Lysistrata tried it in ancient Greece. Now Josefina Vazquez Mota employs the strategy.

Vazquez Mota is a trailing candidate in Mexico for the ruling National Action Party. As the first woman presidential candidate in the nation’s history, she has sometimes met enthusiastic crowds of women.

At one campaign gathering late last week in Mazatlan, Vazquez Mota said this to the boisterous crowd, according to the Rio Doce newspaper (h/t to the Narco Mexico blog):

"Everybody get out to vote, but don't do it alone, go with 15 or 30 other votes, go early before anyone else gets to the polls, invite your children, your friends and your partners: warn your partner (a man) that if he doesn't go there won't be any cuchi cuchi for a month.”

If he does get up, then give him double “cuchi-cuchi,” she added.

With that outburst, Vazquez Mota introduced a new expression into the campaign argot – one that has engendered countless columns, political cartoons and spoofs. Cuchi-cuchi is, of course, a made-up expression. It doesn’t appear in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, the final arbiter of Spanish usage.

Regardless, the concept is not new. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the main character gathers the women of ancient Greece and urges them to deny sex to their husbands until a peace treaty has been signed to end the Peloponnesian War.

In Colombia in the mid-1990s, armed forces Commander Manuel Jose Bonnet (a big buff of all things Greek) picked up on the Lysistrata theme, encouraging Colombian women to deny sex to leftist guerrillas taking part in a kidnapping campaign. I don’t think his plea had any effect, but if I remember correctly the government later sent him as ambassador to Greece.