For Ana María Hernández Cárdenas, fighting for human rights runs in her family. Raised in a politically active household, she considers her grandfather to be her biggest role model as a kid. He participated in the Mexican Revolution and was, in her view, a “social fighter.” “I grew up with him and he is the one who instilled in me all those values related to justice, uprightness, and the common good. I started being an activist in my late teens. However, it didn’t start with feminism for me, but rather with left-wing movements,” she explains.
It was then that Ana María began to participate in international solidarity actions with the revolutionary processes, which at the time had their focus on Nicaragua and El Salvador. The beginning of her activism, linked to internationalist solidarity, students’ protests and social movements —both rural and urban— led her towards feminism.
“I remember a day when the State used violence against a popular urban movement, and demonstrators and several leaders of the movement were arrested. They also detained some women that day, and it was then that I realized the repression against women was somewhat different from the repression against men. I began to feel curious to understand what was happening and I started to come up with feminist proposals; and together with some girl friends, we created a support committee for the liberation of our women comrades.” That first contact with women’s inequality as compared to men’s, together with the lessons learned from her own experience as a militant in equality organizations, would accompany her throughout her life.
Consortium for Parliamentary Dialogue and Equity and Consortium Oaxaca
In 1998, Ana María Hernández was one of the founders of the Consortium for Parliamentary Dialogue and Equity in Mexico City, a civil society organization that was created with the aim of promoting legislative changes. From those early days, the activist spells out that: “At the time, the Congress of our country was beginning to open up to national plurality thanks to a political reform. Among other things, several parties were allowed to participate in Congress and we saw the opportunity and importance of being able to influence the legislative framework, in order to advance women’s rights. We created the Consortium with the mission of dialogue to influence the legislative power, with deputies and senators. One of our main axes of action was to pressure politicians to advance our agenda and see that more women could become legislators.” It was in the 1990s that international conferences on population and development began to take place and that this type of initiatives gained a place on both global and local agendas.
A few years later, in 2003, the Oaxaca Consortium, which is a branch of the Consortium for Parliamentary Dialogue and Equity, was founded with Ana María Hernández as its leader. At that time, one of the organization’s main focuses was the expansion of laws in favor of decriminalizing abortion in the country’s regional governments. In Oaxaca, the state with the largest indigenous population and the third poorest state in Mexico, the need to work for the rights of indigenous women arose. “In Oaxaca, not only is the national legislative framework recognized, but also community regulatory systems. In other words, the community provides itself with its own regulations. However, women did not have many opportunities to decide on those regulations, so we realized that in order to strengthen women’s leadership, it was necessary to address the issue of violence against women, as well as family violence. In this regard, one of the routines that we followed was to document the deaths of women and girls due to violence”. It was then that Ana María Hernández and the Oaxaca Consortium began working to have the concept of femicide recognized and to expand the Citizen Participation Law, placing women’s rights at the center, with the aim that it would be them, women, who would participate in improving the conditions of their own community’s regulatory systems.
Currently, the Oaxaca Consortium is made up of 35 women who work in different areas and programs, and whose focus is on youth, women and the protection of women defenders. Ana María Hernández no longer leads the organization, after a generational change occurred in 2024, after 20 years of militancy. However, she continues to work for the comprehensive feminist protection of activists through the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (IM-Defensoras), which is the first regional initiative focused on preventing, documenting and reporting violence that affects women human rights defenders. It also focuses on the care and healing these defenders go through, so as to strengthen the endurance of their social movements.
Currently, this initiative articulates nearly 3,000 women human rights defenders and 240 organizations from various social movements and territories in several countries in the Mesoamerican region. From IM_Defensoras, Ana María has contributed to developing the strategy of self-care, collective care and healing as part of the approach to comprehensive feminist protection and has specialized in providing support for both individual and collective care processes. She firmly believes that “placing care at the center of political action is fundamental to sustaining protests and social movements.”
Mexico, facing a new era, but with the same challenges
In October 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum (from the National Regeneration Movement party) became Mexico’s first female president, a country where 9 to 10 women are murdered every day. According to UN Women: “In 2023, Mexico’s Home Department registered 848 victims of femicide and 2,591 intentional homicides. In total, there were 3,439 women victims of femicide and intentional homicide.” However, only 25% of the cases of women and girls murdered in the country were investigated as femicides.
The challenges for President Sheinbaum, successor to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, are immense in all areas: foreign policy and the border with the United States, security (in Mexico there is an average of 30,000 murders per year and there are currently tens of thousands of missing people), eradication of the mafias (part of Mexican territory is under the control of organized crime), protection of women and girls, or the reduction of the social gap, among others. Despite everything, Ana María Hernández is optimistic and believes that the new president will continue to advance in the protection of basic rights. “She will have to take on important challenges such as the issue of drug trafficking violence or criminal violence. In this sense, she is changing the strategy followed by López Obrador. She is being firmer and more direct. I also admire her moderation. Often men’s politics are expressed in a more violent or tense way. I think Claudia Sheinbaum is showing that women can also be strategists,” she concludes.
