On the menu today: My guess is you haven’t heard much about Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and to the extent you have seen U.S. coverage of Mexico’s election results, it has been “yas queen!” cheerleading for Mexico’s first female, and Jewish, president. But life for the average Mexican has gotten worse in the past six years or so under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Maybe the economy has done okay and trade has picked up, but the violence of the cartels is as bad as ever, and AMLO has been steadily picking away at the checks and balances within the Mexican government and expanding the power of the presidency. Right now, it looks like Sheinbaum will keep moving in the same direction, perhaps becoming a de facto puppet of AMLO. American socialists are thrilled at the landslide victory of a leftist populist scientist — and the happier the self-professed socialists are, the worse the road ahead appears.
Meet Mexico’s Next President, Claudia Sheinbaum
Americans spend a lot of time discussing, and being angry, about the situation at our border with Mexico, but comparably little time discussing what’s going on in Mexico. We certainly don’t spend much time talking about the Mexican government. Earlier this year, new evidence emerged contending that AMLO had been cozy with the notorious Sinaloa Cartel for a long time, while the record of the cartel’s extensive and lucrative ties to China — in production of fentanyl and methamphetamine — grew clearer and clearer. That discovery barely made a ripple in the U.S. news cycle.
Nor did many Americans notice in April when Mexico’s national police agencies contradicted AMLO’s spectacularly implausible claim that no fentanyl is produced in Mexico:
The head of Mexico’s detective service acknowledged Tuesday that the country is “the champion” of fentanyl production, something that appears to run counter to past statements by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
López Obrador has hotly denied in the past that any fentanyl is produced in Mexico, saying Mexican cartels only press it into pills or add finishing touches.
But Felipe de Jesus Gallo, the head of Mexico’s Criminal Investigation Agency, said that since the 1990s “Mexico has been the champion of methamphetamine production, and now fentanyl.” He spoke at a U.S.-Mexico conference on synthetic drugs in Mexico City.
Experts agree that cartels in Mexico use precursor chemicals from China and India to make the synthetic opioid and smuggle it into the United States, where it causes about 70,000 overdose deaths annually. . . .
“Believe me, methamphetamine production has become industrialized, it’s not just in the mountains anymore,” Gallo said. “We now expect to see (drug) laboratories not just in the mountains of Sinaloa and Sonora, but in Hidalgo as well, Puebla, and also in Jalisco.”
You cannot solve a problem if you refuse to acknowledge it exists.
Perhaps it’s just bad luck for Mexico that the presidential election occurred two days after the first conviction of a former U.S. president, an event destined to dominate the U.S. news cycle for at least a week. To the extent that the U.S. media has noticed Mexico’s next president, former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, it has mostly offered shallow assessments and “yas queen!” cheerleading for Mexico’s first female, and Jewish, president.
(Yes; Mexico has Jews. There is a brief discussion of Mexico’s Jewish community in Hunting Four Horsemen.)
First, a word about Sheinbaum’s Jewish heritage. No one should expect her to become an outspoken advocate for Israel on the world stage. Back in 2009, she wrote to a Mexican newspaper:
I can only see with horror the images of the state bombings. Israeli in Gaza. . . . No reason justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians. . . . Nothing, nothing, nothing, can justify the murder of a child. For this reason, I join the cry of millions around the world who are calling for a ceasefire and the immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian territory. As Alberto Szpunberg, Argentine poet, said in a recent letter: ‘that is what it is about: saving a world, this unique and anguished world that we all inhabit, that belongs to everyone and that today is called Gaza.’”
The Mexican government supports South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. If Sheinbaum has any objections to that decision by AMLO, she’s kept them to herself.
Sheinbaum is a secular Jew, saying she “grew up without religion.” Ben Raab, a Mexican Jew, wrote in The Forward that Sheinbaum “de-emphasized” her Jewish identity during her campaign:
Her paternal grandparents arrived in Mexico at the same time as my great-grandparents, fleeing persecution in Lithuania during the 1920s. Her maternal grandparents escaped the Nazis in Bulgaria.
