On October 1, Claudia Sheinbaum was inaugurated as Mexico’s president, becoming the first woman to lead the country. Her rise to this office brings hope for a shift in Mexican politics.
“It is an advance that for the first time a woman holds the highest public office in the country,” Adriana Baez Carlos, a political science professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), tells The Progressive. “She comes to office with a series of initiatives to support women that are positive.”
Sheinbaum, a sixty-two-year-old climate scientist, won in a landslide on June 2, 2024, with around 60 percent of the vote. Her Morena political party, which was founded by her close political ally, the outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also won a majority in the country’s legislative branch elections.
Sheinbaum is expected to largely continue the policies of López Obrador, but she has also proposed new legislation that would benefit women across Mexico. She has further promised to promote policies related to environmental concerns, energy, and insecurity brought about by drug trafficking networks across the country.
One of Sheinbaum’s policy goals is to reform Mexico’s judicial system, a process that was set in motion by López Obrador just before leaving office in September. In her first daily press conference, collectively known as mañaneras—a tradition started by López Obrador during his term in which he gave hours-long comments to the press each day—the new president stated her intentions to carry out these reforms, which have faced condemnation from conservatives and protests from her political opposition, which is made up of the rightwing and members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in Mexico.
The contested judicial reforms are not the only obstacle that Sheinbam will face. Mexico is currently experiencing a wave of violence brought about by drug trafficking networks, which have displaced people across the country. The northern city of Culiacán, Sinaloa, is among the hotbeds of violence: Two factions of the drug gang known as the Sinaloa Cartel have been fighting following the surprise arrest of their leader Ismael Zambada García, better known as “El Mayo,” in July 2024.
Sheinbaum must also respond to the ongoing migration crisis and the crackdown on immigrants and asylum seekers passing through Mexico.
The violence against immigrants and asylum seekers most recently manifested the same day Sheinbaum was inaugurated, when Mexican soldiers opened fire on a truck carrying migrants, killing six. Sheinbaum condemned the killing in a press conference.
"It's a regrettable event and it must be investigated and punished," said Sheinbaum during a press conference. "A situation like this cannot be repeated."
Upon assuming office in October, Sheinbaum also publicly apologized for the 1968 massacre of protesting students by Mexican soldiers in an event that became known as the Tlatelolco Massacre.
“We cannot forget October 2,” Sheinbaum said in her first morning press conference on that day. “[It was] one of the greatest atrocities that Mexico lived through in the second half of the twentieth century.”
She added, “The student movement of 1968 opened the doors for political participation for the young and all of society for a more democratic country.”
Her apology came on the fifty-sixth anniversary of the massacre.
The day has long been commemorated in Mexican society. As Sheinbaum recognized, the massacre marked a critical point in Mexican political history.
Sheinbaum’s inauguration came as Mexico marked another more recent anniversary.
September 26 was the tenth anniversary of the forced disappearances of forty-three students in the city of Iguala in the southwestern state of Guerrero. As in previous years, the families of the victims and others who have called for justice for the students marched through Mexico City demanding that the Mexican government provide the truth of what happened to the students in 2014. Families of the victims have struggled for years to find information about what happened that day.
“The first time we came through here, who could have imagined that all of this time would pass and [we would be] here again without answers,” Margarito Guerrero, the father of missing student Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, told the Associated Press during the march.
The students were from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa. They had attempted to steal a bus in order to travel to Mexico City for a demonstration to mark the forty-sixth anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre.
Outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had promised to expose the truth of what occurred, establishing an independent truth commission, known as the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, to look into the case. But the progress was rolled back after members of Mexico’s armed forces were implicated.
In July 2023, the commission presented evidence that showed that authorities at the federal, state, and local levels had collaborated with drug cartels in carrying out the students’ disappearance. The commission called it a “state crime.” In their final report, the investigators denounced the hindrance of their investigation by the Mexican state and the country’s military.
The lack of clear information and the continued efforts to derail the case by the military have infuriated families, who are still looking for answers.
“The parents of the students from Ayotzinapa are not satisfied as long as they do not know where the children’s remains are,” Baez Carlos says. “As long as there is no answer to that [question] and as long as they don't have a clear answer, they will continue to press [the government].”
There are high expectations for Mexico’s first female President. While Sheinbaum plans to continue the progressive reforms and policies of her predecessor, there are hopes that she will also confront the impunity that exists in Mexico, especially in regard to the tragedy of the disappearance of the forty-three students a decade ago.