Former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum speaks after being elected as the ruling Morena party’s presidential candidate for next year’s presidential election in Mexico City on September 6, 2023.
Claudio Cruz | Afp | beautiful images
Voters in Mexico are participating in the country’s elections the biggest election ever — vote on Sunday to fill more than 20,000 local, state and federal positions and will almost certainly elect their first female president.
But widespread violence has marred the path towards one next election in Mexican history.
Criminal gangs have taken over much of Mexico as they vie for territory to smuggle drugs into the United States, make money from smuggling migrants and blackmailing residents to promote their illegal business. Violence against political figures continues throughout this election cycle, resulting in a 150% increase in the number of victims of political violence since 2021, according to an analysis from Integraliaa public affairs consulting firm that researches political risk and other issues in Mexico.
These have deeply disappointed Mexican voters, leading most of them to consider security as a top concern. According to estimates, about 6 in 10 adults in Mexico consider the city where they live to be unsafe due to robberies or armed violence. a survey by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography published in April.
Both leading presidential candidates – Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico’s ruling political party, Morena, and Xóchitl Gálvez, of the opposition coalition Broad Front for Mexico – have radically different ideas about how to Best for reducing crime.
One of them is expected to make history as Mexico’s first female president, given that Jorge Álvarez Mãnez, the presidential candidate of the Civic Movement party, is third in the polls. probe.
Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City and a physicist and climate scientist, said she plans to combat the violence by continuing “Hugs, not bullets” policy done by her mentor, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, this does not directly take on the cartels as has been done in previous administrations.
Before López Obrador, “at least the Mexican government and local authorities had the rhetoric of doing something,” said Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. that” about violence. “But since Mr. Lopez Obrador took office at the end of 2018, that discourse has completely changed…These criminals feel that they can do almost anything they want and the state will not go after them .”
López Obrador’s policies have not significantly reduced the number of murders over the past six years, because Mexican government data shows that at least 102,400 murders were reported during that time.
But the data also shows that López Obrador’s predecessors’ strategy of pursuing drug lords in all-out war has not improved safety.
Gálvez, a former senator and tech entrepreneur, has worked to convince voters that health care access and economic development have stagnated under Morena and crime rates remain high . The center-right candidate has also tried to position his party – a coalition of traditional political parties that have long ruled Mexico such as the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, the Progressive Democratic Revolutionary Party small and long-standing Institutional Revolutionary Party. , or PRI – as the change Mexico needs to unite an increasingly polarized nation.
Mexico’s next president will have an important role in addressing US priority issues such as immigration and foreign affairs, as well as determine the future of the trade agreement that turned Mexico into the United States’ biggest Commercial Partner.
On Sunday, polls open at 8 a.m. local time and close at 6 p.m.
