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“THE NORTH NEEDS TO LEARN FROM THE SOUTH”: MEXICO POISED TO ELECT
FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT  
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Interview by Amy Goodman and Juan González
May 29, 2024
Democracy Now
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_ The landmark moment has filled many with hope as Mexico has one of
the highest rates of gender violence and femicides in Latin America. _


Opposition hopeful Xochitl Glavez (L) and ruling party candidate
Claudia Sheinbaum (R) are the frontrunners in the race for the Mexican
presidency., Rodrigo Oropeza CLAUDIO CRUZ

 

In Mexico, millions of voters are poised to elect the first woman
president in the country’s history when they cast their ballots on
Sunday. Voters will be choosing between front-runners Claudia
Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, and Xóchitl Gálvez, a
former senator; and a third candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, who is
trailing further behind in the polls. The landmark moment has filled
many with hope as Mexico has one of the highest rates of gender
violence and femicides in Latin America. “This is the primary
contradiction for Mexico. You’re going to elect a woman, but you
still haven’t resolved the fact that women are being murdered at the
rate of about 10 to 11 every single day,” says Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, who interviewed both
Sheinbaum and Gálvez. Hinojosa says the two front-runners are the
result of “decadeslong work by feminists in Mexico, along with
feminists all over Latin America, pushing for equality.”

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: This is _Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org, _The War
and Peace Report_. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to Mexico, where this Sunday millions of voters are poised
to elect the first woman president in Mexico’s history. The landmark
moment has filled many with hope, as Mexico has one of the highest
rates of gender violence and femicide in Latin America, with at least
10 women murdered in Mexico every single day. Voters will be choosing
between front-runners Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez; a third
candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez.

Sheinbaum has maintained a significant lead in the polls ahead of June
2nd elections. She is the former mayor of Mexico City, member of the
ruling left Morena party, seen as a continuation of the current
president, AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, while Gálvez, a
former senator, is backed by a coalition that includes the
conservative PRI and PAN parties. The PRI, or Institutional
Revolutionary Party, ruled Mexico uninterrupted for 71 years until the
2000s. Rampant violence, perpetuated in part by the decadeslong
U.S.-backed so-called war on drugs, is a central issue.

This campaign cycle has been one of the deadliest in Mexico, with at
least 34 candidates or aspiring candidates assassinated since
September. Immigration and Mexico-U.S. relations are also pivotal
issues.

In a minute, we’ll be joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Maria Hinojosa to discuss the historic elections. But first let’s
turn to clips of Maria’s recent interviews with both front-runners,
Sheinbaum and Gálvez, which recently aired on _Latino USA_. Maria
Hinojosa and her colleague Peniley Ramírez were in Mexico City
earlier this year, where they spoke to Claudia Sheinbaum at a campaign
rally. They asked her how she’d handle immigration.

MARIA HINOJOSA: What is your message to Latino Mexican voters in the
United States about this election and your candidacy?

CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: We’re going to fight for them, for their
rights, and we’re going to fight for the families in Mexico. We want
welfare for all the Mexicans.

PENILEY RAMÍREZ: Now you have said a few days ago that Biden and
Trump should stop talking about the Mexican elections. Why you said
that? And what’s your plan regarding immigration?

CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: The best way to reduce migration is to invest in
the countries where people have to leave and want to go to the U.S.
Either if Biden wins or Trump wins, there are a lot of problems in the
U.S. And it’s better that their campaign not use Mexico as the
problem. We are not the problem. We are part of the solution.

AMY GOODMAN: They met Xóchitl Gálvez while the presidential
candidate traveled to New York to meet with Mexican voters here. This
is what Gálvez said.

MARIA HINOJOSA: So, what is your fresh new approach towards the
issue of immigration?

Now, she did not really answer the question, but she did say to us
that we needed to understand that immigration is a worldwide problem,
and therefore, the solution, she said, was to sit and talk. She
replied that if we don’t sit and have a dialogue, young people will
keep dying on both sides of the border.

AMY GOODMAN: Xóchitl Gálvez, the other Mexican presidential
candidate.

