Ifigenia Martínez, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies President Passes Away at 94
the president of the Chamber of Deputies of Mexico, Ifigenia Martínez, who passed away this Saturday at the age of 94. Photo: X/ @Samuel_Prieto
October 6, 2024 Hour: 5:22 pm
The president of the Chamber of Deputies of Mexico, Ifigenia Martínez with a long left-wing and human rights activist life, passed away this Saturday at the age of 94, reported the Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum.
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Despite her health problems, using a wheelchair and oxygen, Martínez attended the swearing-in ceremony of Sheinbaum last Tuesday, October 1, where the outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador first handed her the presidential sash, which she then passed on to Sheinbaum.
“On June 2, I voted for Ifigenia Martínez, a consistent woman with convictions. 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 teacher Ifigenia,” Sheinbaum noted in a farewell message on social media.
For his part, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) deputies Coordinator Ricardo Monrealm said “such an extraordinary woman rest in peace and may her loved ones find swift resignation.”
Martínez, along with Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo (1933-2023), founded the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989.
She studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and was one of the main participants in the student movement of 1968.
Among her countless achievements are being the first Mexican to obtain a master’s degree in economics from Harvard University, the first woman to lead the Faculty of Economics at UNAM, and being a staunch defender of university autonomy in 1968, in addition to serving as an ambassador to the UN.
She was also a co-founder of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and received the national economics award.
As a politician, she has served as a federal deputy several times and has been a senator twice.
Additionally, on October 5, 2021, the Mexican Senate approved granting the Belisario Domínguez medal to Martínez (Mexico City, 1930) “for her highly relevant and significant career,” according to Dante Delgado, coordinator in the Senate of Movimiento Ciudadano.
Martínez was the seventh woman to receive the highest civil distinction awarded by the Senate since the establishment of this recognition in 1954.
Last August, by a majority vote, Ifigenia Martínez was elected as the president of the Board of Directors for the first year of legislative exercise, and therefore she was the one who handed the presidential sash to Sheinbaum.
Autor: ACJ
Fuente: EFE