This Saturday, October 7th, María de Jesús Patricio submitted her official bid to run for Mexico’s presidency in 2018. Better known as Marichuy, this indigenous woman is an independent candidate who needs about 850,000 signatures to run for president.
The Mexican elections of July 2018 will be the first to allow independent candidates to run as long as they met the requirements. Every single independent candidate must collect signatures from 1 percent of registered voters in 120 days to be eligible to run.
Marichuy is the official spokesperson for the National Indigenous Congress – Congreso Nacional Indígenain Spanish – and is the candidate of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. The Zapatista National Liberation Army, or Ejército de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in Spanish, is better known as the Zapatista movement.
The group picked Marichuy to be their candidate back in May, but have been preparing her for the position long before that. After announcing her candidacy, Marichuy told the press that she does not intend on using money from local groups that fund presidential campaigns.
Marichuy was born and raised in Tuxpan, a small town in the west of Mexico. She is now 53-years-old but has been helping her community since the age of 20, when she realized the government was not taking care of her people the way they should.
She took matters into her own hands and started offering herbal remedies to the sickly of her town. Marichuy managed to preserve medicines that are traditional means of healing of the indigenous culture, and her political goal is to heal the country and better represent her people.
The indigenous community makes up about 20 percent of Mexico’s entire population, but they’ve been mistreated and misrepresented for over a century. Marichuy found her platform to help her country through the Zapatista movement, which started in the mid-90’s.
Marichuy’s goal entering this presidential race is not to win. Instead, she wants to take advantage of the opportunity and platform that becoming a presidential candidate provides to raise awareness of the shortcomings that the indigenous community faces on a daily basis.
Mexico’s current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, alleged that his administration invested 21,500 million pesos in infrastructure for indigenous towns. He also claimed that they helped 4,100 indigenous people who got wrongfully incarcerated.
However, despite the president’s claims, indigenous communities have limited access to education, employment, and medical aid. They’ve also suffered at the hands of the government that takes their lands and does not reward them in any way or form.
Marichuy’s presidential campaign is the first step to revitalize the way the government takes care of indigenous communities. Nearly 30 million Mexicans identify as indigenous, but since its independence, the only indigenous Mexican president was Benito Juarez in 1858.
Article inspired by Reuters/Indigenous woman registers to run for Mexican presidency in 2018