from al Jazeera
One of Claudia Sheinbaum’s earliest childhood memories is visiting political prisoners with her parents, a moment that helps explain why she calls herself a “child of 1968” — the year protest movements erupted around the globe.
In Mexico, mass student protests targeted the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had governed Mexico since 1929. Often described as the “perfect dictatorship,” the PRI maintained the illusion of democracy through symbolic elections while suppressing dissent.
After months of protests, a crowd of activists assembled in Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas on October 2, 1968. Helicopters circled overhead and flares were reportedly fired into the crowd, before snipers opened fire from nearby rooftops. As bodies fell, a panicked crowd scrambled for cover.
Estimates vary, but up to 300 were believed to have been killed and more than a thousand arrested, effectively quashing the movement.
Sheinbaum has recalled how her mother and father took her to visit their friend and protest leader Raul Alvarez Garín at Lecumberri prison. To this day, she considers him one of her mentors.
Decades later, that political inheritance helped shape the career that won her the presidency in 2024.
“She’s the first woman to become president of the Mexican republic – a country that, because of our culture and the way we’ve been raised, is very macho; a country that seems eternally in crisis,” said Baltazar Gomez Perez, an old friend of Sheinbaum’s and a history professor at the National Autonomous University (UNAM).
“It’s a truly Herculean task.”
Before assuming office, many assumed Sheinbaum would be a carbon copy of her mentor, populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — better known as AMLO — who was president from 2018 to 2024. A climate scientist by training, she has taken a more pragmatic and security-minded approach than AMLO, while navigating intense pressure from the United States.
In January, after Delta Force abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a nighttime raid in Caracas, President Donald Trump used the occasion to suggest that the US might expand anti-cartel operations onto land in Mexico.
Sheinbaum pushed back firmly.
“We categorically reject intervention in the internal matters of other countries,” she said.
“Cooperation, yes; subordination and intervention, no.”
Several weeks later, she showed she could confront cartels on her own terms. Army helicopters closed in on luxury cabins in the wooded hills on the outskirts of Tapalpa, a quiet town in central Mexico. Federal authorities had intelligence that the gated compound hid Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, aka “El Mencho”, Mexico’s most-wanted and dangerous drug lord and head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).
Groggy from a late-night party, Mencho’s armed entourage was caught by surprise when special forces stormed the perimeter. A firefight erupted, and Mencho fled to the nearby woods, where he was found mortally wounded in the undergrowth.
The Mencho operation demonstrated that Sheinbaum wasn’t afraid of taking on the cartels, but it might not have been enough. The following day, Trump posted online that Mexico must do more to fight crime and drugs.
The White House has also exerted trade pressure, using tariffs over the past year to squeeze Mexico and declining to renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in its current form.
Yet, despite fears that Mexico is too dangerous to cohost the World Cup, the games there have proceeded smoothly. The president was spotted watching Mexico’s opening match against South Africa in a fan zone in the capital, having given her stadium ticket away to a young female fan. This sort of down-to-earth image evoked the ‘man-of-the-people’ leadership projected by her mentor, AMLO, but Sheinbaum has also sought to step out of his shadow and define herself as a pragmatic leader capable of handling cartel crackdowns, violent crime and mounting pressure from the White House...
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