Mexico Poised to Elect First Woman President

By KENT PATERSON

Unless the world turns upside down, it’s almost certain that a woman will be elected president this year for the first time in Mexico.

Vying for the top job are 62-year-old Claudia Sheinbaum, former Mexico City governor and the standard bearer of the three-party Sigamos Haciendo Historia (Let’s Continue Making History) coalition that supports the left-leaning policies of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), and Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, a 61-year-old former Fox administration official, ex-senator and businesswoman who’s the hopeful of a three-party center-right coalition, Fuerza y Corazón por México (Strength and Heart for Mexico).

A career politician, 38-year-old Jorge Álvarez Máynez, is running on the ticket of the centrist Citizen Movement (MC) party. Yet the male presidential contender faces a tough admittance to the main ring in a political slugfest held during an era that’s popularly dubbed “the time of the women.”

An estimated 98.9 million Mexicans, up from 89.1 million in 2018, will be able to cast ballots June 2 for a new president, Congress, state lawmakers, local officials and nine governorships, including the powerful Mexico City position.

According to the National Electoral Institute (INE), regulator and organizer of the country’s elections, nearly 20,000 offices nationwide are up for grabs.

Essentially, the election boils down to a referendum on whether to continue forward with López Obrador’s Fourth Transformation (4T) program. The 4T’s components include reasserting state control over key economic sectors, curbing corruption and cutting governmental fat, reaffirming national sovereignty, and redistributing wealth to the lower-income, majority sectors of the population.

Given the overwhelming popularity of AMLO’s new social programs that benefit the elderly, low-income students and small farmers, the opposition is loath to openly attack them, much less propose their dismantlement as conservatives in the US do. Gálvez pledges to respect the programs, and even one up AMLO or Sheinbaum, for instance vowing to lower the eligible retirement age to 60 instead of 65. Voucher-like, Gálvez supports granting government financial assistance for some students to attend private universities.

Rated the strong frontrunner in numerous polls, Sheinbaum proclaims that her government will be a “Republic of and for Women” where the legal definition of femicide will be broadened, women searching for disappeared loved ones will be supported, and the spectrum of gender parity in high government positions will be expanded. She proposes granting women aged 60 to 64 a bimonthly half-pension until full retirement so females can enjoy “greater autonomy.”

On International Women’s Day, Gálvez proposed a 10-point women’s policy that aims for a gender violence free country, more day care facilities, free cancer treatment, and a monthly payment of approximately $200 to women in vulnerable situations, La Jornada daily reported.

The candidates’ campaign promises don’t come out of thin air. Decades of protest and organizing by women activists precedes the current electoral contest, bolstered by new waves of women’s activism rippling across the country. Hundreds of thousands of women turned out for marches and rallies in all 32 Mexican states on March 8 International Women’s Day.

For the most part, the movement in the streets fiercely maintains its independence from political parties and elections, but raises grievances and issues that frame the national political agenda.

Coinciding with AMLO’s political philosophy of Mexican humanism and the 4T, Sheinbaum has developed 100 policy proposals broadly organized around greater public-private investments, social welfare, environmental protection, education, healthcare, and “shared prosperity.”

Tracing a journey from a young social activist to the likely first woman president in Mexican history, Sheinbaum studied physics and graduated with an energy engineering doctorate from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She was Mexico City’s environment secretary during AMLO’s administration in the early 2000s, and served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2007.

From 2018 to 2023, Sheinbaum oversaw the governance of Mexico City, no small feat for anyone.

Insecurity is the big card wielded by the opposition. With violence connected to organized crime still destabilizing regions of the country, the opposition is zeroing in on AMLO’s “Hugs not Bullets” approach.

The physical safety of candidates, especially at the local level, is again emerging as a concern. The states of Michoacán, Guerrero, Veracruz, Chiapas, Colima, and Mexico rank high as danger zones. On March 15, Humberto Amezcua, who was seeking reelection as mayor of Pihuamo, was murdered. According to Aristeguinoticias, at least 26 local and state level politicians or political aspirants from multiple political parties have been murdered during the current electoral process.

Although gender rights, equity, social justice and public safety loom large in 2024, international relations, particularly with the United States, likewise are shaping the Mexican elections. Foreign influence in Mexican elections is nothing new, but with US elections also underway this year the two political transitions are intertwined not only by the calendar but in theme and tone as well.

On Feb. 29, the day before the Mexican general election campaign commenced, President Biden and former President Trump staged competing visits to the US Mexico border, which for all of President López Obrador’s earlier appeals for Mexico not to become the “piñata” of US politics, is again a big election year prop in the political theater of El Norte.

Trump has retrieved the rhetoric he found successful with his base in 2016, comparing migrants and refugees with criminals and crazies while denouncing an “invasion” of the United States. Stirring the pot further, both Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and former Trump national security official Chad Wolf, the latter in comments made on CNN, urged a return to the Trump era policy of Remain in Mexico for asylum seekers.

South of the border, Johnson’s comments that Washington should tell Mexico what to do because “we are the United States” sounded like a ghostly recording from the Big Stick era of US intervention in Latin America. Stay tuned for more Mexico bashing as the US election season advances.

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who divides his time between Mexico and the US Southwest. Email kentnews@unm.edu

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2024

Populist.com