Indigenous presidential independent pre-candidate Maria de Jesus Patricio, 'Marichuy' smiles in a meeting with university students in Mexico City, Mexico February 12, 2018. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The first indigenous woman to run for the Mexican presidency was injured and at least one other person killed when a van in which she was traveling was involved in an accident in western Baja California state on Wednesday, campaign social media said.

Maria de Jesus Patricio, running as an independent candidate for president in the July election, suffered a fractured forearm in the accident, according to Carlos Godinez, a state emergency services official.

The person killed, one of 11 in the van, was not identified.

Patricio, known by the nickname Marichuy, previously served as the spokeswoman for the National Indigenous Congress, or CNI, the political arm of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.

“Our spokeswoman Marichuy and councilor Lucero Islava were injured,” the CNI said on its Facebook page without providing further details about the accident.

Independent presidential aspirants have until this weekend to gather some 866,000 voter signatures in at least 17 Mexican states to appear on the July ballot.

A traditional healer and native Nahua speaker, Patricio has not yet met the signature requirement.</s>Indigenous presidential candidate María de Jesús Patricio was among eight people injured in a motor vehicle accident yesterday that left one person dead.

Patricio, commonly known as Marichuy, was traveling with 10 campaign workers in a van on the transpeninsular highway in Mulegé, Baja California Sur, when it left the road and overturned.

The candidate suffered a fractured arm and a head injury and was flown to a hospital in La Paz for treatment.

Eloísa Vega, a state representative on the council that is coordinating Patricio’s campaign, was killed in the crash, which occurred between San Ignacio and Vizcaíno.

Patricio had met earlier in the day with professors and students at the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur and was en route to Baja California.

With just four days to go until the deadline for independent candidates to collect the requisite number of signatures from supporters, Patricio is not likely to get her name on the ballot. As of Tuesday she had collected just 241,000 of the 866,000 she needs.

But yesterday she told her audience at the university that the indigenous community would win regardless because her campaign had met its objective to raise awareness of the problems facing Mexico’s indigenous people.

An outpouring of support via Twitter yesterday evening followed Patricio’s accident. President Enrique Peña Nieto was joined by several presidential candidates in wishing her well.

Stories from our archives that you might enjoy</s>An indigenous woman who is running for president of Mexico was injured Wednesday and a member of her campaign was killed when the van transporting them ran off the road, her party said.

Maria de Jesus Patricio, who is known to supporters as "Marichuy," has been touring the country trying to collect the signatures needed to become the first indigenous woman ever to make it onto the presidential ballot in Mexico.

The accident happened in a remote region of the state of Baja California Sur, which forms the southern part of the Baja California peninsula.

"Our spokeswoman, Marichuy, and councilwoman Lucero Islava were injured," said a statement from the National Indigenous Congress, the organization backing her candidacy.

Another councilman was "very badly" injured, it said. It did not specify what kind of injuries they sustained.

A woman who worked on the campaign was killed in the accident, it said.

"I am saddened by the accident that Maria de Jesus Patricio Martinez and her companions had," he wrote on Twitter.

"The navy is helping provide medical attention and ground and air transport for the injured."

Marichuy, 54, a traditional healer from the Nahuatl ethnic group, is a long shot to win the July 1 election to succeed Pena Nieto, and may not even gather the million signatures required to stand as an independent candidate.

But she has drawn widespread grassroots support in a country where never-ending corruption scandals and brutally violent crime have voters fed up with the traditional political parties.</s>MEXICO CITY, Feb 14 (Reuters) - A van carrying the first indigenous woman to run for the Mexican presidency was involved in a highway accident on Wednesday in western Baja California state that killed at least one person and injured the candidate, according to social media associated with her campaign.

Maria de Jesus Patricio, running as an independent candidate for president in the July election, was injured in the accident, her party said on Facebook. The individual killed, one of 11 people in the van, was not identified.

Patricio, known by the nickname Marichuy, previously served as the spokeswoman for the National Indigenous Congress, or CNI, the political arm of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.

"Our spokeswoman Marichuy and councilor Lucero Islava were injured," the CNI said on its Facebook page without providing further details about the accident.

Independent presidential aspirants have until this weekend to gather some 866,000 voter signatures in at least 17 Mexican states to appear on the July ballot.

A traditional healer and native Nahua speaker, Patricio has not yet met the signature requirement.</s>MEXICO CITY, Feb 14 (Reuters) - The first indigenous woman to run for the Mexican presidency was injured and at least one other person killed when a van in which she was traveling was involved in an accident in western Baja California state on Wednesday, campaign social media said.

Maria de Jesus Patricio, running as an independent candidate for president in the July election, suffered a fractured forearm in the accident, according to Carlos Godinez, a state emergency services official.

The person killed, one of 11 in the van, was not identified.

Patricio, known by the nickname Marichuy, previously served as the spokeswoman for the National Indigenous Congress, or CNI, the political arm of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.

"Our spokeswoman Marichuy and councilor Lucero Islava were injured," the CNI said on its Facebook page without providing further details about the accident.

Independent presidential aspirants have until this weekend to gather some 866,000 voter signatures in at least 17 Mexican states to appear on the July ballot.

