Mexico’s incoming president, Claudia Sheinbaum, will take office in December having been elected to the top job on Sunday, beating opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez by more than 30% at last count.
On election day in the centre of the sunny city of Chilpancingo, capital of the southern state of Guerrero, voters told Crikey of their hopes, or not, for change. Chilpo, as it is known by residents, sprawls out from the skirts of the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range, about four hours drive from Mexico City.
Marco Antonio, a farmer who grows corn and runs cattle in the mountains beyond the city, said he voted for Sheinbaum as a supporter of Morena, the nominally left-wing party she belongs to that was founded by outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known by his initials as AMLO) in 2012.
“I’ve always been on the left so I’ve always supported [Morena], as a sympathiser,” he said.
Under AMLO poverty has been reduced, which he said he believed could only be achieved under a left-wing government.
The outgoing president oversaw an official 182% increase in the daily minimum wage from 88.15 pesos (then nearly $15) in 2018 to 248.93 pesos (about $21) this year.
“And it’s time for women!”, the farmer added heartily, quoting a Morena campaign slogan that the party used to promote its women candidates.
That Mexico will have a woman president is of course cause for celebration, said Jessica Estevez of Marea Verde Guerrero, a feminist collective in the state of Guerrero that undertakes political and social advocacy for women throughout Guerrero and in neighbouring states.
“Women’s political representation is directly related to improving our human rights in society,” she said.
In Guerrero, where women deputies led the decriminalisation of abortion in 2022, representation “has allowed us to consolidate important achievements in defence of the feminist agenda”, she said.
But she noted that whether a woman president means treatment of marginalised genders improves remains to be seen.
“The fact that there are women in front doesn’t really guarantee that they are going to govern with a gender perspective,” which she said would address the intersection of gender, race and class in policy-making.
“The two women candidates for president in this election have been quite lukewarm,” she added, noting that they had barely addressed important issues, like “reproductive rights, femicide, and disappeared women”.
The stakes of government in Mexico are dramatically increased by the pervasive deadly violence that was unleashed in 2006 by then president Felipe Calderon’s declaration of a “war on drugs” — a military-led security strategy that has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Mexican civilians, the majority of whom are poor and Indigenous. The war on drugs had also led to a significant increase in gender-based violence.
During the lead up to Sunday’s election, the state of Guerrero registered the highest number of incidents of political violence in what has been called Mexico’s bloodiest election in modern history. A total of 38 candidates across the country were murdered during the campaign period, including a candidate for mayor in Guerrero’s coastal municipality Coyuca de Benitez who was gunned down live on camera at his campaign closing party.
The killings, typically characterised as shots fired in struggles between organised criminal groups for control of territory, highlight Mexico’s highly compromised system of government and representation. High rates of impunity and corruption see the country ranked low on indices of rule of law and executive accountability.
Despite sweeping to office on a platform of “hugs not bullets” and promising to wage peace, AMLO has instead posed Mexico’s armed forces as the solution to the public security crisis. During his term he has drastically increased the ranks and power of the nation’s military, a policy that Sheinbaum says she will evaluate.
‘Without our disappeared, there is no democracy’
According to the online outlet Desinformemonos, at least 1,000 Mexican citizens participated on Sunday in the “vote for the disappeared” campaign which saw electors marking their ballot papers with names of the estimated 115,00 people registered as disappeared in the country. “There is no democracy in Mexico with more than 100,000 disappeared people”, as one voter tweeted, with a photo of their ballot bearing the name Vanessa Diaz Valverde, a university student who has been missing since April 2018.
Morena has shown that “they care more about the media circus of the elections and not about the disappeared, unfortunately,” said Mario González.
González is the father of César Manuel, one of the 43 young men who were forcibly disappeared from Guerrero’s Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2013, a world-famous case that AMLO leaves office without having resolved, despite promising to do so when he took power in 2018.
In an age of high-profile climate denial, international news stories about Sheinbaum’s election have focussed heavily on her profession. An environmental engineer who did her PhD on energy policy in Mexico, she was also a member of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won a Nobel Prize.
Within Mexico, however, she is better known for supporting President AMLO´s megaprojects, such as the Tren Maya, which have caused significant destruction of the environment. She was elected on a platform of continuing or building the “second floor” of Morena’s policy agenda.
As one voter tweeted: “I wish there was a Claudia Sheinbaum who is an environmentalist, progressive and scientist, as the international media say. I only know the one who built a first floor for cars as environment secretary, a vehicular bridge in a wetland and defends ecocidal megaprojects.”
