Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in this week as Mexico’s first woman president, inheriting a country beset by gang violence and economic uncertainty over controversial reforms passed by her powerful ruling party.
To cries of “Long live Claudia! Long live Mexico!”, the 62-year-old former Mexico City mayor took the oath of office and received the presidential sash in Congress, with foreign dignitaries looking on – including US First Lady Jill Biden.
Sheinbaum told cheering lawmakers that, for the first time, “women have arrived to shape the destiny of our beautiful nation”, where around 10 women or girls are murdered every day.
Supporters began gathering at dawn to celebrate the inauguration of the new leader of the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking country, home to 129 million people, which has had 65 male presidents since independence.
“I don’t arrive alone” but with “all the women of Mexico”, Sheinbaum told the flag-waving crowd in the capital’s main square after undergoing an Indigenous purification ritual.
“No to racism, no to classism and no to machismo,” she said. Marta Ramirez arrived at five in the morning after a bus journey from the central city of Leon to join the celebrations. A woman president “understands the people better”, the housewife said.
Gina Montes de Oca, a 28-year-old social worker, said it was “a day of celebration”, calling the inauguration of Mexico’s first woman president “a historic change”.
One high-profile absence at the ceremony was Spanish King Felipe VI, whom Sheinbaum refused to invite, accusing him of failing to acknowledge harm caused by colonisation.
Sheinbaum, a scientist by training, won a landslide victory in June elections with a vow to continue the left-wing reform agenda of outgoing leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a close ally.
Lopez Obrador leaves the presidential palace after six years due to the country’s single-term limit, despite an approval rating of around 70%, largely thanks to his policies aimed at helping poorer Mexicans.
He bequeaths Sheinbaum the leadership of a nation where murders and kidnappings occur daily and violent drug cartels control vast swaths of territory.
Spiralling criminal violence, much of it linked to drug trafficking and gangs, has seen more than 450 000 people murdered in Mexico since 2006 and more than 100 000 people are missing.
While Sheinbaum has pledged to stick to the outgoing president’s con- troversial “hugs not bullets” strategy –using social policy to tackle crime at its roots – experts expect some changes in her approach.
“It will be a modified version of ‘hugs not bullets’ that will be more reliant on intelligence and therefore more effective at getting things done,” said Professor Pamela Starr, an expert on Mexico at the University of Southern California.
Cape Times