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CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM-MAY BE MEXICO’S FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT  
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Arturo Cano; Translated from the Spanish by Nicholas Allen.
April 9, 2024
The Nation
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_ The former student activist and current mayor of Mexico City is
poised to make history with an ambitious platform on education, clean
energy, and combatting violence against women. _

Claudia Sheinbaum, (AP Photo // The Nation),

 

In the center of the photograph is a young woman wearing a kerchief.
Alongside a small group of protesters, she holds up a sign that reads,
in English, “Fair Trade and Democracy Now.” The protest—the only
expression of dissent during Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s triumphal
tour of California—took place in September 1991 at Stanford
University, where the Mexican president was invited to give a speech.
Salinas was at the height of his power. Thirteen months later, he and
his fellow North American leaders, US President George H.W. Bush and
Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, would sign the North American
Free Trade Agreement into law.

At that moment, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the young woman in the
photograph, was driving from her home in Palo Alto, California, to the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was doing research as
part of her doctoral studies in energy engineering at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). When one of Sheinbaum’s old
friends sent me the photo recently, I texted it to her. She wrote
back, “Heh, heh. I have the original,” referring to the
story published
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Stanford Daily_.

Barring unforeseen disaster or a major electoral upset, Sheinbaum, who
was born in Mexico City in 1962, will be elected the next president of
Mexico on June 2. In 2022 and 2023, I conducted several interviews
with her—whenever her schedule as mayor of Mexico City, one of the
largest cities in the world, would permit—for my book, _Claudia
Sheinbaum: Presidenta_. On March 1, she launched
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presidential campaign and announced
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basic platform. But knowing her history, her family, and the roots of
her political positions is essential to understanding who she is and
how she reached this point—and how she might use her power as
president. Sheinbaum’s principal opponent is Xóchitl Gálvez,
who represents
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coalition made up of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the
National Action Party (PAN), and the Party of the Democratic
Revolution (PRD).

During one of our conversations, I asked Sheinbaum what her life had
been like between 1991 and 1994, when she was a graduate student in
the United States. “It was a beautiful time,” she said. “We
lived in Stanford student housing, in small houses that formed a
circle where all the back doors opened onto a garden; our kids lived
with children from all over the world. I had a scholarship, so I
dedicated myself to doing my doctorate while working and living with
the children.”

Sheinbaum and her family, which includes many academics, have a
decades-long relationship with the United States. She lived with her
then-partner, Carlos Ímaz, who was pursuing a PhD in education at
Stanford, and their children, Rodrigo (from her husband’s previous
marriage) and Mariana, who was 2 years old when they came to the US
and who later returned to study and earn her doctorate in philosophy
at the University of Santa Cruz in 2021. Sheinbaum’s sister,
Adriana, lives in Los Angeles. Her older brother, Julio, who
influenced her decision to study physics, is a physics researcher in
Ensenada, in the Mexican border state of Baja California. Sheinbaum
recalls that in nearby Redwood City, “they ate the best carnitas,”
joking that “all of Aguililla” lives there, referring to the town
in Michoacán, a state with one of the highest migration rates in
Mexico.

One of her best friends at the time was an economist from Michoacán,
Alma González, who crossed the border because she had no job
opportunities and “because of the violence,” Sheinbaum explained.
Speaking of her friend, Sheinbaum evoked the struggles of many
migrants: “She started cleaning houses, and now she works at
Stanford Hospital.”

 
Never forget: Protesters commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the
Tlatelolco massacre of student activists on October 2, 1968.  (Luis
Barron / Eyepix Group / Future Publishing  //  The Nation)
"In my house, politics was discussed at breakfast, lunch, and
dinner,” Sheinbaum told me. Her father, Carlos Sheinbaum, a chemist,
and her mother, Annie Pardo, a biologist, were involved in the 1968
student movement, which marked a generation and contributed to the
erosion of the authoritarian regime of the PRI. For several months in
1968, thousands
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young Mexicans marched in the streets, shouting demands that boiled
down to two words: democratic freedoms. On October 2, the government
of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz brought the movement to an abrupt halt with
a massacre
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Tlatelolco, when more than 300 students were killed and over 1,000
more arrested.

Some of Sheinbaum’s most vivid childhood memories are of family
trips on Sunday to a jail. “We brought the prisoners something to
eat,” she said. They regularly visited
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Álvarez Garín, one of the main leaders of the youth movement and a
friend of Sheinbaum’s mother, who herself had been fired from the
National Polytechnic Institute for supporting the students.

Upon his return from a brief exile following his imprisonment,
Álvarez Garín and others founded _Punto Crítico_, a magazine
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had been conceived in prison and later gave birth to a movement in
which Sheinbaum had her first experience with activism: the Student
Committee of Worker-Peasant Solidarity (Comité Estudiantil de
Solidaridad Obrero Campesina).

