Mexico’s explicitly feminist foreign policy, announced by the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs in January, is a first among Latin American nations. The policy, which mandates gender equality and freedom from gender-based violence in Mexico’s foreign ministry and foreign service, is intended to raise awareness of women’s contributions to the field and to prioritize the pursuit of international relations with a gender perspective and an intersectional feminist framework, meaning engagement with interconnected categories and domains of power.
Mexico had been leading gender equality efforts in the international community even before the feminist foreign policy was formally announced. It pushed for the inclusion of a Gender Action Plan for climate policy at the UN COP25 climate change conference in December 2019, which was adopted. The same year, it began a partnership with the European Union and the United Nations to implement the Spotlight Initiative, a large-scale program aimed at eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific. The initiatives are consistent with the country’s long commitment to multilateralism and its role in advancing global policymaking in key areas such as nuclear nonproliferation and wealth distribution.
