Fernando Camacho Servín / I
La Jornada Newspaper
Sunday, January 4, 2026, p. 18
Although the purpose of affirmative actions is to allow historically violated groups to more easily access elected public positions, this figure has been “distorted and perverted,” since currently political parties can include candidates who do not belong to the aforementioned groups.
Legislators who promote a critical review of the issue stressed that to correct this “usurpation” – which has even reached Congress – it is necessary to put more filters so that those who aspire to a candidacy not simply ascribe themselves as members of a group, but also demonstrate their effective membership.
The issue, they said, is the subject of consultations between the groups in question and it will probably be at the beginning of this year when a proposal will be announced for it to be included in the political-electoral reform of President Claudia Sheinbaum and put an end to the misuse that, in the case of sexual diversity, means that up to 95 percent of the candidacies have been given to people who should not occupy them.
Recent figure in Mexico
Affirmative actions, as a method to allow historically marginalized social groups to gain access to positions of public responsibility, have their main antecedents in those that were decreed in the 30s and 40s of the last century in the United States, when they encouraged the entry into education and employment of “underrepresented sectors.”
In Mexico, it was not until the 2021 electoral process when the INE guaranteed the participation of these groups, which translated into the arrival of 65 people to the Chamber of Deputies under this scheme, which meant 13 percent of the seats and exceeded the expectation that 10 percent would be achieved.
The beneficiary groups of the positive discrimination strategy are indigenous and Afro-Mexicans, people with disabilities, people of sexual diversity, as well as migrants and residents abroad. The above coexists with the gender parity policy so that women occupy 50 percent of the seats in Congress.
To promote the arrival of political parties to the Legislative Branch, the INE establishes that they must include members of historically violated groups in the first 10 places on their proportional representation (multi-member) lists of each of the five electoral constituencies in the country.
“Mockery of the LGBT+ community”
In the case of sexual diversity groups, the abuse of the figure of affirmative actions reached such a point that only 5 percent of those who applied actually correspond to these groups, since of the 410 LGBT+ candidates in the country, only 20 have some type of militancy or real commitment to them.
“All the others are people who have self-ascribed and, since today you cannot challenge the self-ascription, they are usurping that place. The parties use these spaces to put their darlings or to pay favors,” lamented the president of the Diversity Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, Jaime López Vela (Morena).
Currently, he noted, there are two federal deputies who arrived in San Lázaro under this scheme: Verónica Pérez Herrera, from the PAN, and Fuensanta Guerrero Esquivel, from the PRI. The latter even repeated for sexual diversity in 2024, a figure that she also used to become a deputy in 2021.
However, according to information from the Chamber, none of them are part of the Diversity Commission and they have not presented initiatives or proposals related to the issue for which they came to office as multi-member members. They do not make any mention on their social networks either.
