With same-sex marriage law, Mexico City becomes battleground in culture wars
On Thursday, this sprawling megalopolis will catapult to the front lines of gay rights in Latin America when a city law
legalizing same-sex marriage and adoption goes into effect.
The prospect of gay marriage has sent tremors through the Catholic Church, drawn the opposition of President Felipe Calderón and
his conservative National Action Party (PAN), and spotlighted the power of Mexico City's center-left Democratic Revolution Party
(PRD) leaders to advance a liberal agenda that contrasts with provincial traditionalism.
Mexico allows the federal district of Mexico City to pass its own laws, and the metropolis of more than 20 million people has
become a major battleground in the culture wars playing out across the Americas.
In recent years, the city's PRD-dominated Legislative Assembly has recognized civil unions and no-fault divorce, legalized
abortion in the first trimester and given terminally ill patients the right to refuse treatment.
Now, as conservatives protest, gay couples from Xochimilco to Polanco are making plans to tie the knot.
Mexican actress Jesusa Rodríguez will marry her partner, Liliana Felipe, after 30 years together. "The important thing is that
this law grants equality," Rodríguez said.
Many marriage-minded gay couples are preoccupied by concerns about the security of their loved ones.
Reyna Barrera, 70, had a breast removed two months ago, and although she is weak from chemotherapy, she is busy planning her
wedding to her partner of 36 years, Sandra Ponce.
"This way, she is protected. She will get my pension, our house, everything from the life we built together," said Barrera, a
literature professor at Mexico's National Autonomous University.
The Legislative Assembly passed the gay marriage act by a broad majority in December, as activists cheered and PAN
representatives looked on in dismay. Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a PRD leader, signed the bill into law -- a first in Latin America.
"The family is under attack," warned Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera, saying that the "perverse" measure would inflict
psychological damage on "innocent children."
With the news, same-sex couples across the region began to demand equal access to the altar.
"Homosexual Marriage is Approved in Mexico. And in Chile, When?" read a headline in Chilean news Web site El Paradiario 14.
On Feb. 23, Buenos Aires judge Elena Liberatori told a gay couple to set a wedding date, despite policies that are "not in line
with the times." In late December, two men whose wedding plans were derailed by a Buenos Aires court married in Tierra del Fuego
-- home to a tolerant governor -- becoming the first gay couple in Latin America to legally wed.
Mexico City legalized same-sex civil unions in 2007; they also are recognized in Colombia, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador and
Argentina, but advocates for gay rights say only marriage can protect the rights of families in such matters as property and
custody.
Mexico's ruling party does not want the Mexico City law to be the catalyst for a domino effect.
The attorney general filed a challenge with the Supreme Court, arguing that the law violates the constitution.
"The constitution of the republic speaks explicitly of marriage between a man and a woman," Calderón, a devout Catholic, said in
early February.
According to the constitution, "men and women are equal under the law," and "this protects the organization and development of
the family."
Advocates said there has been no popular backlash to the law.
"I don't understand why a president would invent a constitution that concerns itself with weddings," said Mexican intellectual
Carlos Monsiváis. "There has been a campaign by the church and the right, but not by the people. There is still a lot of
machismo, but not as much as there used to be -- and not nearly as much as people believed."
An opinion poll by El Universal newspaper in November found that 50 percent of Mexico City respondents accepted gay marriage and
38 percent opposed it. Residents ages 18 to 39 were more likely to be supporters.
A survey by Calderón's party found that more than half of those polled opposed same-sex marriage and that 74 percent opposed
adoption by gay couples. "Marriage, as it was originally conceived, as a union between a man and a woman, guarantees the future
of the state and of Mexican society," Mariana Gómez del Campo, PAN's leader in Mexico City, told a radio interviewer.
"Just because something has become common, should it be legally recognized?" said an editorial in El Semanario, a publication of
the Catholic Archdiocese of Guadalajara. "If so, we should legalize all of the murders, narcotics traffic or whatever other
activity that has become common."
Gay rights activist Mariana Pérez Ocaña said she fears conservative provincial leaders will chip away at same-sex marriage.
After abortion was legalized, she noted, states altered their constitutions to say life begins at conception. Governors
affiliated with PAN have promised to challenge same-sex marriage.
"Many activists in gay groups fear there will be a backlash," Pérez said.
Binational couples will add to the legal complications, she said. If Pérez weds, the marriage will not be recognized in her
partner's native California. Mexicans who marry partners from countries that recognize same-sex marriage, such as Spain and
Canada, could ask for citizenship, but their spouses would not be eligible for the same in Mexico, she said.
