Some fashionistas pride themselves on having an outfit for every occasion. Julia Klug, a Mexican activist and veteran protester, prides herself on having an outfit for every demonstration.
Whether dressed up as a pig, priest, president or the pope, Klug has been a staple of Mexico City protests for more than two decades, bringing a splash of color to her chosen causes with her collection of hundreds of disguises.
Klug, 65, does not shy from wearing her costumes to even the most serious of protests.
Photo: AFP
Earlier this month, she donned a Donald Trump mask and a US flag suit for a protest outside the US embassy — where she pretended to mow down fellow demonstrators with a toy rifle, in protest at the Aug. 3 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that killed 22 people, including eight Mexicans.
“I use my own body to create every kind of image you can imagine, in order to get people’s attention,” she said.
Klug considers herself “a citizen committed to justice,” she said during a tour of what she calls her “museum”: the large room where she keeps her massive collection of costumes.
Photo: AFP
Klug has no shortage of props to enhance her performances, from fake blood to plastic excrement to a giant magnifying glass she recently made to protest allegations the Mexican government spied on journalists and human-rights activists.
She says her roots as an activist go back to her own traumatic experience as a child in Guatemala, where she was born.
Her mother died giving birth to her, and her father gave her to another family to raise. As a child, she was raped by her neighborhood priest — only to be beaten by her adoptive family when she told them what had happened.
She moved to Mexico as a young woman, and attended her first protest in 1997: a demonstration against Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, founder of the ultraconservative Legion of Christ congregation, who was accused of sexually abusing minors and was forced to resign in 2006.
Immediately, the gray-haired, green-eyed widow — who, despite her fierce fighting spirit, speaks in a sweet, gentle lilt — caught the protest bug. She has attended hundreds of protests since.
The ones closest to her heart are marches against abuses by the Catholic clergy, and she has no shortage of disguises for them: priest outfits, various sets of pope garb and a “slutty nun” costume to protest pedophile priests.
She said she has been attacked and received death threats for her activism.
She even suspects foul play may have been involved when her son, a Mexican air force pilot, was killed when his plane crashed in 2010.
Instead of giving up her activism, she uses the pension she receives from the air force to buy more materials for her costumes, which she mostly makes by hand.
“As long as corrupt politicians and pedophiles continue doing that crap, I’ll keep marching,” she said.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
‘TOXIC CLIMATE’: ‘I don’t really recognize Labour anymore... The idea that you can implement far-right ideas in order to stop the far right is nonsense,’ a protester said Tens of thousands of people on Saturday marched through central London to protest against the far right, weeks ahead of local elections and six months after Britain saw one of its largest far-right demonstrations. Organized by hundreds of civic groups, including trade unions, anti-racism campaigners and Muslim representative bodies, Saturday’s Together Alliance event was billed as the biggest in UK history to counter right-wing extremism. A separate pro-Palestinian march had also converged with the main rally. While organizers claimed 500,000 had turned out in total, the police gave a figure of about 50,000. Protesters carrying placards with slogans such as
RSS