A traditional healer and native Nahua speaker, Patricio has not yet met the signature requirement. (Reporting by David Alire Garcia, Diego Ore and Lizbeth Diaz; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Paul Tait)</s>MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities say dozens of dolphins have been found stranded on a rocky beach along the coast of Baja California Sur state.

The federal environmental protection agency says 54 of the marine mammals came onshore in the area of La Paz Bay. Workers attended to the dolphins and saved 33 of them, but 21 died.

The agency said Tuesday in a statement that they were short-beaked common dolphins. Marine experts believe an attack by a group of bottlenose dolphins provoked the mass beaching.

Photos released by the agency show dozens of dolphins washed up on the rocks and lined up in the sand, overseen by white-coated personnel.</s>MEXICO CITY -- Mexican independent presidential candidate Maria de Jesus Patricio was injured in a road crash that also killed a person riding in her caravan and injured two others Wednesday.

The National Indigenous Council said in a brief statement that a vehicle carrying Patricio and 10 other people went off a highway in the state of Baja California Sur.

The group said a woman it did not identify was killed and council member Francisco Grado was in serious condition. Patricio and council member Lucero Islava also had injuries, the statement said, but gave no details.

The newspaper La Jornada published a photo of emergency workers assisting Patricio as she walked next to an ambulance and a picture of a white van resting on its roof in a desert countryside. The paper said Patricio's left arm was broken.

Patricio, a Nahua indigenous healer from Jalisco state known popularly as "Marichuy," has been running as an independent candidate seeking to get a place on the July 1 presidential ballot.

However, days before a deadline to gather some 866,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot, she is well short of the requirement.</s>About sixteen men and women were dancing to drums in front of the bandstand in Oaxaca’s central square on January 29. A small crowd gathered to watch the dancers and wait for María de Jesús Patricio Martínez—better known as Marichuy—the Zapatista candidate for president of Mexico, and the first indigenous woman to run for the highest office in the country’s history.

The dancers wore bandanas, loincloths, and colorful skirts, with rattles on their ankles above bare feet. A few looked like young hippie-types in dreadlocks. Others were older, less ostentatious, wearing work boots and jeans. One man danced in an enormous gold, feathered headdress with a skull on his forehead.

In the center of the drum circle there were flowers and candles, offerings of bread, corn and squash, and copal incense emitting thick clouds of smoke.

Marichuy was on her way, a man announced from the stage. She was still marching with her supporters down Independence Street toward the zocalo.

Two of the dancers stopped and blew conch shells, and the whole group knelt and prayed, turning to face each of the four cardinal directions.

They thanked Mother Earth, asking forgiveness for the damage people do to her every day.

They shouted “Viva el consejo indigena!” (Long live the indigenous council!) and “Viva la rebeldia y la resistencia de Oaxaca!” (Long live the rebellion and the resistance in Oaxaca!)

Banners tied to the railing around the bandstand featured fabric paintings of Che Guevara next to Marichuy, and slogans using millennial-style gender-free language: “Nadie detiene a los guerrerxs—ni al dolor ni a su rabia” (No one holds back the warriors—not their pain nor their rage.)

Another banner was emblazoned with the Zapatista slogan: “Nunca Más un Mexico Sin Nosotr@s” (Never again a Mexico without us).

About an hour and a half past the appointed time, the band arrived: a Oaxacan brass band of the type that marches through the streets for festivals, weddings, and religious parades. The sound of horns overtook the pounding of the drums. A troop of white-clad stilt walkers marched in front. Marichuy came behind them, surrounded by onlookers and pursued by photographers and TV cameras.

Marichuy, a fifty-four-year-old traditional-medicine healer, was born in the state of Jalisco. She is the spokeswoman for the National Indigenous Congress, an organization formed in 1996 as part of the Zapatista movement, to be “the home of all indigenous peoples . . . to strengthen their struggles of resistance and rebellion.”

The Zapatistas have not been making as many international headlines lately. At least not compared to the worldwide sensation they created when they first took up arms in Chiapas in 1994 to resist NAFTA, as well as repression by the Mexican state, the seizure of their lands and livelihoods, and the entire global capitalist system.

Hundreds of reporters, movie stars, literary figures, and politicians from around the globe trooped down to the jungle in Chiapas to find out more about the indigenous uprising against big capital, and to interview the mysterious and charismatic Subcomandante Marcos.

Marcos has retired. But the Zapatistas are still a presence in Mexico—especially in the southern state of Chiapas, which, like Oaxaca, is poor, rural, and indigenous.

This year, with Marichuy’s campaign, the Zapatistas are entering the realm of electoral politics.

The goal, according to comments by members of the indigenous council and even the candidate herself, is not to win the presidency.

Instead, the campaign aims to give voice to the voiceless, and make an indigenous, feminist perspective a part of Mexico’s national presidential debate.

But first Marichuy’s campaign must gather 860,000 signatures by February 19. An iPad-wielding signature gatherer in Oaxaca—an earnest, bearded young man—conceded that, a month before the deadline, the campaign had gathered only slightly more than 100,000 of the 860,000 signatures required.

