Mexico & Nafta - May 2007 (ISSN 1741-444X)

On 24 April the Mexico City assembly voted by 46 votes to 19, with one abstention, to allow abortion for any reason in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The public hospital system in the Distrito Federal reckoned that it would now be carrying out 77 abortions a day. The vote in favour of easier abortion has infuriated the Roman Catholic Church and poses a significant political problem for President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa.

Although Calderón himself (and his wife) are personally against liberalising abortion, he can do little about the Mexico City vote. Some Roman Catholics in Calderón's Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) say that they will go to the supreme court to get the liberalisation overthrown as unconstitutional. This may be effective because of a 2002 supreme court ruling which upheld the right of abortion in certain circumstances (the Ley Robles) but also, crucially, ruled that the constitution protects the right to life from conception. Cleverly, the PAN has asked the Comisión de Derechos Humanos del Distrito Federal to take up its application to the supreme court. 

The Ley Robles, propounded by Rosario Robles, when she was mayor of Mexico City (1999 to 2000), allowed pregnancies to be terminated when either the foetus is genetically deformed; or conception is the result of a rape; or the mother's health was endangered. This was the first legalisation of abortion in Mexico. Just as with this year's reform, the law was opposed by the PAN and the Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico which argued that the change was unconstitutional. The wording of the Supreme court's decision on aborting because the foetus has genetic defects was interesting. Legal abortions required the consent of the mother plus the opinion of two medical specialists that the defects in foetus are such that its risk of survival is in doubt.

The Roman Catholic Church responded moderately to both the Ley Robles and the supreme court decision upholding it. Now the Roman Catholic Church is taking a much more militant attitude. The problem is that the Roman Catholics' shrillness has touched an anti-clerical nerve in Mexico. The ministry of the interior announced that it is opening an investigation into statements by the Cardinal-Archbishop of Mexico City and his spokesman, Hugo Valdemar. The complaint was made by the small Partido Alternativa Social Demócrata y Campesina (PASC). The PASC and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional had suggested at the end of 2006 that the city assembly should consider further liberalisation of abortion. In its complaint, the PASC alleged that the cardinal, Norberto Rivera, and his spokesman had broken the constitution and the law which regulates what religious organisations can do in Mexico. 

The cardinal seems to be taking no notice. On 29 April, he called for doctors not to carry out abortions. He said: "doctors who make possible the extermination of life, are betraying their own profession." The Roman Catholic Church says that it will excommunicate anyone who performs an abortion. One bishop even called people who advocated abortion on demand as no different from the people that perpetrated genocide in Hitler's Germany. On the other side, the mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, said that doctors at city-run hospitals cannot refuse to perform abortions even if they personally object to the procedure.

Church and state
The row over abortion looks like being the first big dispute between church and state since the settlement imposed by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1992. Until then there were tight restrictions on what priests in Mexico could do. Under Article 130 of the 1917 constitution, they were banned from commenting on public affairs. This article was reformed by Salinas. Under the reforms, the church recovered its right to own property and priests could comment on public affairs and vote. The limits of the churches' freedom have not been defined by the courts. 

The last great rebellion in Mexican history, by the Cristeros, in 1927, was caused by the demand by the then president, Plutarcho Elí­as Calles, that the Roman Catholic Church submit itself to regulation by the secular government. This would allow mayors to dismiss parish priests. The rebellion lasted three years, cost 90,000 lives and involved 13 states in central and western Mexico. It also prompted the first major emigration to California. The central western states where the Cristero guerrillas operated, especially Jalisco, remain the heartlands of Catholicism in Mexico. 

Mexico City, on other hand, is a bastion of the leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática. The PRD has 34 of the 66 seats in the city assembly. The PAN has 17 and the PVEM three. The fact that only 16 assembly members voted against the liberalisation of abortion means that the opposition was split on the issue. In the assembly the PRI and the Partido Nuevo Alianza both have four seats each; the PASC has two and the PRD's allies, Convergencia and the Partido del Trabajo, one each. 

In the Mexico City vote, the PRD secured the support of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the organisation which ruled Mexico from the Revolution until 2000. The PRD also won the support of the Partido Nueva Alianza, and the PASC. 

The opponents of liberalisation were the same as those that opposed the Ley Robles: Calderón's Partido Acción Nacional and the Partido Verde Ecologista Mexicano (PVEM). An independent also voted against liberalisation. 

The degree of polarisation caused by the abortion issue was exemplified by an unhappy exchange between two of Mexico's most progressive public figures. Santiago Creel, now president of the senate but previously interior minister under President Vicente Fox and before that a progressive member of congress, had a public disagreement with Juan Ramón de la Fuente. De la Fuente is now Rector de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and had previously been health minister under the last PRI president, Ernesto Zedillo (1994 to 2000). If Andrés Manuel López Obrador had won the presidential election in 2006 De la Fuente would probably have been interior minister.

What caused the two to fall out was De la Fuente's claim that " a democracy was only a democracy if it was secular." Creel, who ran unsuccessfully for the PAN presidential nomination in 2005, said that "a debate on whether states should be secular was something out of the 19th Century and the issue was resolved in favour of secular states so that people who believed different things could live in this country. It is a bad thing to go back to the debates of 19th Century. "