When I asked Sheinbaum about her political mentors, she answered
without hesitation: “Apart from my parents, Raúl, of course.” Her
peers recall that in 1978, when she was 16, she supported a hunger
strike
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front of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City—part of a
campaign to support the mothers of young people who had been
disappeared during Mexico’s long “dirty war,” which, according
to conservative estimates, killed
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people over two decades beginning in the 1960s. It was around this
time that she became active in student struggles, the worker
solidarity movement, and protests against electoral fraud.

When Sheinbaum took office as the mayor of Mexico City on December 5,
2018, she reflected on these events in her inaugural speech
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“It may just be a historical coincidence, but it is still amazing
that the national triumph [of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador]
and the democratic reconquest of Mexico City is taking place 50 years
after the student movement of 1968, and 30 years after the electoral
fraud of 1988 [which delivered victory to Salinas]. That is our
origin, but our government will be for all.”

Ulises Lara, the Mexico City attorney general, met Sheinbaum when both
were in high school. They were at an assembly to organize a march in
commemoration of the massacre of dozens of student demonstrators on
June 10, 1971 (the “Halconazo,” or “Hawk Strike,” depicted
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the film _Roma_). Sheinbaum objected to the order in which their
respective schools were assigned to appear in the march. After Lara
cut her off by loudly declaring, “No, _compañero_, we will march
in front,” Sheinbaum replied: “I am a _compañera_, not
a _compañero_, and my name is Claudia!”

Today, Lara laughs at mistaking her for a boy, recalling that in those
days Sheinbaum was “very thin, had short, red, curly [_chino_] hair,
and wore jeans and plaid shirts.”

Sheinbaum attributes her sense of discipline to her scientist mother,
who is still active professionally: “She always used to say to us,
‘Sure, you’re going to do other things, but school is
school.’”

Sheinbaum attended high school in the mornings and took French and
classical ballet in the afternoons. “I was involved in politics, but
until my first year of college, I never missed ballet,” she said.
After high school, Sheinbaum enrolled at UNAM, where she encountered
professors who believed that young people had to tackle major social
problems. She studied air pollution in Mexico City and traveled to an
Indigenous community in Michoacán to work on a project involving
wood-burning stoves that would consume less wood and be less harmful
to women’s health. (“We thought we were going to teach a lesson,
but we were the ones who learned something,” Sheinbaum said during a
visit to that community last March.) Just as she finished her research
in Michoacán and began working on her thesis, the university rector
announced an increase in tuition fees and other measures that were
seen by many young people as steps toward the privatization of Mexican
education.

The University Student Council (CEU) was born
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response. Thousands of young people filled the streets to protest and,
through coordinated strike action, forced the administration into
negotiations with the students that eventually brought a halt to the
so-called “reforms.” The campaign gave birth to the student slogan
“We are the force of reason.”

In 1988, the decades-long hegemony of the PRI was broken when
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas launched his opposition candidacy for the
presidency. Many on the left who had never previously participated in
elections joined the Cárdenas wave. Sheinbaum hosted meetings in her
house to organize a rally for Cárdenas at Ciudad Universitaria, the
main UNAM campus—a place that no PRI candidate dared set foot in,
particularly after a UNAM protester attempted to throw a stone at
former president Luis Echeverría in the 1970s.

Salinas won the election through fraud, but Cárdenas would run again
in 1994. A similar rally was held during his second candidacy,
although by that time the university movement was committed to
supporting the far-left Zapatista Army of National Liberation. A photo
of Cárdenas appearing alongside the Zapatista spokesman
Subcommandante Marcos during a campaign stop in the Chiapas jungle was
circulated with the phrase “Our votes are the weapons of peace,”
which became the rallying cry of the student movement.

 
Students speak out: Protesters at UNAM are arrested in the fall of
1968. Inset: Protests at Stanford University were the only expressions
of dissent during then–Mexican President Carlos Salinas de
Gortari’s 1991 tour.  (Top: El Heraldo /Agence France-Presse(AFP)
 //  The Nation)
In late December of 2008, the world’s newspapers reported on an
Israeli army campaign in Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead,
that resulted
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the deaths of 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. In
a letter
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in the newspaper _La Jornada_, Sheinbaum called for peace there and
wrote of her family origins: Her paternal grandparents came to Mexico
in the 1920s from Lithuania, which had expelled her grandfather
because he was “Jewish and communist”; her maternal grandparents
left Bulgaria in the early 1940s “fleeing Nazi persecution.”