For more, we are joined by Maria Hinojosa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist and founder of Futuro Media, host of _Latino USA_, which
has just released its new episode
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Presidenta Will Lead Femicide-Plagued Mexico.”

Maria, it’s great to have you with us at the table. Why don’t you
start off by talking about the historic significance of these
elections and what it means for what’s happening in Mexico today?

MARIA HINOJOSA: You know what’s interesting, Amy — because you
and I have been doing this for a while, right? — the reason why two
women end up being the two front-runner candidates is not just like,
oh, it just happened. There was a tremendous, decadeslong work by
feminists in Mexico, along with feminists all over Latin America,
pushing for equality, pushing for equity for women. In the face of
violence, in the face of impunity, the feminist movement in Mexico and
Latin America just kept on pushing, to the point where you were able
to make it by law that there had to be parity in the government, and
this leads to both women ending up as candidates. And it is historic.

You know, I’m asking the question. It’s a little — you know, a
little — but which country is more _machista_? The United States,
that has two old men, one accused of strange and weird sexual and
cover-ups, etc., and fraud, etc., and the other one, who’s just
quite elderly? And in Mexico, you have two women. And so, what
they’re talking about in the political debate in Mexico is really,
frankly, light years away from the political debate that we’re
having in this country. Mexico — strangely, Mexico, Amy, becomes
like a North Star. When would I have said that? I could have never
imagined. And having said that, I’m not —

AMY GOODMAN: And you were born in Mexico City.

MARIA HINOJOSA: And I was born in Mexico, and I’ve watched the
entire political process. I’m not Pollyanna. Impunity and violence
against women, corruption, the assassination of multiple candidates,
it’s a real problem. But Mexico has a different political debate
happening now.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Maria, I wanted to ask you if you could talk a
little bit about the major differences between the two candidates
policy-wise. Clearly, Claudia Sheinbaum is being supported by the
current president, AMLO, and appears to have a very big lead in the
polls. But your sense of their differences?

MARIA HINOJOSA: So, they will both say that they are from the left.
Xóchitl will say that she’s center-left. Claudia Sheinbaum will say
that she’s obviously more to the left. The policy differences have
to do kind of with the historical differences between their two
parties, as it were — the Morena party, which was a street activist
movement, that now has ended up in the presidential palace, versus you
have the PRI and the PAN. These are the two oldest parties in
Mexico. It would be like the Republicans and the Democrats getting
together to support a candidate. It is a very strange coalition. And
so, what they represent is actually these two very different parts of
American history.

Having said that, there’s a big critique that Claudia Sheinbaum will
continue the policies of AMLO. She responds in a retort that’s
saying, “That’s a misogynistic question. You’re saying that
because I’m a woman, I’m only going to follow what a man has done
before me.”

Xóchitl Gálvez says that she’s going to change things, that she
will root out corruption, that she has a vision. But, interestingly,
Juan, when I was with her and spent an hour with her, and two days
later I was trying to process like what really happened in that
hour-long interview, what were we able to get at, who does she really
— what does she really represent, and I came to a strange
conclusion. It is strange, but I feel like her entire candidacy is
strange because of these parties supporting her. And I said it’s
like she’s the Sarah Palin of Mexico, the center-left Sarah Palin of
Mexico, in the sense that she’s kind of like, “Hi, I’m here, and
I just kind of ended up as the main candidate here, and I’m bright,
and I’m smart, and I’m a survivor, and everything is going to be
fine.” And it’s like Mexico is much more complex than that. You
know that. Why do you continue to kind of do this performative
political stunts? Even here in New York, she ended up riding her bike
to _The New York Times_ for a series of interviews there. Just, I
mean, one, she wasn’t wearing a helmet. Who rides a bike in New York
without a helmet? And also, why do you want to ride a bike in Times
Square? So, she does that, and people kind of pick up on these
performative acts that she does.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, I wanted to ask you about the importance
of the Mexican diaspora in the United States? For several years now,
Mexicans abroad who are Mexican citizens have been able to vote in the
election. Can you talk about the kind of interest there appears to be
in the U.S. in Mexican communities?

