Mexico’s election: A victory for organized crime

Under Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency, organized crime will likely be calling the shots.

Supporters of Morena party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum celebrate at Zocalo Square in Mexico City, June 3, 2024 [Yuri Cortez/AFP]

On June 2, Mexico elected  Claudia Sheinbaum  as its first woman president. The 61-year-old scientist served as mayor of Mexico City from 2018 until 2023 and is the protégée of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), to whose Morena party she belongs and in whose shadow she will now govern.

In the  largest election  in Mexico’s history, Sheinbaum faced off against 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 countrywide.

In the run-up to the election, observers relentlessly cast the prospect of an impending  female head of state  in Mexico as a victory for women’s empowerment, although a glance at facts on the ground suggests the prematurity of any such celebration.

Back in 2019, Sheinbaum, the first female mayor of Mexico City, promised to eradicate violence against women. During her tenure, however, the femicide epidemic in the Mexican capital – and the rest of the country – continued to rage.

Mexico currently sees at least 10 women and girls killed on a daily basis, with tens of thousands of women missing. The vast majority of femicides go unprosecuted.

Of course, the emergence in femicides occurs within a general context of violence; In the first four and a half years of AMLO’s term, Mexico recorded 160,594 homicides, while the estimated number of  missing people  has now surpassed 111,000 – a figure AMLO has preferred to drastically lowball.

The outgoing president has also found it prudent to  accuse  people overly concerned with the search for the missing of suffering from “delirium of necrophilia.”

The violence extends to the political realm, too. More than two dozen  candidates were assassinated  ahead of the June 2 polls, and hundreds more dropped out of their races. In April, two mayoral contenders were  found dead  on a single day.

Some might go as far as to call it a “delirium of necrophilia.”

The pre-electoral spike in political killings is attributed primarily to cartels and other organized crime outfits conducting their own form of elections – if you will – by eliminating unfriendly candidates. After all, there is no time like the biggest election in Mexican history to show who will really be calling the shots in the coming years.