What the designation entails
A capacity audience attended the announcement at the Mexico City museum. The plaque marks its participation in a boycott campaign backed by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks economic, cultural and institutional pressure on Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.
Participating institutions are asked to examine their business relationships and avoid partnerships with companies accused of benefiting from Israeli policies toward Palestinians or other serious human rights abuses. The initiative also asks cultural venues and public spaces to reject activities that BDS identifies as supporting Israeli apartheid or violations of Palestinian rights.
The BDS movement uses the English name "Apartheid Free Zones" for the designation; in Mexico, the Spanish term is "espacio libre de apartheid." According to the Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (MSP), which participated in the ceremony, the museum is the first institution in Latin America and the third worldwide to join, Urgent Matter reported.
Earlier participants include Seattle's African American Heritage Museum & Cultural Center, which designated its site an Apartheid Free Zone during a vigil on May 18, 2021. Kunsthal Gent, a contemporary art space in Belgium, also lists its participation on its website, though it does not give a date.
Institutional ties and calls for sanctions
Speakers at the ceremony addressed how institutions could put the commitment into practice. Gilberto Conde, a researcher at El Colegio de México, pointed to Google and Amazon, whose involvement in Israel's military and surveillance infrastructure has drawn criticism from the BDS National Committee and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Representing the MSP, Tania Valadez said the museum "can refuse to be complicit" through the choices it makes as an institution.
The gathering included political organizations, academics, activist collectives, journalists and artists. Silvia Rabinovich, a philosopher and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, called for sanctions against Israel.
In a video message to the ceremony, Mexico's permanent representative to the Organization of American States, Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez, described ending apartheid in Palestinian territories as a fundamental demand for justice, human dignity and respect for international law, La Jornada reported.
Rafael Barajas Durán, the political cartoonist and writer known as "El Fisgón," announced another planned declaration. He said the political training institute of Mexico's ruling Morena party, which he heads, would also become an Apartheid-Free Space.
The director's political case
Museum director Gabriela Pérez Noriega presented the decision as an expression of the institution's support for Palestinian rights and BDS. She linked solidarity with national liberation movements, particularly the Palestinian cause, to Trotsky's legacy and the revolutionary Marxist tradition.
"The great Russian revolutionary defended these principles throughout his life, and specifically in the movement he founded in the 1930s," she said. Calling the designation "not surprising," Pérez Noriega described it as a modest contribution to the Palestinian struggle and the international BDS campaign.
She traced that position to Marxist opposition to Zionism in Tsarist Russia, saying Marxists regarded the ideology as reactionary and contrary to both Jewish workers' interests and the wider struggle for working-class emancipation. She also said the Revolutionary Communist League, the Fourth International's small Palestinian section, opposed the UN's 1947 partition plan for Palestine and the establishment of Israel. The MSP belongs to the Fourth International founded by Trotsky.
Pérez Noriega also placed the declaration within what she described as growing international rejection of Israeli policies and their political supporters. She criticized an alliance "between the most reactionary forces of imperialism, first of all the government of Donald Trump in the United States, and Zionism, personified not only by Benjamin Netanyahu but by the entire Israeli political class." That alliance, she said, is "increasingly repudiated worldwide."
She cited Pew Research Center findings from a survey conducted between February and May: 59% of Mexican adults viewed Israel unfavorably, while 23% viewed it favorably. Organizers and participants described the museum's action as a commitment to speak out about Palestinian suffering and demands for justice rather than remain silent.
A museum shaped by exile
The museum occupies Trotsky's former home in Mexico City's Coyoacán borough. The Russian revolutionary arrived in Mexico in 1937 after President Lázaro Cárdenas granted him asylum. In August 1940, Ramón Mercader, an agent of Joseph Stalin's secret police, assassinated him at the house, attacking him with an ice axe.
The house has served as a museum since 1990. A plaque at its entrance records that diplomat Javier Wimer Zambrano founded the Right of Asylum Institute, which operates the museum, on August 21, 1990.
