[3] The Guadalajara Pride celebrations are usually preluded by a week of cultural events focused on the LGBT community to promote human rights and practice the right of freedom of speech, this week is called Semana de la diversidad (week of the diversity) and host the famous MIX Festival which is the International LGBT Film Festival of Guadalajara (MIX Festival de Diversidad Sexual en Cine y Video), also several art expositions, conferences, AIDS marathons, concerts and several artistic and cultural activities which are a well known characteristic of Guadalajara city, Guadalajara Pride has the special feature that since 2014 took the emblematic Glorieta de la Minerva as the starting point of the Pride and culminating in Guadalajara main square called Plaza de la Liberación.
1983 saw the birth of the Gay Pride group GOHL led by Pedro Preciado Neglete, a tapatio activist who decided to create this group after the discriminatory and arbitrary arrests and harassment of homosexuals by the Metropolitan Police during the Flavio Romero de Velasco government period, which was characterized by repression of the gay community in the 1980s.
The first movement was organized by GOHL the same year in the summer of 1983 in protest of the atmosphere of hostility and repression that violated the civil rights of thousands of homosexuals in the city of Guadalajara.
Years later, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), which is currently a global partnership that works with the United Nations Organization and the European Union to promote the rights of lesbian women, gay men, bisexuals, transgender and intersex people in the world, accepted the offer of Guadalajaran groups (including GOHL) to organise its 1991 world conference.
The reasons for that were not only condemnations by the conservative church led by Archbishop Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, but also threats from both the local and the State (of Jalisco) officials that participants would be arrested, co-operating hotels would be closed and most of all, that police would not offer any protection against death squads.