CLAUDIA COLIMORO, a candidate for the Representative Assembly of the Federal District of Mexico Party (PRT - Mexican section of was in the news during the 1991 election campaign. This feminist, Involved in urban struggles, wh demands the legalization of her profession. Here is what she ha
up canteens and open nightshelters, to give them free education and technical training that will help them to find a proper job.
We have a similar project for prostitutes. We don't intend to teach them to sew or embroider, or to do crochet and cross-point. They must have real choices so that they can get well paid jobs when they decide, out of age or fatigue, to leave this profession.
In Mexico women work for pitiful wages. In the frontier zones for example, the women who work in the maquiladoras drudge for 15 hours a day and still don't earn enough to live, and have to work as prostitutes at the weekend - this is true for about half of them.
As long as such low wages are being paid, and in the absence of real social security for all and crèches, women will continue to become prostitutes to eat and feed their children — 95% of prostitutes are mothers.
Since I am also a feminist, I took part in the National Convention of Women for Democracy in March 1991 which brings together 40 organizations, movements and women's unions. The Convention proposed me as a candidate for the elections and looked for a party that would put me on its list. Violent attacks from the right
We suffered various rebuffs, but the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) and the Socialist Electoral Front (FES) accepted at once. This cost them votes and provoked violent attacks from the right, above all from the Party of National Action (PAN) and the Provida movement. For, apart from calling for the legalization of prostitution, a systematic campaign against AIDS, and sexual education at all levels, I also called for the liberalization of abortion.
Provida produced photos of a completely dismembered foetus of at least eight months and I was described throughout as a "aborter" along with Rosario Ibarra and other feminist candidates of the PRT.
This work with the PRT has been very important for me, since, although I am not a militant, I agree with many points of its political platform, including free sexual choice, the right to organization, the rejection of violence against women, democratic rights, the legalization of abortion and the reappearance of the disappeared.
My election campaign was very difficult.
At the start, journalists treated me in a friendly enough way, comparing me more or less to la Cicciolina?; later they realized that I was serious and absolutely
MEXICO / USA determined to make myself heard and see prostitution legalized so as to break the power of the corrupt authorities.
Then, I was attacked fiercely, since I said loud and clear that every woman on the planet can end up a prostitute, and that blessings and white dresses only serve to hide the fact that one belongs sexually to a man.
During the campaign I got to know about the needs of prostitutes throughout the country. Their rights are systematically violated. For example recently there were two police operations in Queretaro where all the girls and transvestites were arrested, stripped and spattered with paint. We oppose these periodic onslaughts by the authorities in districts where prostitution takes place; prostitutes are citizens like anybody else. In Mexicali, every two weeks the prostitutes are taken to a health centre where they are massively dosed with a type of penicillin, even if they do not have any sexually transmissible disease. This weakens their body's defences.
In the state of Sonora, during AIDS tests, the heads of the health department have been insisting that people give their names, addresses and date of birth, although AIDS testing is meant to be anonymous, secret and free. After a struggle we finally put a stop to this.
When I went to do a meeting in Lower California, a conservative daily in Tijuana wrote that the PRT fills its ranks with prostitutes and homosexuals with AIDS.
This was the first time that a prostitute has been a candidate in an election in Mexico, and it is clear that many women voted for me; however there was such massive fraud by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that we did not win any representation. In the polling station where I voted with my son in the presence of several journalists, there was not a single vote for the PRT by the time of the count...
I wanted to win because I want the media to finish with their horror stories and their double standards and in order that our voice should be heard. I am a voice for those that have none. * 1. A violent debate on the legalization of abortion erupted when, in 1991, the congress of the souther state of Chiapas, which has a big Indian population, decided to legalize it, without doubt for eugenic reasons. Under pressure from the church and conservatives, the state retreated. 2. The "Provida" movement, inspired by American "pro-life" conservatives, is violently opposed to abortion and has been prepared to use force in pursuit of its campaign. 3. La Cicciolina is an Italian pomographic model who won a parliamentary seat on the Italian Radical Party ticket.
250,000 turnout for