On June 2, Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum as its first female president. The 61-year-old scientist was mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023 and is the protégé of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), whose party she Morena belongs to and in whose shadow she will now govern.
In the largest election in Mexican history, Sheinbaum faced former senator Xóchitl Gálvez, head of a conservative coalition. In addition to the presidential race, Mexicans also voted for candidates contesting more than 20,700 federal and local positions across the country.
In the run-up to the election, observers relentlessly cast the prospect of an imminent female head of state in Mexico as a victory for women’s empowerment, even as a look at the facts on the ground suggests the prematurity of such a celebration.
In 2019, Sheinbaum, the first female mayor of Mexico City, promised to eradicate violence against women. During her tenure, however, the epidemic of feminicide in the Mexican capital – and the rest of the country – continued to rage.
Currently in Mexico there are at least 10 women and girls killed every day and tens of thousands of women missing. The vast majority of femicides are not prosecuted.
Naturally, the increase in feminicides occurs in a general context of violence; in the first four and a half years of AMLO’s mandate, Mexico recorded 160,594 murders, while the estimated number of missing people has now exceeded 111,000 – a figure that AMLO has preferred to drastically lower.
The outgoing president also deemed it prudent to accuse people who are too worried about searching for the missing of suffering from “delusions of necrophilia.”
The violence also extends to the political sphere. More than two dozen candidates were assassinated ahead of the June 2 election, and hundreds more dropped out of their races. In April, two mayoral candidates were found dead in a single day.
Some might go so far as to call it “delusions of necrophilia”.
The pre-election surge in political assassinations is attributed primarily to cartels and other organized criminal groups conducting their own form of elections – so to speak – eliminating hostile candidates. After all, there is no better time than the largest elections in Mexican history to demonstrate who will really make the decisions in the coming years.
In March, for example, the mayor of the small coastal town of Zipolite in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico – my intermittent home – was shot dead in broad daylight in front of the local municipality building. The incident went almost completely unnoticed by the Mexican press, but there were rumors in the city that “they” had tipped it off, “they” being the dominant drug trafficking group in the area, whose operations the mayor apparently sought to impede.
I left Zipolite in April, but recently called a local Mexican friend to find out about the candidates to replace the mayor. His response: “Nobody wants the job.”
Multiplying the case of Zipolite by the entire territory of Mexico, you will get an idea, perhaps, of how “free” Sunday’s elections really were.
And while the United States prefers to categorically place the blame for Mexico’s violence on drug cartels and end the discussion there, the truth is that the United States itself plays an outsized role in maintaining the violent landscape south of the border. For one thing, the simultaneous demand for and criminalization of drugs in the United States is what spawned the entire cartel business.
Add to this the US demand for illegal labor and the criminalization of immigration, on which AMLO has been all too eager to do the gringos’ dirty work – a pattern that Sheinbaum will no doubt continue.
As unprecedented numbers of asylum seekers pass through Mexico to reach the United States, drug trafficking organizations have expanded their services to include human trafficking. People on the move suffer abuse and extortion at every opportunity by state agents and organized criminal groups, often working in cahoots.
I had the opportunity to experience these collaborative efforts firsthand when I drove from Oaxaca to the neighboring state of Chiapas in March to pick up two young Venezuelan friends of mine who had just entered Mexico from Guatemala. I initially offered to pay acquaintances in Chiapas to pick them up at the border but was politely informed: “If we take the migrants, the cartels will kill us.”
Our subsequent day-long odyssey involved extortion from every conceivable branch of the Mexican immigration and security apparatus, including AMLO’s beloved National Guard, three members of which cornered us in a parking lot with their pickup truck after being been informed by migrant smugglers that I had been interfering with business.
Dissatisfied to learn that all my pesos had already been distributed to other Mexican officials, the National Guard officials suggested that I go to a nearby gas station to make a large payment on my credit card, which the station attendant would then passed to the distributor. cash officers.
Created in 2019, the National Guard has been accused of torture, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and sexual violence against asylum seekers. Now, Sheinbaum optimistically expressed hope that the National Guard “will be closer to the public, act as local police, truly become first responders.”
Speaking of criminal actors, Sheinbaum also hopes to strengthen cooperation with the United States in the field of so-called “free trade,” despite the concept’s rather sordid history in Mexico. Let us remember that the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) imposed by the United States in 1994 destroyed millions of livelihoods in the country, fueling poverty and forcing countless Mexicans into drug-related jobs to survive. It was then that deadly violence against women increased dramatically.
In any case, what is US-imposed capitalism if not truly organized crime?
As Mexico now prepares for a new administration, it is safe to assume that violence, official corruption and impunity will remain the watchword. A woman may have won the Mexican elections, but the real winner is organized crime, in every sense of the word.
The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Oltre La Linea.
