Perhaps this may have some value if we some time have to write about Mexico.
Continuing what I was saying on Monday with some repetition, Claudia Sheinbaum was elected president in a landslide: she got almost 60% of the vote vs 27% for Xochitl Galvez (an indigenous woman) vs 10% for Jorge Alvarez. Additionally, Sheinbaum got the highest number of votes ever recorded in Mexican history, surpassing López Obrador's record of 30.1 million votes. She also achieved the highest vote percentage since 1982, when PRI completely dominated the country's politics. Along with this, the Morena party won a super-majority (two-thirds) in the lower house of Congress and just short of that in the Senate.
This outcome was pretty much predicted by all of the polls, and some press commentators worry that Morena may become what PRI once was.
Xochitl Galvez was the joint candidate of PRI, PAN and what remains of the PRD after López Obrador split from it in 2014 to form Morena. [López Obrador gave the reason as being that, "PRD leaders and most of its legislators voted for the fiscal reforms (raising taxes and gas prices) and with their collaboration, they paved the way for privatization of the oil industry."]
As I also was mentioning, Sheinbaum has a BS in physics, and a MS and PhD in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She's a climate scientist who co-authored two IPCC reports earlier this century. But while she speaks in favor of clean energy, she at the same time speaks in support of oil (PEMEX). And she did not make climate change part of the election debate.
Indeed, I think we can only expect Claudia Sheinbaum to take what amount to infinitesimal measures to deal with the accelerating climate catastrophe. When she was head of the government of Mexico City, for example, she announced a six-year environmental plan that included reducing air pollution by 30%, planting 15 million trees, banning single-use plastics and promoting recycling, building a new waste separation plant, providing water service to every home, constructing 100 kilometers of corridors for the exclusive use of trolleybus lines and the Mexico City Metrobús system, and constructing and installing solar water heaters and solar panels. She also announced a $2 billion investment to modernize the Mexico City Metro over a period of five years.
Sheinbaum is also a self-declared feminist, but other than continuing López Obrador's economic program (which does to some extent help poor and working-class women), I don't see her doing much more. For example, abortion rights in Mexico have been moving in the opposite direction as they are in the United States. Thus, while abortion was only legal in Mexico City and 13 states in 2019 (and only legal during the first twelve weeks of a pregnancy), last year the Supreme Court voted to decriminalize the procedure nationwide. So now the federal public health service and all federal health institutions are required to offer abortion to anyone who requests it.
On the other hand, Mexico is one of the worse countries in the world in terms of murders and femicides. (In recent years, the only countries that have been higher on the murders list are some small Caribbean countries, and sometimes Honduras or Ecuador.) In 2023 there was more than 30,000 murders for the sixth year running, with the murder rate being three to four times as high as it is in the murderous U.S. For example, in 2021 the Mexican murder rate was about 28 per 100,000 residents in contrast to 7.8 per 100,000 in this country. Moreover, with roughly 100,000 people listed as missing, the real number of murders in Mexico is no doubt considerably higher. Also, it may be that the Morena-led government is trying to hide the true number of murders in order to hide the failure of the stated aim of its anti-crime policy. At any rate, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has accused the press and volunteer searchers who look for the bodies of missing people of necrophilia and other nice things. - see https://www.npr.org/2024/06/06/nx-s1-49 ... loved-ones and https://apnews.com/article/mexico-searc ... 413cef15a2
Needless to say, there is mass anger about this situation, and it was debated in the election. But Sheinbaum just stood for a continuation of López Obrador's policy, and it appears that the other candidates only had minor quibbles with it. Now a large percentage of the Mexican murders are a result of turf wars between the drug cartels, and AMLO sold his policy toward them as “hugs, not bullets,” which on one side meant financing training and scholarship programs for youths, and on the other side meant militarization, i.e., setting up the National Guard to replace the old Federal Police (the Federales). But while the National Guard has been rapidly expanded in size (it now has some 128,000 troops, with lots of them coming from the regular army and navy) and is well armed, it may be avoiding open confrontation with drug cartels—at least there are charges that is. Meanwhile, since its inception, Amnesty International has been warning that the new National Guard would infringe on civil liberties. (Just one of their articles about it is at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/ ... -impunity/.)
Overall, there was some leveling of the increasing Mexican murder rates and even some declines during López Obrador's six years. It's hard to tell how much this has to do with AMLO's policies and how much it has to do with such things as truces between the cartels, or both. But the number of murders obviously remains atrociously high, and the solution to them is not an obvious one. Further, the fact that 38 candidates from all parties were assassinated--purportedly by the drug gangs--during this election (the most in many years) is not a good sign.
Something that I haven't investigated are the accusations that López Obrador has worked to concentrate executive power by weakening independent government institutions and the judiciary through electoral reform.
Mexico
Re: Mexico
https://portside.org/2024-06-15/preside ... transition?
This is Portside's promotion of Scheinbaum. What they call "the energy transition" is not decarbonization, but rather re-nationalization of oil. Mexico had been selling off its oil fields and other energy sources to private multinational corporations.
This is Portside's promotion of Scheinbaum. What they call "the energy transition" is not decarbonization, but rather re-nationalization of oil. Mexico had been selling off its oil fields and other energy sources to private multinational corporations.
Re: Mexico
Contains info re: Moreno's stand on Palestine: https://www.newarab.com/opinion/claudia ... -palestine