Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service, first hand accounts

of events that have shaped our world. I'm Mike Lanshin. Today we're going back to 1982

when a leading human rights campaigner Rosario Ibarra became the first woman to run for

President in Mexico. Her decision to stand was political but also highly personal as I've

been finding out. It's the early 1980s and crowds marched through the streets of Mexico

city bearing a huge banner plastered with black and white photos of mostly young men and women.

These are the faces of Mexico's political prisoners and of people who've disappeared without trace,

kidnapped or killed presumably by security forces. Their desperate families are demanding

information that the head of the crowd is Rosario Ibarra, an energetic small dark-haired woman.

You could always see her sadness in her face and her commitment to the struggle mixed in with her anger.

This is Rosario Ibarra's eldest daughter, also called Rosario. What defined her was her optimism

and the conviction that she was in a fight for justice. That fight for justice consumed most of

Rosario Ibarra's life. It thrust her into becoming a champion for human rights and later to become

the first woman to stand for President. It was a long and difficult journey that had begun back in the

1970s. Across the whole of Latin America, the 1960s and 70s were a time of upheaval. They'd been left

winged revolutions in Cuba and later Nicaragua. Popular protests were growing and from Argentina to Guatemala

to El Salvador, armed guerrilla groups were trying to unseat military regimes. Mexico wasn't under

military rule, but it wasn't exempt from political and social turmoil. Nick Caster is a London-based

writer and broadcaster in Latin America. The government in Mexico had been the same party since

1929. The institutional revolutionary party was a pre. And after being 40 years in power, it was

becoming questioned. There had been student revolt in the 1960s, which had led to a massacre in 1968.

And though it was democratic in the sense that they had periodic elections,

...