Mexico City.- By a unanimous vote of 127, the Senate approved tonight the reform to Article 2 of the Constitution, which recognizes indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples and communities as subjects of public law.
The reform, which is part of Plan C promoted by President López Obrador since last February, states that indigenous jurisdiction will be exercised by community authorities in accordance with the normative systems of the peoples, whose population must be subject to legislative and administrative measures when these may cause harm.
The speech of Edit López Hernández, a member of Morena, stood out. She is an indigenous leader who attends the sessions in colorful outfits. Originally from San Cristóbal de las Casas, she concluded her speech with a slogan: “We are subjects of law and not museum objects…”
In the opinion of the Chiapas native, the invisibility that indigenous peoples have felt for years and years was due to “problems generated by bad governments.”
According to him, the reform gives continuity to the second floor of the 4T. “The Executive’s initiative gives us hope: the cornerstone is the recognition of indigenous peoples as subjects of public law and with legal personality and their own assets,” he celebrated. For Movimiento Ciudadano, Luis Donaldo Colosio affirmed that this reform was an outstanding debt of the Mexican State. “For more than three decades, derived from the San Andrés Accords, the Federal Government committed to address the demands of these communities and fully recognize their demands, but since then only the rights of indigenous communities have been haggled over, only the legal scope of the reforms have been limited,” he said. “The recognition of peoples and communities as subjects of public law, as well as respect and guarantee of self-determination and autonomy, including over their lands and territories, are pending issues. This reform truncates a historical injustice of invisibility of our Afro-Mexican communities, in addition to recognizing them as subjects of public law in the Constitution; and that is not something that should be skimped on.” With tears in her eyes, Purépecha Reyna Celeste Ascensio Ortega, from Morena, thanked “Tata” López Obrador for having made the indigenous people visible. The PRI member Anabell Ávalos warned about the absence in the ruling of “budgetary extensions and allocations for the current fiscal year,” which will make it difficult to apply the changes in what remains of the year.
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