MARIA HINOJOSA: You know what, Juan? I have been trying to get my
Mexican citizenship back, because when I became an American citizen in
1989, I had to give up my Mexican citizenship. It has been — it got
messed up because of the pandemic. But this — I’m just one of
probably millions of Mexicans who would like to be able to have a vote
and a participation in the Mexican political process.

When you look at how close recent Mexican elections for president have
been, you can understand why Mexican parties, presidential campaigns
are coming to ask for Mexicans in the United States to vote. It’s
small now, maybe 200,000 or so, but if you continue to push to get
after these votes of Mexicans living in the United States, it could
actually be quite influential. And I think for the politics of
Mexicans living in the United States, it’s a welcome idea that we
don’t have to decide, “Am I from here, or am I from there?” we
actually can vote in both places.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to some of the clips, the interviews
you’ve done. This is Xóchitl Gálvez speaking to you, Maria, about
her experience with gender violence.

MARIA HINOJOSA: How do you define feminism?

She said that she believes in equality for all women in terms of
political, economic and reproductive rights. And to emphasize why this
matters to her, she told us she suffered violence as a child. This
story has become a part of Xóchitl Gálvez’s stump speech. Her
father, she says, was a violent man who terrorized her as a child. One
time, she tells us in the interview, he pointed a shotgun at her
mother and threatened her. She says that they escaped, but that this
experience marked her.

And then I asked her what she thinks the solution might be for this
kind of gender-based violence in Mexico. What Xóchitl said to us was
that women in Mexico need a support system in cases of violence, and
that men need to know that if they commit violence against women, they
will be prosecuted.

AMY GOODMAN: This is another clip of _Latino USA_’s interview
with Claudia Sheinbaum. Futuro Media executive producer Peniley
Ramírez asks her about her presidency, what it would mean for Mexico.
She spoke to her at a campaign rally in Mexico City.

PENILEY RAMÍREZ: What’s going to be unique about your government?

CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: Well, you know, I’m a scientist, so I’m going
to put a lot of effort in science and development. We’re going to go
for women’s rights. And we’re going to continue bringing
education, good health system for the people, housing and what I call
the rights for the Mexican people.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Claudia Sheinbaum, the — well, she is
the front-runner, for sure. They both call themselves feminists. Women
got the right to vote in Mexico when? In 1953. And what about
abortion?

MARIA HINOJOSA: So, abortion right now, actually, is more
progressive in Mexico than in the United States. This is actually not
like a primary issue in the presidential campaign right now, unlike
here in the United States, because what’s happening in Mexico is
trending towards legalization across the entire country. There are
parts in Mexican states where it is legal, but it’s not kind of the
kind of abortion politics that we’re having here, where you would
expect, Amy, a Catholic country to be making the decisions on abortion
like the ones that are being made in the United States, that says it
has no relationship with the church in its politics.

So, right now, again, for women, on the issue of reproductive rights,
more progressive, but on the issue of violence, on the issue of
impunity, the number of female candidates running in different parties
in different states, lower, much lower down the ballot, being
assassinated. It’s really a huge issue. And this is the primary
contradiction for Mexico. You’re going to nominate — you’re
going to elect a woman, but you still haven’t resolved the fact that
women are being murdered at the rate of about 10 to 11 every single
day, and the impunity that comes with it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Maria, in terms of this issue of Mexico
electing a woman president, several Latin American countries have
already done so: Chile, Honduras, Argentina, Brazil, and now Mexico.
And yet here in the United States, the potential for electing a woman
president still will have to be postponed for another four or eight
years. I’m wondering your sense of the difference, especially with
the United States supposedly claiming to represent a much more
forward-looking view on inequality between the genders.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Well, Juan, you won’t be surprised when I say that
the North needs to learn from the South. There’s always this
perspective that the North, the United States, is leading the way, is
the way to go. And in fact, what the United States and the feminist
movement in the United States needs to do is to look at what happened
in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The number of countries that
have elected a woman president in Latin America is stunning,
considering the fact that the United States is still at about a third
of women in Congress. You have countries like Rwanda that have
legalized parity in political representation, and our country is
lagging behind. It is huge, Juan.

