Mexico has just made history by electing its first woman president in a landslide victory. Claudia Sheinbaum, the 61-year-old former mayor of Mexico City won 59.4% of the vote and easily defeated businesswoman Xóchitl Gálvez. She’s also the first Jewish president of the country.
Sheinbaum is also a former energy scientist with a doctorate in energy engineering. She used to work in a research lab in California, examining how Mexico consumed energy, and is an expert on climate change.
In her victory speech she said:
“For the first time in 200 years of the republic, I will become the first female president of Mexico. … And as I have said on other occasions, I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.”
Sheinbaum was born in Mexico City in 1962 after her maternal grandparents fled Europe to get away from the Holocaust. She’s the daughter of Annie Pardo Cemo, a renowned biologist and professor emeritus at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Her father is Carlos Sheinbaum, who worked as a chemical engineer.
She attended UNAM to study physics and earned her doctorate doing fieldwork at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. She eventually returned to the college as a professor in the engineering department in 1995.
In an interview with the Associated Press in 2023, she said “I believe in science.”
She was politically active as a student and a professor throughout the ’80s and ’90s. In 1998, she helped to form the Revolutionary Democratic Party, a student-led political organization. In 2000, Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador appointed her as Mexico City’s environmental minister. She worked hard to improve the city, including overseeing the introduction of Mexico City’s Metrobus. She was also instrumental in constructing the second story of the beltway road the Periférico, which circles the city’s urban zone.
When Obrador lost a 2006 bid for the presidency, Sheinbaum went back to UNAM. During this period she contributed to the fourth and fifth assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is a UN organization that sets suggested global warming policy. The organization won the Nobel Peace Prize after the fourth assessment was published in 2007.
She fully entered politics fully in 2015 when she was elected the mayor of the Tlalpan district in Mexico City. She used her background in climate science to push for water rights and its fair usage, and in 2018 she was elected in a landslide victory as the mayor of Mexico City as a whole. Like the presidency, she was the first woman and first person of Jewish descent to hold the office.
She continued her work on city infrastructure and climate change in her new position, this time on a bigger scale. She tackled public transit, expanded the collection of rainwater, helped to reform the waste management division and started a generational reforestation program. She also tried to modernize the subway system in the city.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she took a different approach toward testing than the rest of the country. While Obrador didn’t want to place any restrictions in the country that could potentially hurt the economy and downplayed how important it was to test, she expanded the Mexico City testing apparatus. While Obrador still greeted crowds intimately, she wore a mask and pushed for social distancing.
She has two children and a grandchild of her own. She was previously married to Carlos Ímaz Gispert but they divorced in 2016. In 2023 she married Jesús María Tarriba, a financial risk specialist at the Bank of Mexico.
One of her biggest challenges will be battling the specter of violence and drugs that dogs the country. To this end she’s said will expand the National Guard and try to combat the social problems that attract young men to the cartel in the first place.
She wants to make it clear that her policies don’t mean “an iron fist, wars or authoritarianism. We will promote a strategy of addressing the causes and continue moving toward zero impunity.”
Sheinbaum is a former ballet dancer, and she considers herself “obsessive” and “disciplined,” and others who know her describe her as a reserved woman that can seem at times aloof. She’s more of a “get things done quietly” type person than someone who harps on her achievements. When asked about her Nobel Prize win, she often highlights that there were many other people involved in the work besides herself.
She announced her presidential aspirations on June 12, 2023 as a candidate for Morena, a left-wing political party and the largest party in Mexico. She doesn’t hide the fact that her mentor is former President Obrador, and many see her as someone who will continue to push his policies.
They do disagree on some things, however. Obrador strongly championed the country’s petroleum industry as a way to stimulate economic growth, but Sheinbaum wants to pivot away from fossil fuels and move the country toward the country’s burgeoning renewable energy space.
Her win made headlines all over the world, and United States President Joe Biden congratulated Sheinbaum on “her historic election as the first woman President of Mexico.”
“I look forward to working closely with President-elect Sheinbaum in the spirit of partnership and friendship that reflects the enduring bonds between our two countries,” he said. President-elect Sheinbaum will begin her six-year presidential term on Oct. 1.
Published: Jun 4, 2024 06:16 am