In theory, the first-ever election of a Mexican-Jewish woman to the country’s highest political post should reaffirm the validity of my own dual identity as a Mexican Jew. In practice, it’s left me wishing that Sheinbaum would seize the opportunity to stop downplaying her Judaism, and start embracing it. . . .
Sheinbaum has frequently de-emphasized her Jewishness. In her victory speech Sunday night, she emphasized the significance of her becoming Mexico’s first female president, but made no acknowledgement that she will also be the country’s first Jewish president. While she has privately discussed her culturally Jewish upbringing, Sheinbaum rarely makes public mention of it, even as opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez took to X, formerly Twitter, last September to wish the Jewish community a happy new year and a “blessed” Yom Kippur.
Not only does Sheinbaum refrain from discussing her Judaism, she actively downplays it, possibly to protect her image and to appeal to the overwhelming majority of Catholic voters. On the campaign trail, she gained attention for wearing a Catholic rosary necklace and skirts decorated with an image of the Virgin Guadalupe.
It’s a free country — well, this is a free country — and Sheinbaum is free to identify herself however she wishes. But at this point, it appears Sheinbaum’s Jewish heritage will be an unusual factoid, not a major factor in how she runs the Mexican government or her country’s foreign policy.
How far to the left is Sheinbaum? Far enough for the Associated Press to feel comfortable labeling her “a leftist.” (For perspective, the AP calls Bernie Sanders a “liberal icon.”)
Sheinbaum is AMLO’s protégé; there’s little reason to think she’ll represent a significantly different philosophy in governing. The Economist is nervous that she’ll double down on statist policies that consolidate government power, and that AMLO will remain the power behind the scenes:
Ms. Sheinbaum’s to-do list is clear: tackle disorder, boost trade and investment and strengthen democracy. Yet is she really up to the task? One fear is that despite her technocratic credentials and style she is a captive of Mr López Obrador’s agenda. Intellectually she is a nationalist and ideologue. She is his protégée and throughout her three-decade political career has hewn closely to him. During the campaign she spoke more about policy continuity and protecting his legacy than about her own proposals.
Even if Ms. Sheinbaum wants to reverse course, will she have the power to do so? Mr López Obrador claims he is returning to “La Chingada”, his ranch (an interesting name: in Mexico sending someone to “la chingada” means to send someone to hell). But it is hard to imagine this obsessive, egomaniacal figure leaving the stage. Instead, he may continue to hold sway over [his party] Morena, which looks to have won at least a simple majority in Congress and possibly the two-thirds majority needed for constitutional changes. Many politicians and officials across Mexico owe their position to him — as to a large extent does Ms. Sheinbaum herself.
David Frum, writing in the Atlantic:
I interviewed Sheinbaum in Mexico City in January 2023. I found her highly intelligent but lacking in the people-pleasing ways of a professional politician. Most strikingly, she repeated every dogma of López Obrador ideology without a millimeter of distancing: The independent election commission was bad; the elections that López Obrador had lost earlier in his career were stolen from him; the act of replacing impersonal social-service agencies with personal handouts of cash from the presidential administration to the poor amounted to a social revolution equal to the other great transformations of the Mexican past, including the Mexican Revolution of 1913.
Juan Pablo Spinetto, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin American business, economic affairs, and politics, warned, “For all practical purposes, after this election Mexico will resemble the one-party hegemonic system that dominated the country for most of the past century. Investors smell trouble, as shown by the peso slump overnight.”
The socialists — that’s not a pejorative, that’s their own label — over at Jacobin magazine are thrilled:
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, building a million affordable homes on a rent-to-buy plan, constructing seven long-distance train lines, avoiding the maquiladora experience of the 1990’s by mandating that companies investing in the “nearshoring” phenomenon provide higher wages and benefits, and — in what is certain to continue raising the shackles of multinational energy interests — a public sector–led energy transition building on Mexico’s state-owned oil, electricity, and lithium companies.