On the issue of immigration and whether or not Claudia or Xóchitl —
more likely it will be Claudia who ends up as president — will do
something profoundly different, fresh, stand up to the United States,
say, “No more Remain in Mexico,” begin to do kind of political
battle on the issue of immigration — as you know, this is one of my
key issues as an immigrant journalist in the United States — to be
seen. The thought, though, of a Claudia Sheinbaum, who, frankly, you
know, Stanford-educated, speaks perfect English, sitting down in any
kind of meeting with a potential Donald Trump is — it messes with
the brain, although she — I don’t think she will take things
sitting down.

AMY GOODMAN: And it’s very interesting. There were just major
protests in Mexico City outside the Israeli Embassy around Gaza,
and AMLO, the president, and the Morena party supporting Mexico
joining South Africa in its genocide case against Israel at the
International Court of Justice, and Claudia Sheinbaum, the
front-runner, following AMLO, is a Jewish woman.

MARIA HINOJOSA: Correct. This is extraordinary, because the fact
that she is a Jewish woman, but she doesn’t really — she’s a
scientist, so she’s not very religious. But she is a Jewish woman,
and her name is Sheinbaum. It’s not a big issue, which is
fascinating in and of itself. In some ways, you know, my colleagues,
Mexican journalists, in many ways, are leading this conversation of
how you cover politics, and you don’t play into authoritarian and
propaganda games. For example, there might have been journalists who
wanted to kind of fuel the fire of saying, “But she’s Jewish.
She’s Jewish.” It hasn’t really been an issue.

And what’s more interesting is that Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl
Gálvez, both of them wearing _huipiles_, which is the traditional
Indigenous Mexican — you know it because of the embroidery — this
is — the fact that both of them are like, “We love Indigenous
women. We love our Indigenous roots,” again, fascinating for Mexican
politics, which, again, to me, that would be the word that I use in
terms of Mexican politics right now: “fascinating.” That is not
the term that I would use when discussing U.S. politics at all.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Maria, finally, in terms of the legacy of
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, obviously, he came into office with a
lot of hopes of progressives around the hemisphere. He remains very
popular, but, of course, he’s under a lot of criticism for his
handling, or his mishandling, of the femicides, of the killing of
journalists, of his dealings with the United States in terms of
immigration. Your sense of how he will be remembered? And what were
his accomplishments?

MARIA HINOJOSA: Well, it is a very divisive time in Mexican
politics, as well, so we can’t walk away from that. I mean, my own
family is deeply divided. This feels very much like U.S. politics,
families divided. We won’t talk about politics over dinner, or no
political conversations because of how divisive it is.

Look, AMLO, again, came from a street movement to end up in the
presidential palace. You’re right, all of the critiques that
surround him. But there is a lot of support for the policies that
he’s done specifically in terms of progressive policies regarding,
let’s say, protection for workers, protection for domestic workers,
raising the minimum wage — these kinds of issues which are getting
to the class divisions in Mexico. If you’re progressive, you’re
supporting these policies. If you are, let’s say, more on the
conservative side, you see AMLO and his policies as a threat. You
see his populism as a threat. By the way, we understand how
threatening a populist movement can be. We’re seeing it here in the
United States.

But there is going to be a legacy that he, in fact, wants to make
history and be remembered as the president that changed the trajectory
of a modern Mexico. For those who support him, they will say he did
that. For those who are critiques will say he began taking Mexico down
the tubes. And they are unforgiving. They do not like AMLO, and they
do not like Claudia. But more than likely, they will not — that will
not change in the polls in terms of Claudia walking away with the
presidency.

AMY GOODMAN: Maria Hinojosa, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,
Futuro Media founder, host of _Latino USA_. Congratulations! It’s
turning 30 years old. And we will link to your just-released episode
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Presidenta Will Lead Femicide-Plagued Mexico,” ahead of Mexico’s
elections this Sunday.

* Mexico election
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* Presidential Campaign
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* women candidates
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