Sunday, June 2, 2024, 3:43 p.m.
Mexico will have a president. The polls give the entire advantage to climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum, representative of López Obrador’s ruling party, and second place to opposition senator Xóchitl Gálvez. Whether one or the other wins, a woman will be at the head of a country paradoxically devastated by femicides, sustained gender violence and social inequalities. Also due to an excessive narco-offensive, which since the beginning of the electoral process a year ago has claimed the lives of 38 candidates.
None of the previous presidents has managed to put an end to the cartels. Since 1985, the year of the murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena by the Guadalajara Cartel, seven leaders have occupied the presidential palace and the mafias have not only outlived them all, but have increased their number – the United States estimates that today there is one operating dozen groups – and diversified its activity, now extended to human trafficking and infiltration into the big businesses that drive the country, such as food. Neither Felipe Calderón, instigator of the so-called “war on drug trafficking” in 2006, nor the more selective policy and with less military presence – “hugs not bullets” – of Enrique Peña Nieto or the last six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who in 2019 He proclaimed the end of the battle against drug trafficking and euphemistically changed it to the beginning of the fight against ‘organized crime’.
It is still unknown what strategy the next president will deploy. The reality is very harsh. Since 2006 there have been more than 300,000 fatalities and at least 115,000 people have been recorded who are still missing in that abyss of bullets, dismembered bodies and drums of acid. The edges of the border and the states traditionally in the hands of drug lords are the most conflictive.
A good part of this strategy depends on the result of the polls – nine governors and 20,000 local officials are elected – and the number of politicians and related members that the cartels manage to place. Many of the candidates most belligerent with violence have disappeared from the ballots. Apart from the 38 murdered, several hundred candidates have given up running in recent months and half a thousand have only been able to carry out an irregular campaign under military protection. For these, it has not been a rarity to offer rallies in empty squares where the hitmen had threatened the population to stay at home.
A model of machismo
The woman who becomes president this June 2 will mark the symbolism of how Mexico has advanced over the rest of Latin America in empowering its female positions in politics. But it will not modify the sexist model of operation that previous governments have maintained since Mexico was Mexico. At least, that is what the experts think, highlighting how the main candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, has not deviated from her boss’s script regarding the feminist marches against the Government being manipulated by the opposition.
López Obrador is considered a populist immersed in the tide of the second progressive cycle in Latin America. Starting in 2018, nations such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Honduras fit in there, but Mexico is the one that has survived the best. With greater stability within a country always subject to storms. The point is that this veteran leader has not been a prodigal son of progressivism in terms of equality. He has undervalued the right to abortion. In August of last year, while civil organizations were asking for solutions to the “pandemic of femicides” in the country, Obrador asked himself: “Isn’t everything they say to me gender rape or is the gender nothing more feminine?” The 8-M proclaimed that women are “the driving force of Mexico” and then pointed out those who demonstrated that day before his Government, considering them “vandals” of the right.
Many in this society wonder if in reality Obrador’s success, or the foreseeable success of his successor, corresponds to a leftist profile or to a movement of the country towards the right, which places them rather in a centrist position. There is also the theory that the outgoing president has not achieved all of his objectives due to a blockade by the opposition. Today 98 million citizens vote and the real crux of these elections will be the result of the 500 deputies and 128 senators that must be elected. If all the winds were strongly in favor of Morena, it could take over the power of the main institutions of the State and pave the way for future legal reforms and of the Constitution itself. But achieving such qualified majorities seems unlikely. The polls do not give such a distance with the PRI-PAN-PRD coalition and the third party in the running, the Citizen Movement.
The imminent fact that Mexico will have a woman president is due to a collusion of factors. Politically, in 2007 the country implemented a quota system that forces each party to present no more than 60% of candidates of the same sex to Congress. In 2020, the Electoral Tribunal extended this system to state and municipal governments. Feminist organizations, however, consider Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez as a mirage. They argue that, below the first level of the Administration, only 26% of leadership and presidencies are in the hands of women and that their departments generally receive a smaller budget.
Another reason is demographic. In Mexico there are 105 women for every 100 men. Mortality is higher among these, but so is migration. There are more men crossing to the United States in search of work. This influences the fact that family clans have a matriarchal sense, significantly despite the authoritarianism of men. Furthermore, there has been an increase in divorces since 2010 – one in four households is headed by a woman – and employment among women has increased by over 40%, although it remains a sad reality that their salaries are much higher. low and that there are more women than men in poverty.
Machismo is still there, rooted to the social core. Four out of ten women have suffered violence from their partner. Despite this image of progressivism in politics, women die in the streets. Eleven are murdered every day. In the case of sexual assaults, they reach the dimension of a supernatural hell: a report presented to the Senate a few months ago that in 2021 alone there were 1.7 million sexual crimes against Mexican women and, on the other hand, there were only 10,700 convictions. Last year, 243 daily rapes were recorded. “These numbers reflect an unacceptable situation, as well as the urgent need to take immediate action to guarantee the safety and protection of women,” the report states.
decisive states
The next president has a lot of work to do. Against Sheinbaum is the way in which Obrador has underestimated this scourge. But also its scant echo to the demands of family organizations that search for the disappeared. Most of the time they work without any official or police help, facing the threats of drug traffickers alone.
Elections are played throughout the country. But five states are key: State of Mexico, Mexico City, Jalisco, Veracruz and Puebla. His profile is the spearhead of the nation. They concentrate everything: the epicenter of politics, the refuge of a reasonably stable economy despite the enormous weight of precariousness and shadow work, the darkness of violence and population. Together they account for almost 40% of the electoral roll. What they dictate is what reaches the presidential palace.
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