There’s no law that says elected officials need to keep their campaign promises. But angry voters in one Chiapas municipality have their own way of punishing their mayor: dress him up as a woman.
Residents of San Andrés Puerto Rico, in the municipality of Huixtán, dressed up Mayor Javier Sebastián Jiménez Sántiz and another municipal official, Luis Ton, in traditional women’s clothing and forced them to beg for money from passing motorists on the San Cristóbal-Ocosingo highway.
The community is demanding that the mayor fulfill a campaign promise to provide 3 million pesos (US $158,000) from a municipal development fund for improving the community’s water system and other public services. They are also asking the state government to investigate the mayor to determine if he stole the money.
The mayor, who has denied any wrongdoing, said there is no money in the development fund because it has already been distributed equally among the municipality’s communities.
Jiménez and Ton, as well as two other municipal officials, were taken hostage in San Andrés Puerto Rico on Friday and had not been released as of Tuesday.
Dressing men in authority in women’s clothing as a way to humiliate them for breaking promises is a local custom in the area.
This was the third time that it’s happened to Mayor Jiménez. The first was in April in the community of La Era, while the second was in San Lázaro Chili, where residents were angry with him for not having visited their community even though he had been in office for a year.
