The Mexican president has claimed that a metallic barrier to wall off the presidential palace ahead of a planned women’s march is intended to avoid provocation and protect historic buildings from vandalism.
In a country where femicides rose nearly 130% between 2015 and 2020, critics said the decision to erect the three-metre-high (10ft) barriers was symptomatic of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s apathy toward the crisis of violence against women.
Ahead of International Women’s Day on Monday, barriers were also installed around other buildings and monuments in downtown Mexico City, where a year ago tens of thousands of people protested rampant violence against women and impunity.
“We have to avoid provocation of people who only want to cause damage,” López Obrador said at an event in Yucatan. “Imagine, if we don’t take care of the national palace and they vandalise it. What image will this send to the world?”
López Obrador reiterated that women had the right to protest and cited his own movement in 2006 as an appropriate form of peaceful protest.
“The presidency was stolen from us … and we protested but never broke glass. … I walked two, three times all the way from Tabasco to Mexico City,” he said. López Obrador has repeatedly accused opponents of electoral fraud over the years.
At least 939 women were victims of femicide last year in Mexico, official data shows.
The interior minister, Olga Sánchez Cordero, said on Twitter that the barriers were “for the protection of the women”.
Anger among the women’s rights movement was stoked this year after Félix Salgado, who has been accused of rape, announced his candidacy for governor for the southern state of Guerrero. Salgado has denied the allegations.
López Obrador has said that those calling on him to drop support for Salgado, a member of the ruling Morena party, are politically motivated.
