This is because although the reformed law did not include anything regarding the way in which the parties should allocate their time, it did not include the recent INE guideline that forced the parties in 2021 to allocate at least 40% of these to promote to their candidates.
And by denying it regulatory powers in the matter, unless the parties act of their own accordit is foreseen that the progress in the promotion of women that was achieved in this process will not be repeated: according to the INE, of the 499,946 promos disseminated by the parties and where people registered for some candidacy appeared, 67% were carried out by women.
Another change included in “Plan B”, which has been promoted as an achievement towards the joint nomination of candidates, is that for state executives, women are nominated throughout an entire cycle of renewal of all the country’s governorships.
But this in reality “is not a guarantee that women will be postulated in entities with a high level of competitiveness of the parties,” Gilas established.
They remove teeth from the INE and TEPJF
Historically, all parties have sought to reverse the guidelines and even the laws when it comes to expanding women’s rights.
Although the TEPJF, Gilas acknowledged, “has not always been up to the task” if it has made decisions to force the parties to respect parity or to open spaces for vulnerable groups, as the INE has also done.
But in addition to the fact that the INE was now left out of the possibility of regulating compliance with the requirements to prove belonging to each vulnerable group, it was prohibited from setting more rules than those that are in the law.
And today it has been INE guidelines or Court rulings that have contained setbacks engineered by the parties to reverse parity.
Thus, even when there was no legal framework, INE and TEPJF prohibited women from being assigned candidacies in losing districts; they ordered the equal integration of the legislative and municipal bodies, modifying the lists of proportional representation; they established affirmative actions in favor of indigenous people, people with disabilities, or the LGTBQ+ community, and more recently they ordered parity in gubernatorial candidacies.
Practically all these decisions have been fought by the political parties, which have resisted opening spaces equally.
Now “Plan B” also limited the INE’s power to interpret the laws on this matter.
“It is the exclusive power of the Congress of the Union to issue the rules that regulate the candidacy application process, which may not be regulated, contradicted or modified by others of a secondary nature such as agreements, guidelines or regulations, in addition to the Statutes of the Political parties will establish the affirmative actions that, within the scope of their internal life, they determine”, the law now establishes.
In addition, the electoral authorities may not order political parties to modify their basic documents.
For patricia olamendi feminist lawyer, former coordinator of the monitoring mechanism against violence against women of the Organization of American States (OAS), this provision “limits the TEPJF in the application of the principles pro person and progressiveness of rights.”
And that “violates international treaties or laws on human rights, with that the international treaties that Mexico has signed on women’s rights are violated.”
He also warned that by empowering the parties to issue in their basic documents criteria that the TEPJF will not be able to judge, even when they contravene the Constitution, “it brings with it risks of setbacks, without there being an authority that can contain them.”
