By Pedro Pablo Cortés - EFE
Mexico City, Dec 31 (EFE).- For the LGBTI+ community in Mexico, 2022 will go down in history as the year in which equal marriage became a reality in all the states of the country, more than a decade after it was recognized by First time in the Mexican capital.
Although Mexico City legalized same-sex marriage in 2010 and the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the state civil codes that prevented this right in 2015, just this year all the states recognized this figure each on their own.
[Tamaulipas legalizes equal marriage and from now on it is a reality throughout Mexico]
Just this year, 8 of the 32 entities in the country, a quarter, reformed their civil codes in favor of equal marriage:
Yucatán, Jalisco, Veracruz, Durango, Guerrero, Tabasco, the State of Mexico and, finally, Tamaulipas.
"This wave of reforms that have been taking place very little by little, which took 10 years or more, has just culminated this year, in these last few weeks," said Antonio Sotelo Gutiérrez, a law professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM). ).
A long but historic fight
In Mexico, where 5 million LGBTI+ people officially live, equal marriage was recognized for the first time in 2010, when the reform of the civil code of the then Federal District, now Mexico City, came into force.
The Mexican capital was followed by Quintana Roo in 2012 and Coahuila in 2014.
A couple hugs after getting married during a collective wedding within the framework of LGBTQ+ pride month, on the esplanade of the Civil Registry in Mexico City on June 24, 2022. ALFREDO ESTRELLA / AFP via Getty Images
But given the omission of other states, civil organizations such as México Egalitarian promoted appeals that led to the historic ruling of the Supreme Court in 2015, when it declared unconstitutional the state civil codes that ignored the rights of LGBTI+ couples.
"It seems like a very long period, but for the creation of a right of this type,
10 years, the truth is that historically it is almost a record time, if we think of other major issues such as racism and women's rights,"
indicates the Professor Gutierrez Sotelo.
Despite the fact that the local congresses resisted reforming their civil codes and public opinion remained adverse in 2015, "it was that trajectory of the Court that did not waver, that did not regress, which was already leading" to the recognition of equal marriage, adds the academic.
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A message of equality
The right to civil marriage "is a matter of equality before the law", so this milestone is an important message from the State, considers the lawyer Marco Antonio Moreno, operational director of the organization México Egalitarian, which promoted the judicial fight of this right.
The expert explains that this figure
"has a very special legal effect"
because "it is a space that the law has created in which many of the rights of inheritance or social security, access to health or family benefits, even sometimes prosecutors.
"When the State begins to recognize equal marriage, it also sends a message to the rest of society: we are already reducing discrimination, we are increasing protection for the non-heterosexual population, that is, for the LGBTI+ population," he says.
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A milestone in the middle of slopes
Despite the milestone of equal marriage, the human rights defender lists pending issues for the LGBTI+ community such as recognition of the gender identity of trans people and the supply of antiretroviral drugs for people with HIV.
It also
warns about hate-motivated murders and LGBTphobia,
a crime in which Mexico ranks second in Latin America, according to Fundación Arcoíris's National Observatory of LGBT Hate Crimes.
[A couple of Mexican men make history by getting married]
In addition, experts agree that there is
a lack of legal and constitutional recognition of diverse families,
and that in practice discrimination is eradicated.
Even so, the judicial fight for equal marriage prompted the Supreme Court and congresses to begin debating the sexual and reproductive rights of LGBTI+ people, for which it marked the movement of sexual diversity.
“This judicial incidence opened a new way to litigate human rights violations, that is, it was possible to establish a new path and it was possible to speak in the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation on these issues, on issues of sexual rights and reproductive”, concludes Moreno.