Mexico has always been a welcoming destination for refugees fleeing
persecution, particularly artists and leftists—whether they were
escaping the Spanish Civil War, McCarthyism in the US, or South
American dictatorships from the 1970s to the present
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Sheinbaum wrote, “Both families decided to make Mexico their
homeland. I was raised as a Mexican, loving its history and its
people. I am Mexican, and that is why I fight for my homeland. I
cannot and do not want to deny my history; to do so would be, as [the
Argentine musician] Leon Gieco says, to deny the soul of life.”

Though Sheinbaum’s Jewish heritage has received scant mention on the
campaign trail, a small part of the opposition thinks it can score
points by attacking
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as a “foreigner” or a non-Catholic. Sheinbaum counters that “my
mother and father raised us loving Mexico and its history,” as she
has said several times.

On July 1, 2018, huge numbers of voters turned out to elect Andrés
Manuel López Obrador to the presidency and Sheinbaum as the mayor of
Mexico City. López Obrador garnered the widest margin of victory
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a Mexican presidential election since the 1980s; meanwhile,
Sheinbaum’s victory made her a natural candidate for the next
presidential election.

In his most recent book, López Obrador writes that he wanted
Sheinbaum to coordinate his campaign and then join his cabinet as
secretary of the interior, but that she preferred to pursue the Mexico
City mayoralty—despite the fact that internal polls indicated that
she wasn’t a front-runner.

Since 1988, the Mexican left has produced only three competitive
presidential candidates: Cárdenas, López Obrador, and now
Sheinbaum—the only one of the three who was never a member of the
PRI.

In February 2024, with the end of his term approaching and with the
country caught up in the presidential campaign, López Obrador
presented a package
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constitutional and legal reforms on issues ranging from the popular
election of judges to wage guarantees for workers. Because Sheinbaum
has also included these proposals in her program, her critics have
charged that the president is trying to set the agenda for his
successor.

A Mexican electoral law
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2007 prohibits candidates from formally campaigning before the start
of the election season. But even before launching her campaign on
March 1, Sheinbaum hinted at the direction her presidency would take
by remarking in speeches that her candidacy represents a vote for
“continuity with her own stamp.” In November, Sheinbaum presented
a list of “dreams,” including issues that have not ranked among
López Obrador’s priorities. Her proposals include accelerating the
transition to clean energy, reinforcing action to combat climate
change, making good on “substantive equality”
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women, strengthening LGBTQ rights
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and putting “special emphasis” on education
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Between her own accomplishments as mayor and what she has said in the
past few months, Mexican voters already have an idea of what a
Sheinbaum presidency would look like. In June 2023, as she stepped
down from her position as mayor of the nation’s capital to focus on
securing the nomination as the presidential candidate of the ruling
Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena) party, Sheinbaum summed
up her record as mayor before thousands of people filling a public
square.

She recounted
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history in a “social struggle [that is] closely linked to the right
to education” and then spoke of her political record, emphasizing
achievements related to education, public security, public
transportation, Internet connectivity, and clean energy—a preview of
what the priorities of her national government would be. She touted,
for example, the scholarship programs set up for girls and boys in
public schools, the creation of more middle schools and two new
universities (which serve almost 100,000 formerly excluded students),
and the many resources her Mexico City government invested in the
improvement of school campuses, as well as the new network of
community centers where more than 400,000 residents of Mexico City
engage in cultural activities and sports and take courses in financial
planning.

Sheinbaum added that during her term there was a 58 percent reduction
in “high-impact” crimes (homicides and violent robberies) in the
city and that the proportion of the public that felt crime was a major
issue dropped from 80 percent to 44 percent, according to figures from
the National Institute of Statistics and Geography—trends that are
highly significant in a country reeling from decades of violence.

Sheinbaum pointed to measures her administration took to combat
violence against women, such as the creation of a specialized
prosecutor’s office, new pedestrian paths to promote women’s
safety, and a network of female lawyers to promote access to justice
and eradicate revictimization.

Sheinbaum was López Obrador’s secretary of the environment when he
was mayor of Mexico City. There, the two grew close—so much so that
he placed her in charge of an emblematic roadwork project known as the
“second floor of the Periférico,” a second-story highway added to
a southern section of the Periférico, a major roadway around the
perimeter of Mexico City. For that reason, Sheinbaum now speaks of
her candidacy
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“the second floor of the transformation”—a reference to López
Obrador’s “Fourth Transformation,” his way of describing his
victory as a revolution in Mexico on par with previous major
transformations in the country, including Mexican independence in the
early 19th century, the liberal reforms of the 1850s and ’60s, and
the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. Last September,
following a tough contest, Sheinbaum emerged as the Morena party’s
candidate, defeating her five competitors, all of whom were men. She
received almost 40 percent of the vote; her closest competitor, the
former foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard, got 26 percent. López Obrador
formalized Sheinbaum’s victory by handing her the traditional
Indigenous _baston de mando_, or staff of authority.

