LOOK: Outgoing Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (R) gives the presidential sash to the President of the General Congress of Mexico, Ifigenia Martinez (C), next to Mexico's President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum during the inauguration ceremony at the Congress of the Union in Mexico City on 1 October 2024. | Photo courtesy of Alfredo ESTRELLA / AFP
Photo courtesy of Alfredo ESTRELLA / AFP
Tributes have poured in for Mexico's pioneering democracy and women's rights advocate Ifigenia Martinez, who died aged 94 just days after overseeing the inauguration of the country's first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
"On October 1, I received the presidential sash from her hands. Today she left us. I send all my love and solidarity to her family, colleagues and friends. Farewell, dear Ifigenia," Sheinbaum wrote on social media late Saturday.
The National Autonomous University of Mexico hailed Martinez as a distinguished economist and a "tireless fighter for freedoms and democracy."
A visibly frail Martinez, president of the lower house of Congress, had transferred the presidential sash to Sheinbaum from outgoing leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador at her swearing in ceremony on Tuesday.
"Handing over the presidential sash to the first woman president is one of the greatest honors of my life," she posted on social media Friday.
"The arrival of Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum to the presidency is the culmination of a struggle that entire generations of women have gone through. Women who, with courage, have challenged the limits of our times," she wrote.
Sheinbaum recalled that she had symbolically voted for Martinez, "a woman of substance and conviction," in the June 2 presidential election that the former Mexico City mayor won by a landslide.
Born on 16 June 1930, Martinez is recognized as the first Mexican woman to obtain a doctorate in economics from Harvard University.
She was one of the founders of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in the 1980s, and later joined the Morena party co-founded by Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum.
Senior ruling party figure Marcelo Ebrard described her as "an extraordinary economist, a fighter for democracy and gender equality all her life."
Martinez participated in the student movement of the 1960s. Its bloody repression on 2 October 1968 was condemned Wednesday by Sheinbaum, who offered an official apology as one of her first acts in office.
The following day Sheinbaum, a scientist by training, unveiled a package of proposals to boost gender equality.
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