"If a heterosexual couple gets married, they're automatically eligible for citizenship," she said.
Still, "marriage is a significant milestone," Pérez said. "This law is a very important step forward."
Archaeologists say forest across the Amazon, was home to an advanced, even
spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile
soils to feed thousands.
Rapaz’s isolation has allowed it to guard an enduring archaeological mystery: a collection of khipus, the cryptic woven knots that may explain how the Incas — in contrast to contemporaries in the Ottoman Empire and China’s Ming dynasty — ruled a vast, administratively complex empire without a written language.
Archaeologists in Guatemala have unearthed a 1,600-year-old tomb that is believed to be the final resting place of a Mayan king.A well-preserved tomb believed to be the final resting place of an ancient Mayan king has been discovered in Guatemala, scientists announced last week.
One approach defines a Hispanic or Latino as a member of an ethnic group that traces its roots to 20 Spanish-speaking nations from Latin America and Spain itself (but not Portugal or Portuguese-speaking Brazil). The other approach is much simpler. Who's Hispanic? ...
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico already has many of its monuments on Unesco´s list of protected sites. Now the government is asking for international recognition for the country's cuisine.
Deforestation left nothing to hinder ancient floodwaters on the desert plain, researchers find. Modern Peru could learn from the civilization's collapse, they say.
MEXICO CITY -- Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.
4.4 Million-Year-Old Primate Helps Bridge Evolutionary Gap
Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago in the woodlands of East Africa. She spent most of her time in the trees. She stood about 4 feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had long arms, short legs, and a grasping big toe that was perfect for clambering branch to branch. She ate in the trees, raised her offspring in the trees, slept in the trees.
MACAS, Ecuador -- Several hundred Shuar Indians wearing black war paint and toting wooden spears reinforced a highway blockade that police failed to break up earlier in a bloody melee that left one Indian dead and at least 40 police injured.
Wise Latina. The catchphrase of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings has taken on a life of its own, spawning T-shirts, note cards, dog jerseys and even thongs.
British archaeologists say a rise in temperatures helped fuel the empire, giving access to more cultivable, fertile land, and thus food surpluses that freed the Incas to expand and conquer.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- A collection of slavery records newly available over the Internet may help thousands of people trace their families back to Africa through St. Croix, a former slave-trading hub in the Caribbean.
THE CULEBRA CUT, Panama — You can’t leave Aldo Rincón alone for a moment. As a small knot of scientists and visitors dressed in hard hats and orange safety vests milled around on the banks of the Panama Canal, chatting about the $5 billion expansion program now under way to widen the storied canal and so accommodate the ever-fatter freighters that ply the planet’s seas, Mr. Rincón, 30, quietly pulled a few digging tools from his backpack.
Faced with a simmering crisis over dozens of deaths in the quelling of indigenous protests last week, Peru’s Congress this week suspended the decrees taht had been issued over plans to open large parts of the Peruvian Amazon to investment. Senior officials said they hoped this would calm nerves and ease the way for oil drillers and loggers to pursue their projects.
TARAPOTO, Peru -- The Aguaruna Indians have a well-earned reputation as warriors. In pre-Columbian times they successfully resisted Inca subjugation. And during Peru's 1995 border war with Ecuador, they served as guides for the army.
It is the kind of nightmarish ordeal that is an all-too-common feature of Colombia’s long war: peasants being terrorized by gunmen seeking dominance in the backlands.
CUSCO, Peru — From the postcards bearing his swashbuckling, fedora-topped image to the luxury train emblazoned with his name that runs to the foot of the mountain redoubt of Machu Picchu, reminders are ubiquitous here of Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer long credited with revealing the so-called Lost City of the Incas to the outside world almost a century ago.
MEXICO CITY -- The director of Harvard's Peabody Museum said he wants to return about 50 ancient carved Mayan jade pieces to Mexico, almost a century after a U.S. consul dredged the artifacts from the sacred lake at the ruins of Chichen Itza.
EARLY in the last century, Argentina was one of the world's 10 richest countries. Its fabled beef and other farm exports were building an industrial economy. In 1928, it had more cars than France and more telephone lines than Japan. The dream of its Spanish founders — to transform a wild land tucked near the bottom of the world into a great country of European culture and education inhabited by white-skinned people — was coming true.
The radio reporters huddled in a corner of the Red Cross tent , waiting for the wounded to arrive on stretchers. They wanted details of the injuries. They were not disappointed.
