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“Claudia Sheinbaum won a landslide victory to become Mexico's first female president, inheriting the project of her mentor and outgoing leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador [AMLO]… Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won the presidency with between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote… Opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez conceded defeat.” Reuters
Many on both sides urge the incoming president to focus on improving the security situation in Mexico:
“AMLO will depart having presided over the bloodiest presidency in Mexican history, with over 185,000 homicides and over 110,000 missing people… His ‘hugs not bullets’ approach to the cartels resulted in more of both — more bullets in heads, and more families embracing in sorrow after… Despite AMLO’s assurances that this election would see candidates protected, thirty-eight were killed, many in broad daylight…
“None of this is surprising, considering that we know AMLO and his regime to be a wholly owned partner of the cartels, relying on them for campaign cash and favors in return for emphatic defense of their barbaric behavior. There’s no mystery to this behavior, and AMLO has been anything but subtle about it — even to the point of siding with the criminals against the DEA, which he accused of ‘spying’ on the Sinaloa cartel after a slew of arrests.”
Ben Domenech, Spectator World
“Sheinbaum has shown she can take a pragmatic approach to crime. As mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, she flooded the city with security cameras and deployed the police in certain high-crime areas. Murders dropped by about half in the city during her tenure, according to official statistics…
“Of course, controlling crime levels in a single city is different from facing the sprawling national crisis that in some states resembles a full-blown war… Sheinbaum will be in charge of a nation plagued by over 30,000 murders a year, 90 percent of which go unsolved… Sheinbaum should take the same practical approach she used in Mexico City: pursuing concrete goals that could at least reduce the violence and turn a national security crisis into a more manageable problem of public safety.”
Ioan Grillo, New York Times
Other opinions below.
“[AMLO] has sought to subvert the multiparty competitive democracy that his country achieved in the 1990s. He has weakened the independent election agency that guaranteed free and fair elections. He has broken the laws and disregarded the customs that limited the president’s power to use the state to favor his preferred candidates. He has undermined the independence of the judiciary…
“Of the three candidates within the ruling party who vied for López Obrador’s favor, Sheinbaum was the one with the smallest and weakest following among Morena’s rank and file. Sheinbaum got the nod not because López Obrador wanted a pathbreaker, but because he wanted someone he could control after his mandatory departure from office.”
David Frum, The Atlantic
Others argue, “Sheinbaum ran a disciplined, methodical campaign… Where Gálvez veered from one uncosted policy proposal to another, Sheinbaum rolled out a hundred-point program that includes extending social programs and scholarships, continuing annual minimum-wage increases, consolidating Mexico’s push toward national health care, [and] building a million affordable homes on a rent-to-buy plan…
“Sheinbaum also refused to be goaded by those who repeated that she is going to be a puppet of outgoing president AMLO: every time someone would try to insist on the need to create a more individualistic image — as if she were marketing a new brand of cereal or detergent — Sheinbaum would calmly explain that she represents a social movement.”
Kurt Hackbarth, Jacobin Magazine
“In her acceptance speech, Ms. Sheinbaum took a conciliatory tone, promising to ‘respect business freedom and facilitate with honesty private investment, national and foreign.’ While charting her own course, Ms. Sheinbaum will face problems left behind by AMLO. The public-health system is broke and there’s a large fiscal deficit. Pemex, the state-owned oil company, has some $103 billion in debt…
“An early test will be whether Ms. Sheinbaum continues AMLO’s campaign to have government control electricity generation and oil exploration. Shutting out private investors violates the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the revised free-trade pact signed in 2018. President Biden has failed to enforce the new agreement’s energy chapter, but a second Trump Administration probably would…
“She will also have to address the collapse of internal security. Cartels control large parts of the country, and extortion is routine. Human smugglers run the caravans that bring migrants by the millions to the U.S. border. Recovering the authority of the state won’t be easy. But a closer relationship with U.S. law enforcement could help.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“If Sheinbaum’s government continues to pursue the same narco-friendly agenda as her predecessor, the White House should seriously consider how it can deploy US military assets to confront the criminal cartels facilitating the mass flow of migration and bringing in the fentanyl that’s slaughtering our sons and daughters.”
Andres Martinez-Fernandez, New York Post