The Financial Times reports that investors are starting to fear “that a bigger than expected victory by Sheinbaum’s Morena party, founded a decade ago by López Obrador, and two allied parties in congressional elections also held on Sunday increased the chance of constitutional changes to eliminate some checks and balances on government power.”
After the scale of Sheinbaum’s victory became clear, Mexican stock markets sank, and the AP reported:
With words like “capital flight” and “black Monday” flying around financial markets, quick action to calm markets was urgently needed. But Sheinbaum’s team’s immediate reaction appeared muddled; they announced — and then quickly canceled — plans for her to hold a news conference.
López Obrador appeared determined Monday to push through his highly divisive constitutional changes — many of which opponents fear will fatally weaken Mexico’s democracy — before he leaves office on Sept. 30.
The Morena party that López Obrador founded and in which he remains far more personally popular than Sheinbaum, appeared to be on track to win the two-thirds majority needed to change the Constitution. López Obrador has already laid out 20 constitutional changes he plans to submit, including the elimination of independent oversight agencies and stricter limits on private investment.
That worries foreign investors. López Obrador has already cracked down on private and foreign investment in the energy sector, and now wants to ban new industrial sites in any area of Mexico suffering water stress — essentially the whole, economically vibrant north of the country.
If you didn’t think AMLO was willing to go after the cartels hard enough, there’s not much reason to think Sheinbaum will represent a dramatic departure from this line. Kristina Foltz, writing in the Los Angeles Times:
AMLO also effectively killed the Mérida Initiative, the vast, joint U.S., Mexican and Central American anti-drug program that attempted to counter organized crime and strengthen the rule of law. His policy on the cartels, “hugs, not bullets,” is effectively a non-policy. Despite his recent claim that homicides had dropped 20% during his presidency a government security agency found that his term had seen over 171,000 homicides, more than any previous administration.
Mexico has elected its first female president, a historic event that should be cause for celebration. But I’m afraid AMLO’s protégé is too steeped in Morena methodology to make real progress for Mexico.
In the most recent presidential debate, for example, Sheinbaum claimed that homicides had declined 58% during her mayoralty, when they had actually increased 9%. . . .
Born into an elite family with a history of financial opacity, Sheinbaum falsely denied their involvement in the Panama Papers scandal, betraying her inclination for posverdad, or post-truth. The investigation revealed that six of Sheinbaum’s family members, including her mother, hid millions in offshore tax havens.
Ioan Grillo, a writer based in Mexico who investigates drug trafficking, violence, and organized crime in Latin America, writes in today’s New York Times:
The run-up to the election was one of the most violent campaigns in Mexico’s recent history. Dozens of candidates were killed; a gunman shot a contender for mayor as he shook hands with supporters on a basketball court. Ms. Sheinbaum did not put this bloodshed at the core of her campaign. A 61-year-old environmental engineer and a member of the governing Morena party, Ms. Sheinbaum won the vote on promises to continue social programs of the current president, her mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO. She floated interesting proposals on renewable energy and confronting water shortages.
Her lack of a strong public vision for Mexico’s security is concerning, given that her three predecessors all failed on this front.
I want you to imagine a country suffering more than 560 violent attacks against candidates for public office, with 34 candidates or aspiring candidates getting assassinated, and the winning candidate not putting the issue of violence front and center in her campaign.
I’d say the results of the Mexican election are bad news, but the Mexican people have made their decision, and the U.S. government has no choice but to try to work with Sheinbaum’s administration for the next six years. For once, I won’t begrudge President Biden for offering the usual happy-talk congratulations and statement reacting to her victory.
But there’s good reason to worry about the future of Mexican democracy and separation of powers, the Mexican economy, and the fight against the brutal, ruthless cartels.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci says the six-foot rule for social distancing “just appeared.”
After griping from this newsletter, the White House will not skip the big Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland because President Biden is too busy doing fundraisers with Jimmy Kimmel. For better or worse, the Biden administration is sending Vice President Kamala Harris. I’m just glad someone is going.