The most common criticism of Sheinbaum is that she is nothing more
than a “copy” of López Obrador
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that, with her victory, he will continue calling the shots. Those
accusations make her laugh, she said: “I have my style, and there
are also things on which I don’t agree. Each of us has their own
personal style, but we have been fighting in the same movement for the
last 23 years. As I often say, ‘What do you all want, that I say
‘First the rich’?”—a reference to the López Obrador slogan
“First the Poor,” which Sheinbaum has adopted as her own. “Well,
no, I’m not going to say that.”

Lately, Sheinbaum has been touring the country, recruiting people to
staff her campaign, and overseeing the electoral lists that will
determine Morena’s candidates for the upcoming election. (This year,
95 million Mexicans will vote on more than 19,000 positions for public
office.) But it hasn’t all been work. Amid the electoral hoopla,
Sheinbaum took time to get married in November 2023 to the
mathematician and Bank of Mexico risk analyst Jesús Tarriba, an old
college sweetheart with whom she was reunited after her divorce in
2016.

Sheinbaum wrestles with the paradox of being a
self-proclaimed “daughter of ‘68”
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also bringing aboard members from the “old regime,”
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the _obradoristas_ like to call members of the PRI and PAN. That
list includes politicians who just months ago were harsh critics of
the government and even voted against its bills in Congress. But
she’s working hard to create the electoral majority she will need to
govern effectively. As the conventional wisdom in Mexico goes, she
will need to negotiate and obtain votes from the opposition to achieve
reforms that López Obrador was unable to achieve himself. “Adding
more numbers” has become her campaign motto.
 
The opponent: Xóchitl Gálvez, who is running against Sheinbaum in
the June election, represents an unusual coalition made up of three
parties: the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD.  (Medios y Media  //  The
Nation)
Sheinbaum will face Xóchitl Gálvez, the candidate of a peculiar bloc
that _obradoristas_ call the “PRIAN” because, in effect,
it unites
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PRI, the party that ruled the country for nearly 80 years, and the
right-wing PAN, a party that emerged in 1939 and won presidential
elections in 2000 and 2006—two forces that have traditionally been
at odds but are now united to defeat López Obrador’s supposed
“authoritarianism.” Gálvez, a businesswoman and politician of
Indigenous origin, was chosen partly because her profile would make it
difficult to label her a member of the “power mafia” run by white,
privileged Mexicans. Sheinbaum has consistently held the lead in polls
(64 percent for her versus 31 percent for Gálvez, according to an
average of polls published since the beginning of February).

Leticia Gutiérrez Lorandi, Sheinbaum’s former general director of
policy coordination and environmental culture in the mayor’s office
and the mother of two daughters, ages 5 and 8, is excited by the
prospect of a woman as Mexico’s leader. “My little purple balloon
is in the sky,” she said, referring to the color long associated
with the feminist struggle. “When I was a child, it was just normal
for those politicians to be men.”

Sheinbaum’s campaign is aware that a left-wing politician can face
charges of being an extremist or an enemy of the United States. But
with respect to US-Mexican relations, in the rally to kick off her
campaign, Sheinbaum summarized her intentions: “The relationship
with the US must be one of respect without subordination.”

Diana Alarcón, who served in the mayor’s office as Sheinbaum’s
chief adviser and international affairs coordinator and who holds a
PhD in economics from the University of California, Riverside, has
organized Sheinbaum’s trips to the United States. “What we want is
investment and trade that provides for better wages, innovation and
technology, regional development, and environmental sustainability,”
Alarcón said. “What we do not want are low-wage jobs, nor are we
going to sell Mexico as a maquiladora country.”

In several speeches, Sheinbaum has underlined the continuity between
herself and López Obrador on key issues in the US-Mexico
relationship, including migration, arms and drug trafficking, and
border security. The implication is clear: The two countries have
shared problems and must grow closer to figure out how to solve them.

When I asked Sheinbaum whether she would endorse the statement that
Dilma Rousseff used to inaugurate her term as Brazil’s first female
president—“I am here to protect the weak, honor women, and govern
for all”—she said yes. “There are many parallels between Dilma
Rousseff and you,” I continued, perhaps forgetting that
Rousseff—who followed her own mentor into office—had her term cut
short by an impeachment on corruption charges.

With the laugh of someone who knows how to take serious matters with a
touch of levity, Sheinbaum replied, “I hope my story has a different
ending.”

_[ARTURO CANO is a professor, journalist, and columnist who cofounded
the Mexican publications Reforma and La Jornada. He is the author of
Claudia Sheinbaum: Presidenta
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_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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* Mexico
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* Claudia Sheinbaum
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* Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo
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* AMLO
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* Andrés Manuel López Obrador
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* Xochitl Galvez
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* PRI
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* Mexico City
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* Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
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* Climate Change
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* women's rights
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* Latin America
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