XPost: alt.mexico, soc.women, talk.politics.guns   
   XPost: sac.politics, alt.society.liberalism   
   From: yourdime@outlook.com   
      
   MEXICO CITY —  Claudia Sheinbaum, a U.S.-educated scientist-turned-   
   politician, was elected Sunday as Mexico’s first female president,   
   shattering gender barriers in a country known for a culture of machismo   
   and high rates of violence against women.   
      
   “In 200 years of the Mexican republic, I have become the first woman   
   president,” she told supporters in her acceptance speech, describing her   
   victory as a win for all women. “I did not arrive alone,” she said. “We   
   all arrived.”   
      
   The leftist former mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum, 62, will also become   
   the first president of Jewish ancestry in this overwhelmingly Catholic   
   country.   
      
   She will lead a prosperous but polarized nation that in recent years has   
   been plagued by widespread gang violence. And she will be closely watched   
   to see how she navigates the long shadow of her mentor, outgoing President   
   Andrés Manuel López Obrador.   
      
   Sheinbaum was elected in landslide fashion, according to preliminary vote   
   counts, which showed her winning with 58% of the vote compared with 30%   
   for her closest rival, Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz.   
      
   A successful businesswoman, Gálvez ran a spirited campaign representing an   
   opposition coalition, but who ultimately could not overcome the well-oiled   
   machinery of Morena, Sheinbaum’s political party. Trailing in third behind   
   the women was Jorge Álvarez Máynez, a member of Congress.   
      
   Sheinbaum is the protege and hand-picked successor of López Obrador, who   
   founded Morena in 2011 and who has since transformed it into a political   
   behemoth that has drawn comparisons to the Institutional Revolutionary   
   Party, which ruled Mexico in autocratic fashion for most of the 20th   
   century.   
      
   López Obrador, who under the constitution is limited to a single six year   
   term, is a deeply polarizing figure: Supporters laud him for helping lift   
   millions out of poverty while critics assail him for disregarding   
   democratic norms and failing to curb cartel violence.   
      
   Although López Obrador was not on the ballot, many viewed the election as   
   a referendum on his term.   
      
   Many Sheinbaun supporters said they believed she would advance López   
   Obrador’s trademark anti-poverty policies, particularly his government’s   
   welfare payments to students and elderly people.   
      
   “She is going to continue with all the help that the president has given   
   us,” said Rosa Maria Velazco, a 52-year-old teacher. “She will continue to   
   support the poorest.”   
      
   Gálvez supporters, on the other hand, largely said they backed her because   
   she promised to change the course set by López Obrador.   
      
   “I’m very angry at this government,” said Julieta Jujnovsky, 45, a   
   professor of biology.   
      
   She said she didn’t oppose López Obrador’s ideology so much as his style   
   of governing. “He doesn’t want any opposition,” said Jujnovsky, who   
   described the president’s efforts to reform the Supreme Court, slash the   
   number of seats in Mexico’s legislature and overhaul the country’s   
   elections institute as part of a “deterioration” of Mexico’s democracy.   
   “Democracy depends on counterweights and listening to the other side,” she   
   said.   
      
   How Sheinbaum will mange to mend the divisions so evident during López   
   Obrador’s term is one of the many questions hanging over her presidency.   
   And, while López Obrador has vowed to retire from politics, many wonder   
   whether he will indeed stay away from the political fray that has animated   
   his entire adult life.   
      
   Sheinbaum, for her part, has dismissed such questions as misogynist.   
      
   Her victory was a groundbreaking development in a country where women were   
   barred from voting until 1954.   
      
   Her success is in some way a culmination of years of efforts by Mexican   
   authorities to impose gender equality in a nation where politics was   
   traditionally a male affair. A 2019 constitutional reform set quotas   
   requiring gender parity in all elected posts at the federal, state and   
   municipal levels   
      
   Today, more than half of the members of Mexico’s congress are women, the   
   fourth highest rate in the world. Eight of the nation’s 31 governors are   
   female and a woman heads the Supreme Court.   
      
   Some voters expressed wonderment that Mexico had elected a female leader   
   before much of the rest of the world, including the United States.   
      
   “Never in my entire life did I imagine that a woman would be president of   
   my country,” said Cristina Navarrete Santillán, 76, who voted for   
   Sheinbaum in Mexico City alongside her two daughters and two   
   granddaughters. “I am glad to be alive to see it.”   
      
   Sunday’s election was Mexico’s largest ever, with voters also choosing a   
   new Congress, eight state governors, the Mexico City mayor and some 20,000   
   local office-holders nationwide.   
      
   Preliminary results showed that Morena performed well in the congressional   
   elections, and would, as part of a coalition with two allied parties,   
   likely have a super-majority that would allow it to easily pass   
   legislation.   
      
   In the United States, which is home to nearly 11 million people born in   
   Mexico, migrants who in the past were able only to vote in Mexican   
   elections by mail could vote for the first time in person at consulates.   
      
   Long lines of voters stretched for blocks in cities that included Chicago   
   and Orlando, Fla. In Los Angeles, the line at the Mexican Consulate in   
   MacArthur Park wrapped around the block twice, with some people arriving   
   as early as 4 a.m.   
      
   Voters draped in Mexican flags waited patiently as mariachi music blasted.   
      
   Laura Torres, who arrived with a group from Oxnard, said she had waited   
   six hours to vote and would wait another six if necessary. The group   
   planned to vote for Sheinbaum.   
      
   In some parts of Mexico, voters also lined up before dawn.   
      
   That was the case in the middle-class neighborhood of San Andres   
   Totoltepec, where Sheinbaum, an environmental engineer by training, was   
   reared and where she voted early Sunday.   
      
   As the candidate took her place in a line of about 100 people to cast her   
   ballot, the crowd broke out in chants of “Presidenta!”   
      
   Sheinbaum, an environmental engineer, spent much of her career as an   
   academic, although she was raised in a highly political family.   
      
   Both her parents were active in the 1968 student movement, best known for   
   the infamous Tlatelolco massacre in which Mexican security forces killed   
   scores of protesters in the capital. Her first husband was a leftist   
   politican.   
      
   When López Obrador was elected mayor of Mexico City in 2000, he launched   
   Sheinbaum’s political career by making her secretary of environment for   
   the capital.   
      
   She later joined his breakaway political group, the National Regeneration   
   Movement, known as Morena, and was elected in 2015 as borough president of   
   Tlalpan, a district in southern Mexico City.   
      
      
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