With the global rise of the far right, women and the feminist movement are in the spotlight. How should we approach this new stage?
We are indeed in a very difficult situation, a delicate historical moment. I think that the international feminist movement has been practically the only global movement that has managed to make progress on many of the issues that are crucial, not only for women, but for all of humanity. Women have shown that we do not only work for women’s rights, but also for the rights of all people and dissidences. We have also worked and are working for a change in our life model and to improve our relationship with nature. I feel very hopeful, because we have accumulated great experience in international advocacy and in the collectivization of our leadership. We have managed to work from community leaderships and to group organizations and political parties. We have even managed to incorporate women into governments. This progress is essential to being able to address historical moments like the one we are facing.
Mexico is beginning a new era with President Claudia Sheinbaum at the helm of the government.
I connect with the political agenda that rules my country today, despite the many challenges and undesirable inherited practices. I can relate to the transition process towards the common good, towards social policies, towards the recovery of the State’s function as a guarantor of rights. And all this has been achieved because in all these years we have worked for the incorporation and political participation of women in the most relevant decision-making positions. This has been earned by dust from the communities, from local governments and from social movements; and at the cost of being stigmatized, persecuted and attacked. Unfortunately, the global right is getting stronger, but the feminist movement has twinned with other movements, such as that of sexual and gender dissidents, and the ideological force we share is very strong. This is not the first time that we have been attacked. As libertarian movements, we can take on these challenges from the power of transformation and from hope, but not from defeatism. I think that one of the great ailments that social movements suffer from occurs when we feel discouraged. And I, despite having fought for 45 years, sometimes feel sad when I think about the advances that are being taken from us, but I also see it as an opportunity for resistance and a creative opportunity for transformation. We are capable of readapting the way we fight and our network. Solidarity between women and other libertarian movements is above the fractures and internal wars of the right.
Why is it so important to recognize violence against women as a specific type of violence?
Equality is still a utopia. Women and dissidents do not enjoy the same conditions of rights, equality, transcendence and power as men. Equal rights start from a different history, because we have centuries of discrimination and subjugation accumulated over us. We have suffered many violations of rights, also symbolic ones, which now live and are reproduced in people’s minds. In the 21st century, we have convinced ourselves that we cannot treat as equals those who have historically been discriminated against. Secondly, the violent death of a woman because she is a woman is not comparable to any other death suffered by our male colleagues. Much of the violence that is carried out against women is the confirmation of the hatred towards women of a society that limits and subjugates us. Naming this violence, making it visible, working to access justice, re-educating male aggressors and working to ensure that there are exemplary punishments so that violence does not repeat itself is fundamental. Women are killed by men. We must be able to say it and it must be typified. It is about achieving substantive equality and reparation. Affirmative action may come across as privileges for women, but it is not: it is about carrying out temporary actions that help to gradually close the historical gap of inequality.
You are now part of the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders. What are you currently working on?
The Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders is an organization that emerged in 2010, when I was at the Consortium. We brought together fellow women defenders and activists from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mexico. We began a political reflection in a context in which both governments and de facto powers of organized crime were not only attacking populations, but also women defenders. At that time we had protection programs, but none that addressed gender issues, nor the violence that women defenders suffer because they are women. We wanted to respond in an articulated way and show solidarity in the face of threats, attacks and murders; and also build a political proposal that would recover the need for protection for women defenders.
How is the protection that women need different from the protection that men need?
When a male defender is attacked and has to leave the country, he can generally travel alone and stay in a protection network for a while; whether they are a father or not. Regarding women, there is a difference and that is that in most cases they ask to be able to take their children with them. Many protection programs did not take this kind of issues into account. Since 2010 and until today, however, much progress has been made and some programs already consider the specific needs of women. On the other hand, during these years we have also been critical of the activism of sacrifice.
What do you mean by that?
I mean the type of activism that says you have to put everything behind you, or sacrifice your body or even your life. We began to ask ourselves why there was no balance, why we were not taking care of ourselves. It is important to invest in well-being, because when you provide support, you also suffer an impact: emotional, energetic, physical… everything wears out. A comprehensive feminist protection program involves incorporating self-care, collective care, and the healing processes of the historical wounds of the political impacts I was referring to. Today, we are more than 3,000 women defenders grouped in the Mesoamerican Initiative, and in each country we have a network formed by women defenders and activists who fight for rights as different as land and territory, labor rights, etc. We call this strategy “PIF”, Comprehensive Feminist Protection. This is our political proposal. Collective care allows our struggles to move forward, because when organizations or groups do not take care of themselves, they end up wearing out and becoming exhausted; and this weakens the fight. At the Mesoamerican Initiative, we also work on a registration system that has allowed us to document the different types of violence that women defenders suffer from. We also generate reports on incidents and have deployed a support strategy for colleagues who are in a situation of imminent risk. We have healing houses such as La Serena and La Siguata, where we have welcomed hundreds of women defenders who have stayed there temporarily. At the house, women defenders can share their experiences while therapists accompany them in their healing process.