The process is daunting. I watched this young man take a photo of each citizen who signed the petition, and then take a picture of both sides of each citizen’s voter registration card, then enter the data on that card into the iPad by hand, and then ask for a signature.

Like voter ID laws in the United States, Mexico’s candidate-nomination process seems designed to put a damper on democracy. It took a few minutes for the volunteer I observed to gather signatures from each shopper at an organic market in Oaxaca. But without reliable Internet access or voter registration cards, Marichuy’s base of support in the remote villages of Southern Mexico won’t be able to sign.

The hill is getting higher as the February 19 deadline for gathering signatures nears. But Marichuy is forging on, and delivering a message you will never hear from the mainstream candidates.

When the parade arrived at the zocalo in Oaxaca, and Marichuy finally took the stage—almost two hours behind schedule—she was preceded by an array of speakers welcoming her and delivering their own messages about injustice and repression in Mexico.

The first speaker was a disabled woman who spoke from a wheelchair about her desire for a society that included everyone, did not look down with pity on the disabled, and was not led exclusively by privileged men.

A spokesperson from the newly formed Oaxacan Assembly for Sexual Diversity declared, “There can be no political liberty without sexual liberty.”

An indigenous feminist activist gave horrifying statistics on the scourge of “femicide.” “We are the cheapest element in the capitalist system,” she said of the poor, working women murdered by the thousands every year in Mexico.

Finally, Marichuy herself stepped up to the microphone.

“These are problems that are not new,” she said of the list of injustices the speakers before her had enumerated.

“Up there, on top, they say that everything is fine. We’ve seen that’s not true.”

Focusing on the massive electrical dams and other projects that are threatening indigenous land, she said, “What we get when we plead [for justice] is jail, death, and contamination from large projects that don’t benefit anyone in the pueblos.”

Then she got to the point: destroying the capitalist system.

“Indigenous people are ready to fight, and we won’t stop. We will work together to construct a new Mexico from below, and to destroy this grand capitalist system that is destroying us.”

It was not a raucous event. But members of the crowd launched a few favorite call-and-response cheers:

Those chants stirred memories of bigger, more passionate crowds in Chiapas and Oaxaca, where indigenous people and workers have clashed with police in recent years and, at times, la revolución seemed close at hand.

Now the revolution is in a different phase.

“I think what Marichuy is doing in her campaign is admirable, and I support her doing it,” said human-rights ombudsman and political reformer Emilio Álvarez Icaza, when I spoke to him in his Mexico City office about the election. “But I wish the message were a little broader. They need to speak to people in Mexico City, and other people beyond the indigenous villages, to truly create a national movement.”

The Zapatista movement no longer has celebrity spokesman Subcomandante Marcos, who stopped hosting Hollywood stars and issuing his entertaining, philosophical treatises from the jungle when he retired in 2014. And, thanks to the Occupy-like “bottom-up,” communal philosophy of the indigenous council’s approach to politics, a multitude of voices must be heard.

It might be a recipe for good government, but it can make deadly political theater. No fewer than ten local speakers had to be heard ahead of the candidate in Oaxaca, who, when she arrived, spoke softly and earnestly for about half an hour before she departed the stage, evading the cameras that were set up nearby and skipping a scheduled press conference.

Still, her run is historic and timely. Focusing on the massive destruction of multinational capitalism, the connection between environmental protection and social justice, and the sound idea that women and indigenous people have something important to say about the values that could save our planet, Marichuy has an urgent, globally significant message:

“We, the indigenous people, say we don’t agree with this system—to be exploited, to have them continue to destroy our communities. . . . It should be the people who give the orders and the government that obeys.”

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive.</s>Mexican independent presidential candidate Maria de Jesus Patricio was injured in a crash that also killed a person riding in her caravan and injured two others Wednesday.

The National Indigenous Council said in a brief statement that an SUV carrying Patricio and 10 other people went off a highway in the state of Baja California Sur.

The group said a woman was killed and council member Francisco Grado was in serious condition. Patricio and council member Lucero Islava also had injuries, the statement said without giving any details.

Patricio has been running as an independent candidate seeking to get a place on the July 1 presidential ballot. However, days before a deadline to gather some 866,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot, she is well short of the requirement.</s>MEXICO CITY — Mexican independent presidential candidate Maria de Jesus Patricio has been hurt in a crash that also killed a person riding in her caravan and injured two others.

The National Indigenous Council says in a brief statement that an SUV carrying Patricio and 10 other people went off a highway Wednesday in the state of Baja California Sur.

It says a woman is dead and council member Francisco Grado is in serious condition. It adds that Patricio and council member Lucero Islava sustained unspecified injuries.

Patricio has been running as an independent candidate seeking to get a place on the July 1 presidential ballot. However, days before a deadline to gather some 866,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot, she is well short of the requirement.
María de Jesús "Marichuy" Patricio Martínez, the National Indigenous Congress's independent pre-candidate for President of Mexico, is involved in a road accident while campaigning in Baja California Sur. Marichuy is reported as injured while a passenger of the vehicle is dead.