MEXICO CITY (AP) — Claudia Sheinbaum took the oath of office Tuesday as Mexico’s first female president in more than 200 years of independence, promising to protect an expanded social safety net and other popular policies put in place by her predecessor, but facing pressing problems.
The 62-year-old scientist-turned-politician receives a country with a number of immediate challenges, foremost among them stubbornly high levels of violence, a sluggish economy and the hurricane-battered resort city of Acapulco, which she plans to visit Wednesday.
While former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office six years ago declaring “For the good of all, first the poor,” and promising historical change from the neoliberal economic policies of his predecessors, Sheinbaum has promised continuity.
She has committed to guarding his legacy — more support for the poor and a deepening militarization of domestic security — but many Mexicans remain hopeful that she will eventually step out of his formidable shadow.
Despite her pledge of continuity, she is a very different personality.
“López Obrador was a tremendously charismatic president and many times that charisma allowed him to cover up some political errors that Claudia Sheinbaum will not have that possibility of doing,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a political analyst at Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Teaching. “So, where López Obrador was charismatic, Claudia Sheinbaum will have to be effective.”
He is not leaving her an easy situation.
Her first trip as president will be to the flood-stricken Pacific coast resort of Acapulco.
Hurricane John, which struck as a Category 3 hurricane last week and then reemerged into the ocean and struck again as a tropical storm, caused four days of incredibly heavy rain that killed at least 17 people along the coast around Acapulco. Acapulco was devastated in October 2023 by Hurricane Otis, and had not recovered from that blow when John hit.
Sheinbaum must also deal with raging violence in the cartel-dominated northern city of Culiacan, where factional fighting within the Sinaloa cartel broke out after drug lords Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López were apprehended in the United States after they flew there in a small plane on July 25.
López Obrador has long sought to avoid confronting Mexico’s drug cartels and has openly appealed to the gangs to keep the peace among themselves, but the limitations of that strategy have become glaringly apparent in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, where gun battles have raged on the city’s streets. Local authorities and even the army — which López Obrador has relied on for everything — have essentially admitted that the fighting will only end when the cartel bosses decide to end it.
But that’s only the latest hotspot.
Drug-related violence is surging from Tijuana in the north to Chiapas in the south, displacing thousands.