On September 13, Masha Amini was returning home to Tehran after visiting her family. As she exited the subway, Iranian moral police, officially called Orientation Patrols, detained her and accused her of not covering her hair with a hijab, and of wearing blue jeans instead of baggy clothing on the arms and legs. The police accused her of violating the law, put her in a patrol car and began to beat her in the same vehicle until she was in a coma.
Three days later, in police custody, Masha Amini, on the eve of her 23rd birthday, died. What happened was not just another incident of that theocratic and authoritarian regime, nor was it just another statistic of the repression, because two other women, Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammedi, broke Amini’s story.
The repression did not take long to fall on them. Hamedi, who works for the Sharg newspaper in Tehran, was arrested seven days later by the state security forces, accused by the intelligence services of having published a photograph of Amini on social networks, which was false, since he only disseminated images of his family. Mohammadi, who works for the Ham-Mihan newspaper in the same Iranian capital, was arrested on September 29 for traveling to the city of Saqqez, in Kurdistan province, to report on Amini’s funeral. The two were placed in solitary confinement, but the spread of what happened to the young Kurdish sparked a social revolt throughout Iran.
The protests broke out spontaneously throughout the country, sensitized by the information from Hamedi and Mohammedi, and after the dissemination of a photograph circulated on social networks of Amini, unconscious in a hospital bed, chanting the slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadi, which means in Kurdish Woman, Life and Freedom. Large demonstrations first took place in the main cities and then spread to smaller communities, where women burned their hijabs.
Schools and universities stopped classes -the main protesters are young-, businesses closed intermittently, and even the oil industry suffered damage. The national soccer team that participated in the World Cup in Qatar refused to sing the national anthem and protests against the regime were shouted in the stands.
Violence filled the streets of Iran. As of early December, according to the Human Rights Activists in Iran news agency, at least 458 people had been killed by police, including 63 children, and more than 18,000 had been detained. This month the government executed the first protester on charges of “corruption on land” (efsad-fil-arz). Shortly after, he sentenced Amir Nasr-Azadani, considered the best Iranian footballer of all time – who lives in Dubai – to be executed for supporting the protesters and urging the Army not to allow the country “to be covered in innocent blood.” ”.
Governments, institutions and social organizations from around the world protested the violence of the Iranian regime, which prompted the United States to present a draft resolution to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations Organization, which is made up of 45 countries, to expel to Iran from the Women’s Commission for the lack of women’s rights in that Asian nation. The controversial project was voted on Wednesday and approved with 29 votes in favor, 8 against and 16 abstentions, among which was that of Mexico, which argued that Iran’s departure from a multilateral forum, such as that of women, did not contribute neither to dialogue nor to international cooperation.
Mexico expressed its condemnation of “any” act of repression and the disproportionate use of force, but said that its expulsion was not the way to express concern about what is happening in Iran, but to discuss them in the Commission, if it is considered that it does not comply with their values. “A simple empty seat will not contribute at all to improve the situation of women,” the Mexican representatives pointed out.
Expelling Iran was a matter of principle, which President Andrés Manuel López Obrador always says should govern the conduct of politicians. Removing him because of what his moral police – already dismantled – did against Masha Amin is an ethical position, which the president also presumes to have. Supporting an action of this nature against the Iranian autocrats does help to exert pressure against that regime and that their acts against women and repressors have an increasingly higher cost, because under this criterion, for example, South Africa would continue to live under the regime of Apartheid, because Mexico would not have joined the international pressures to force that authoritarian government to end the racial segregation that paved the way for Nelson Mandela to be president.
But once again, López Obrador chose the side of history of the authoritarians and dictators, and of the regimes where, in order to preserve power, they disrupt legality, as in these days where he has defended ex-president Pedro Castillo at all costs, who to avoid a impeachment trial in Congress, violated the Constitution to dissolve Congress and begin to rule by decree.
He did the same when right-wing extremists stormed the Capitol to derail Joe Biden’s victory for the Presidency, encouraged by former President Donald Trump, overlapping the actions of whom he calls “my friend.” He replicated his trend when President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. And before the consolidation of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and the repression in Cuba.
López Obrador’s actions are not those of a democrat, as he claims to be, but those of an autocrat, which he claims not to be. Yet the side of history he has chosen repeatedly and consistently leans toward the autocrats, not the democrats. These are hard facts, not cheap morning talk.
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