Badpuppy Gay Today |
Thursday, 08 May 1997 |
Tijuana, B.C., Mexico-- It looks as if a gay man and two lesbians will be elected to Mexico's Congress in the July 6 elections.
Mexico City gay activist Francisco Robles Manning and his "substitute" co-candidate Nayeli Fuentes Vidal, a longtime lesbian activist, have two opportunities for victory and are all but guaranteed a seat in the 500-member federal Chamber of Deputies.
First, they could win in direct voting in Mexico City's 12th District, which includes the gay Zona Rosa neighborhood. Speaking at the Fifth Meeting of Gays and Lesbians in Northeast Mexico, held in April in Tijuana, Robles and Fuentes said there is a good chance they will capture the necessary votes as candidates for the left-wing Cardenista Party.
If they do not win in direct voting, however, they still could end up in Congress since 200 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies are filled via a process known as "plurinominal circumscription."
Under plurinominal circumscription, after an election each political party gets to choose a certain number of Congressmembers itself, based on the percentage of votes the party got in a multi-state region.
If the Cardenista Party gets the percentage of votes in the July election that it has gotten in the previous elections, Robles and Fuentes will have their seat--since they are listed at number three on the Cardenista Party plurinominal-circumscription list of candidates.
"The only thing that can go wrong is for the party to not get the three percent of the votes necessary to get to my position on the list," Robles said. "It is very likely I'll get in. In recent elections in these five states, the Partido Cardenista got from three to five percent of the votes."
Each of the 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies enters Congress along with a second, "substitute" member, who often works closely with the main member throughout his or her term. Fuentes would fill that role.
Robles, 38, founded the well-known gay group Orgullo Gay, co-founded the Mexican Homosexual Network, is an organizer of the pride parade, publishes a gay newspaper and operates gay phone lines, among other endeavors.
(Donations to his campaign may be sent in the form of a postal giro to Administracion de correos 138-41, CP 10400 Mexico City, Mexico.)
To keep Robles and Fuentes company, yet another Mexico City lesbian activist is expected to win a seat in the Chamber of Deputies as a plurinominal-circumscription candidate for the mainstream, left-wing Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), it was revealed at the Tijuana conference.
Lesbian activist Patria Jimenez is number 12 on the PRD's list.
"Voting in the 4th plurinominal-circumscription district (the five-state region) will result in the party getting to fill 16-18 seats," Jimenez said, "and I'm number 12."
"So you're guaranteed a seat?" asked a reporter.
"It would seem so," Fuentes said, smiling cautiously.
The elections of Jimenez, Robles and Fuentes would break new ground in Latin America, which has never seen an openly gay elected federal official.
Robles is the candidate whose March 1 kidnapping in Mexico City received wide coverage in the U.S. gay press.
The kidnappers demanded he and Fuentes halt their campaigns and that Robles' family pay 1 million pesos in ransom ($127,000).
However, Robles was released two days later after his captors doused him in white paint to "cleanse his dark soul."
Some Mexico City activists hinted that Robles staged the kidnapping as a media stunt--an allegation he again denied during the Tijuana conference.
The Tijuana meeting in which the three candidates participated drew about 50 gay activists from Mexico City, Tijuana, Culiacan, Mexicali, Zacatecas, Ensenada, and Long Beach and San Francisco in the U.S.
It was hosted by Tijuana's Grupo ?Y Que? (And So What? Group).
The delegates discussed anti-gay violence, repression and discrimination, same-sex marriage, and their excitement over the possibility of electing some of their own to Congress.
They also argued politics--and there was some friction between Robles and Fuentes on the one side and Jimenez on the other, including seemingly partisan allegations that they are not supporting each others' candidacies.
While the PRD is quite pro-gay, the Cardenista Party's platform reads like a gay-movement wish list.
The conference was held in Tijuana's Zapatista Center, a ramshackle second-floor converted apartment with no running water and no phone. Zapatistas are the leftist rebels who have been battling the government for three years in southern Chipas state.
Grupo ?Y Que? founder Alejandro Garcia called the gathering "a great success."
Next year's meeting will be held in Zacatecas, capital of Zacatecas state.
Two other bits of news from the confab: Mexicali and Ensenada, two large cities in Baja, California, will hold their first gay-pride events this summer.
Tijuana's first pride parade in 1995 drew 85 marchers; Last year the turnout increased to 300.
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