MEXICO:While women were both agitators and police, men may be masterminding the action, writes Adam Thomsonin Mexico City
ANGELES SÁNCHEZ, a grandmother with peroxide hair, has two bullet belts slung across her chest, the stock of a wooden rifle resting against her shoulder and, like hundreds of other women gathered with her, she is dressed all in white.
"For our sons and daughters," she shouts from a busy street corner of Mexico City's historic centre in protest at the government's plans to reform the country's ailing oil industry. "For our country," she cries still louder. "They are not going to take our oil."
In normal times, the police standing just a few yards away would be made up of men. Today, though, the authorities have deployed about 100 policewomen, most with heavy make-up and hair pulled tight into a bun. Some are wearing riot gear.
In the few days since the conservative administration of Felipe Calderón presented Congress with a Bill to allow greater private sector participation in the country's nationalised oil industry, women have assumed an increasingly visible role in one of the most divisive issues in Mexican politics.
Virginia Jaramillo, a housewife and one of the organisers of the women's protest, believes such a high female profile is a clear sign of how much things have changed in a country often more associated with moustaches and a macho, tequila-drinking culture than with women's liberation. "We have come a long way in the last generation or two," she says.
In many ways, she is right. For a start, women are far more involved in politics than they used to be. Of the 500 seats in the lower house of Congress, 117 are held by women. Twenty years ago, women held just six.
Women are also gaining ground economically - albeit more slowly. In 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available, there were 54 women in the labour force for every 100 men. In 1995, there were only 48.
There are other signs. Mexico City's government last year passed legislation allowing women to seek abortions. This month, it proposed drastically simplifying divorce proceedings and, before long, the city's universities will have to provide students with free condoms.
Even Bonifacio Florín, a musician wearing a tight black suit and a large silver buckle with a horse's head, believes things have progressed. "My parents gave us boys far more opportunities to go to school than my sisters ever got," he says. "Nowadays, girls get pretty much the same treatment."
But Adriana Ortiz Ortega, an academic at the College of Mexico in the capital, argues that while Mexican women have more economic and political power, it would be a mistake to see the anti-energy reform movement as evidence of further political and social empowerment.
One reason is that today's protest movement is simply another example in a long tradition of women organising social movements in Mexico. Sánchez and her fellow female protesters have even dubbed themselves the "Adelitas" after the legendary white-robed female fighters of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Perhaps more important, says Ortiz Ortega, is the fact that men, particularly Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-wing runner-up in the 2006 presidential election, are masterminding the movement.
"Women are incorporating themselves into the public sphere but they are also bowing to the male agenda," says Ortiz Ortega. "López Obrador is playing with the gender image to get the idea across that the government's proposed reform risks affecting the most vulnerable within our society."
In Mexico City's centre, one of the policewomen agrees. Reluctant to give her name, she says the use of women to head the street campaign is a ruse. "It's a political strategy to make the protesters look more peaceful." - ( Financial Times )