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Ifigenia Martínez, Like hundreds of Mexican women, she had to clear the paths towards elemental equality between people, the raw material of human rights and the condition of justice, with enormous obstacles. His perennial solidarity with women and their causes and efforts attest to this.
Iphigenia followed in the footsteps left by many others and also led the way for thousands more. It was not the first, and to say by the winds that blow, it is part of a story that does not seem to have an end.
Recognizing and honoring Iphigenia’s public career goes beyond recounting her multiple and varied occupations and her latest acts that, without a doubt, are clear symbols of the new times. No matter how arduous they may seem to us.
Hers is a path that begins in the distant 60s when, between 1966 and 1970, she served as director of the then National School of Economics of our National University, being the first woman. Also for his pioneering work on the maldistribution of income in his classic book Income distribution and economic development in Mexicoa text that makes explicit the link between economic development and income distribution, a relationship that at that time meant a renewed focus on economic theory.
His insistence, shared by many of us, on the central attention that the redistributive question has, and should have, is an endless source of a fundamental civic pedagogy. She deployed it with special selflessness at UNAM, its Faculty of Economics and the Institute of Economic Research. Likewise, in the Faculty’s Alumni Association and of course in the Mexican Academy of Political Economy of which she was one of its founders. Without falling into the recesses and euphemisms that this discipline usually falls into, Iphigenia was firm in her conviction that overcoming economic inequality was not only essential for the proper functioning of the economy, but for coexistence and its basic social relations, in which sustain any effective aspiration for democracy and social justice.
From these intellectual and moral convictions, Iphigenia derived the need to carry out a fiscal reform that, in our case, would have to be conceived as tax collection and redistributive. As a fundamental vector for an indispensable and elemental oxygenation of the stability and security of the country.
A tax reform that contributes to boosting growth and sustainable development means breaking the disastrous and self-imposed siege of a normal
irrational and unfounded fiscal policy, to address not only the short-term social needs and urgencies, but also the requirements that a new path of development entails. It is about, Iphigenia reiterated, ensuring sustained economic growth, the generation of good jobs and, of course, reducing poverty and inequalities.
If, as Iphigenia notes in Some effects of the crisis on income distribution in Mexico (Economic Research Institute and Faculty of Economics, UNAM, 1989): “No one disputes anymore (…) the legitimacy of the State to participate as a producer of collective satisfactions (…) (its) responsibility to satisfy large social consumption: education and training, health, social security, agricultural technical assistance, scientific research and technological development, basic food supply, popular housing, conservation and improvement of the environment (…)”, then the revaluation of the role of the State in the economy, as a fundamental actor, takes on vital importance and, in this sense, as convener and supporter of a new agreement to resume or open a new course of development.
A State willing to assume its responsibility to address – and understand – the contemporary social issue; responsible for having sufficient and transparent finances to develop strategies that contemplate not only the expansion of infrastructure and the promotion of job creation but also promote the equitable redistribution of the fruits of growth.
Today, when we highlight the qualities of an exemplary woman, a university student and a politician committed to her university, the country and its development, a pioneer in the studies of income and its distribution, in economic growth and inequalities, it would be appropriate to agree that the only way in which both the motto For the good of Mexico, the poor first
as if the second floors have a certain destiny, is to return to the path of development and move towards the erection of a welfare state worthy of the name, which makes the task of universal protection its own. from the cradle to the grave
as Lord Beveridge said at the dawn of the English National Health Service and that, among us, it was established as a constitutional obligation of the State to guarantee, universally, social rights.
Health and memory for Iphigenia.
