Viva la difference!
With so much happening politically in the United States—to refresh, an ex-president was recently found guilty of 34 felonies—it is understandable that far too little attention was paid to Mexico’s presidential election. But just ten days ago a woman who is also a scientist and academic, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, won a landslide election in Mexico’s presidential election. Sheinbaum captured nearly 60 percent of the vote. Sheinbaum (pronounced SHANE-balm) will become Mexico’s first ever Jewish president.
In her first announcement after her chief opponent for the office conceded, Sheinbaum, 61, told thousands of supporters after being declared the winner, “I do not arrive alone…we all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.”
The former mayor of Mexico City and progressive politician/scientist was also part of a 2007 team of scientists who won the Nobel Peace Prize for work on a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on climate change.
Sheinbaum’s Mexican roots go back more than a century. Her paternal grandparents arrived from Lithuania in the 1920s, her maternal grandparents fled Bulgaria in the 1940s to escape the Nazis. Sheinbaum’s family continues to celebrate Jewish holidays and traditions.
Mexico’s new president won’t be sworn into office until October 1st, but already the U.S. and Colorado are paying close attention to the way she forms her government and how it will impact Mexico-U.S. relations.
Mexico recently supplanted China as America’s leading trading partner. But Colorado and Mexico have also enjoyed a decades long and healthy trading relationship, with Colorado sending everything from beef to aircraft parts across the border.
Colorado and Mexico have an annual trade, both import and export, that exceeds $2.3 billion. Colorado exports more than $1 billion in goods to Mexico while Mexico sends $1.3 billion to the state. The Colorado/Mexico trade corridor exceeds the combined trade it has with Germany and all of Central and South America. The relationship also supports nearly 100,000 Colorado jobs.
Agriculture has long been a central component in the Colorado-Mexico partnership and one staple the state sends south is essential to the economic health of the San Luis Valley, said Jim Ehrlich, Executive Director of the Colorado Potato Administration Committee.
“Business has been good,” Ehrlich said in a phone con- versation as he drove recently across the San Luis Valley. Ehrlich estimated that “11 to 12 percent of our volume” is sent to Mexico. “The last two years,” he said, shipments of the Valley crop “have increased by about 15 percent.”
Former Colorado Congressman John Salazar whose family has grown potatoes in the Valley for more than a century said trade policies under current Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador have been good. Of course, Sheinbaum, a protégé of Mexico’s current president, will have her own trade policies, Salazar said.
Sheinbaum will inherit the same political and social challenges that have plagued Mexico and, by extension, the U.S., for decades. Both countries meet regularly to discuss ways to curb the flood of migrants, the powder keg of violence inflicted by cartels, the tsunami of drugs crossing the border, especially fentanyl and other basic human rights issues.
Cartel violence, which polls show to be Mexico’s number one concern, is recorded nearly daily somewhere in the country. Dozens of mayors and local officials have already been killed this year by the cartels. While cartel violence is legend, so too is the culture of machismo and its residue of victims.
Like it or not, said University of Denver professor of international politics, Oliver Kaplan, part of Mexico’s story is machismo. It is also one of the motivating reasons for the exodus of countless numbers of women and families who have been its victims.
“It is a country known for violence against women,” he said. As the first women president, Sheinbaum will have to deal with it on both a micro and macro level, socially and politically. But Sheinbaum won’t be without examples for managing things. “Latin America,” he said, “has had other women presidents. This is becoming more and more normalized.”
But Sheinbaum is not new to power structures either in politics or in science, another traditional male dominated field. For proof, one need only look at her Nobel Prize or the fact that she presided over the largest city in north America. Add to that, she did win the presidency with 58 percent of the vote.
When Sheinbaum meets with whomever is elected in the U.S. Presidential Election, the scientist and academic president-elect has pledged to thoughtfully address the panoply of issues that connect the two countries, including the exodus of Mexicans to the U.S. “We will always defend the Mexicans on the other side of the border,” she said during her campaign.
Unless things change between now and her scheduled first meeting with the U.S. President, Sheinbaum will be discussing President Biden’s recent decision to temporarily shut the border to asylum seekers when illegal crossing spike. But, said Kaplan, “it’s a good sign when leaders that are elected embrace” long-standing friendships and policies.
Internally, Sheinbaum will also have to deal with pressure mounting from South American countries whose ex-pats traveling through Mexico to the U.S. have complained of harsh and even brutal treatment at the hands of authorities. But with a numerically strong majority in Mexico’s Congress, a nod of support from her predecessor and, of course, her overwhelming plurality in winning, Sheinbaum is off to a good start.
At home, she is saying the right things to the right groups. Her strong signals on gender equality and her long held commitment to the environment for now are working in her favor. But honeymoons for presidents, it is well documented, have notoriously short shelf lives.
