Sheinbaum is sworn in as Mexico’s first female president

MEXICO CITY – Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as Mexico’s first female president on Tuesday, October 1, 2024. She benefited from enthusiasm for her predecessor’s social programs, but also faced challenges such as persistently high levels of violence.

After a smiling Sheinbaum took the oath of office on the floor of Congress, lawmakers shouted “Presidenta! Presidenta!” For the first time in Mexico’s more than 200 years of history as an independent country, the feminine form of president is used in Spanish.

The scientist-turned-politician hosts a country with a number of immediate problems, including a sluggish economy, unfinished construction programs, mounting debt and the hurricane-ravaged seaside resort of Acapulco.

In her inauguration speech, Sheinbaum, 62, said she came to power accompanied by all the women who struggled in anonymity to find their way to Mexico, including “those who dreamed of the possibility that one day, regardless of whether we born, as women or men we would realize our dreams and desires without our gender determining our fate.”

She made a long list of promises to cap gasoline and food prices, expand cash handout programs for women and children, support business investment and the construction of housing and passenger rail. But any mention of the drug cartels that control much of the country was brief and near the end of the list.

Sheinbaum offered little change from former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “Hugs not Bullets” strategy of tackling root causes and not confronting the cartels, other than promising more intelligence work and investigations. “There will be no return to the irresponsible drug war,” she said. / AP