Mexicali’s first same-sex marriage was held on Saturday in the city on the border with California, after officials ended an 18-month fight that led to a Mexican Supreme Court order to permit the wedding, a lawyer for the couple said.
Attorney Jose Luis Marquez Saavedra filed a complaint on Friday against Mexicali officials after authorities again blocked the marriage despite the high court ruling. The lawyer said the city let Victor Fernando Urias Amparo and Victor Manuel Aguirre Espinoza wed on Saturday and he expressed satisfaction that their rights had been upheld.
Urias also said he was satisfied the marriage had been allowed to go forward, telling local reporters that the case showed that “when people work together, this works.”
Mexican federal courts have issued rulings sympathetic to same-sex marriage, but for the most part that has not translated into legalization at the local level.
The nation does not have a single national civil code, but rather one each for the 31 states and the Federal District of Mexico City. Thirty of those entities, including Baja California state, where Mexicali is, do not allow same-sex marriage. Only the capital and the northern state of Coahuila permit such unions.
When Urias and Aguirre first tried to marry in Mexicali in 2013, the local Civil Registry rejected them, saying Mexico’s constitution recognizes only unions of opposite-sex couples. They then went to the Supreme Court and got an injunction authorizing their nuptials.
Civil Registry officials rejected their petition again, saying bureaucratic procedures had not been followed. On a third try in November last year, the registry said the couple had failed to attend mandatory pre-marriage counseling. Then this month, the city hall told them they could not attend those sessions.
Saavedra then filed his complaint on Friday accusing the mayor, two municipal workers and a state employee of failing to fulfill their public duties.
In Latin America, Argentina and Uruguay are the only nations that recognize same-sex marriages. Fifteen other nations around the world also have legalized such unions.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema