2024. Romero and Centeno found data that starkly contradicts that. They point out that 2022 was the year with the highest number of murders of women on record, even though the official number of femicides fell that year. That is, 1,400 women were murdered in 2022, but only 420 were classified as femicides. The remainder were classified as intentional homicides.

Supporters claim that the so-called “Fourth Transformation” has reduced teenage pregnancy, but the University of Sonora researchers also refute this. They found teenage pregnancies rose by 30 percent in 2020, according to data published by the Center for Gender Equity and Reproductive Health, which reports to the Secretary of Health.

Romero and Centeno also found that obstetric violence, which occurs when medical service providers inflict physical or psychological violence on pregnant women, increased by between 20 and 30 percent in 2019. Despite the fact that Congress recognized this as a kind of violence, obstetric violence wasn’t included in the General Law on Women's Access to a Life Free of Violence, which was adopted in 2007. As far as the government is concerned, if something isn’t classified and recorded, it doesn’t exist.

Even with the creation of the Women’s Secretariat, there is a risk that the politicization of data will continue, creating an appearance of progress while actual violence against women continues.

Feminist groups identify multiple debts owed to women. The members of Okupa Cuba Monumenta Viva occupied the offices of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) in Mexico City from 2020 to 2022. They are particularly concerned about incarcerated women—authorities imprisoned two of their members for 10 months after evicting their squatted social center. They are also worried about how the state causes division among activists.

“There so many collectives with so many demands, before the campaigns [political parties] approached [collectives, took their proposals] and coopted years of work,” said a collective member by text message on the condition of anonymity. “They make promises that are too big for them, and they end up adding in an even bigger debt toward us, because they depoliticize and fracture movements.”

Time for change?

President López Obrador and his cabinet members regularly made derogatory statements about the feminist movement and suggested women should focus on caring for their families at home.

By contrast, Sheinbaum began her presidency with the slogan “we all made it,” a phrase that other Morena members, including Brugada, have repeated in their speeches. The first public policy that the Women’s Secretariat announced was the creation of 12 Childcare and Education Centers (CECI), which the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) will launch in Ciudad Juárez.

The first 12 CECIs will open on April 30th, according to the government. There will then be 1,260 centers opened throughout the country which the IMSS will operate for their affiliates. In addition, private companies will provide space for CECIs to operate for their workers, and workers without access to social security have also been promised access. This marks a return to a previous format of state-run daycare centers, which were shuttered in 2019 and replaced with a program that gave 1,600 pesos (US$80) bimonthly to families instead.

It’s vital that officials in the Women’s Secretariat understand feminism, gender and human rights in intersectional terms. Without that perspective, they “run the risk of being oriented toward temporary assistance,” according to Dr. Lucía Damián Bernal, a specialist in Public Policy at UNAM. In her view, the creation of the Women’s Secretariat is positive and unprecedented.

For Romero, the researcher in Sonora, the name and budget of the institution are not important. If women's voices in complex life situations aren’t taken into account, no amount of strategy will work. And if the Women’s Secretariat doesn’t listen, its mission will fail.

“They lack a grassroots perspective, in which people can express what they really need; these are our resources, but what women are experiencing is not being included,” said Romero in a telephone interview. “There is a serious problem with disappearances, women are navigating being single parents on their own, navigating forced displacement on their own, they’re attacked while they are migrating, and these issues are not being addressed.”