Mexico

Through its groundbreaking Inform Women, Transform Lives campaign, The Carter Center partners with city leaders worldwide to raise awareness about women’s right to access information and to help cities reach women with valuable information and essential municipal services. 

Access to this information empowers women with a stronger voice, enabling them to participate in public life, utilize public services, and make more informed decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities. In Mexico, this project has partnered with the cities of Mérida and Guadalajara.

How It Started

Beginning in 1986, the Carter Center’s Latin America and Caribbean Program (formerly known as the Americas Program) tracked Mexico’s elections informally and offered suggestions for strengthening the process.

Our Work and Methods

• The Center led five official missions beginning in 1992 to observe election preparations and implementation of electoral law.
• On each visit, the Center worked with authorities who were striving to overcome past problems and transform Mexico’s politics.
• The Latin America and Caribbean Program also commissioned a report titled “Electoral Justice in Mexico: From Oxymoron to Legal Norm in Less Than a Decade” by Todd Eisenstadt, assistant professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.

Impacts

• In July 2000, a Carter Center delegation witnessed a historic transition of power that ended 71 years of rule by one party. Overall, observers pronounced the elections near perfect, “ushering in a new era of Mexican politics.”
• A successful election was possible due to significant electoral reforms over the preceding decade, including the creation of the autonomous Federal Election Institute, state-of-the-art voter identification cards, and an electoral court to rule on disputes and certify results.

How It Started

Although Latin America spends less on defense than most other regions, government spending on expensive weapons systems often diverts scarce foreign exchange from more effective investments such as education. Further, when one nation spends more on defense, other nations do the same, creating dangerous international tensions.

Our Work and Methods

• Concerned about an arms race in Latin America, the Carter Center’s Council of Presidents and Prime Ministers of the Americas urged governments in the region to pause before embarking on major arms purchases.

Impacts

• From April 1997 to March 1998, 28 current and 14 former heads of government – including Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León – signed a pledge to accept a two-year moratorium on purchasing sophisticated weapons.

This project ended in 1998.

How It Started

In 2001, the Carter Center’s International Task Force for Disease Eradication suggested that it was possible to eliminate river blindness in the Americas with twice-yearly doses of Mectizan® to at least 85% of those at risk.

Our Work and Methods

• Through semiannual distribution of the drug Mectizan^® (donated by Merck), along with health education, onchocerciasis was eliminated from South Chiapas in 2012, and from North Chiapas and Oaxaca by the late 2000s.

• After a three-year post-treatment phase to ensure the disease did not reoccur, Mexico announced in September 2015 that it had become the third country to receive official WHO verification of elimination of river blindness.

This project ended in 2015.