The former mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum spoke after being named the presidential candidate of the ruling Morena party for next year’s presidential election in Mexico City on September 6, 2023.
Claudio Cruz Afp | Getty Images
Voters in Mexico are participating in the country’s biggest election yet – casting ballots Sunday to fill more than 20,000 local, state and federal positions and almost certainly to elect the first female president.
But rampant violence has marred the path to one of the most important elections in Mexican history.
Criminal groups have taken over large parts of Mexico as they fight for territory to smuggle drugs into the US, make money from migrant smuggling, and sell citizens to fuel illegal enterprises. Violence against political figures also continued during this election cycle, causing the number of victims of political violence to increase by 150% from 2021, according to analysis from Integralia, a public affairs consulting firm that investigates political risks and other issues in Mexico. .
This has disappointed Mexican voters, with many citing security as a major issue. About 6 out of 10 Mexican adults consider the city they live in to be unsafe because of robberies or armed violence, according to a survey by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography published in April.
The front-running presidential candidates – Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico’s ruling political party, Morena, and Xóchitl Gálvez, of the opposition coalition Broad Front for Mexico – have very different ideas about how best to reduce crime.
One of them is expected to make history as the first female president of Mexico, considering that Jorge Álvarez Máynez, the presidential candidate of the Citizens’ Movement Party, is running third in the polls.
Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City and a physicist and climate scientist, said she plans to fight violence by continuing the “hugs, not bullets” policy implemented by her mentor, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who did not immediately take over. in the cartels as they had done in the previous administration.
Before López Obrador, “there was at least a rhetorical intention from the Mexican government and local governments to do something” about the violence, said Tony Payan, director of the US and Mexico Center at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “But since Mr. Lopez Obrador took office at the end of 2018, the discourse has completely changed … These criminals feel that they can do whatever they want and the state will not follow them.”
López Obrador’s policies have not reduced murders in the past six years, as Mexican government data shows that at least 102,400 murders have been reported during that period.
But the data also show that the strategy of López Obrador’s predecessors, targeting drug lords in an all-out war, has not improved security either.
Gálvez, a former senator and tech entrepreneur, has been trying to convince voters that access to health care and economic development have stalled in Morena and crime rates remain high. Center-right candidates have also tested the party’s position – a coalition of traditional political parties that have long ruled Mexico such as the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, the small progressive Democratic Revolutionary Party, and the old guard Institutional Revolutionary Party. , or PRI – as Mexico’s change is necessary to unify the increasingly polarized country.
Mexico’s next president will play a key role in resolving US priority issues such as immigration and foreign affairs, as well as determining the future of the trade deal that makes Mexico the United States’ largest trading partner.
On Sunday, polls open at 8:00 a.m. local time and close at 6:00 p.m
