The Empty Symbolism of Sheinbaum and Harris

Claudia Sheinbaum will be sworn in as Mexico’s first female president on October 1, just a month before the United States potentially elects its first female president. In many ways, the political careers of Kamala Harris and Claudia Sheinbaum have followed parallel paths. Both highly educated women have sunk their teeth into the different agitations familiar to the activist left, namely climate alarmism and women’s liberation. Harris is from San Francisco, Sheinbaum from Mexico City, both critical seats of their respective countries’ financial and intellectual capital. Both, albeit under different political circumstances, will inherit and implement the policies of elder statesmen that paved their paths to high office.

If Harris is elected in November, what can we expect from the Western Hemisphere’s girl-boss duo? There will certainly be gasps of joy from the usual suspects when the two women meet for the first time. If the recent media coverage of the Harris-Walz campaign is any indication of the soft-glove approach that awaits a Harris White House, we can expect that vacuous gender veneration will obscure important policy questions in an era of unprecedented transnational criminality. Given that Fashion If we don’t bother to take pictures of the women trafficked across the Southwest border in the potential Harris-Sheinbaum era, we are left to predict, based on recent history, the human toll of their leadership.

Kamala Harris’s tenure as “border czar” was an unmitigated, measurable disaster. Her mission to stabilize the “golden triangle” countries suffering from diasporas failed at the cost of millions of migrants and billions of dollars. While the Harris campaign still doesn’t provide a platform on its website, we can assume that Harris will continue the failed “root cause” strategy laid out before her by her aging predecessor.

In Mexico, the “root cause” strategy is better known as the “hugs not bullets” strategy, as outlined by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) during his 2018 campaign for the Mexican presidency. AMLO led a broad left-wing coalition and blamed Mexico’s endemic crime problem on economic inequality and proposed a détente with Mexico’s cartels. AMLO invested in everything from infrastructure to youth programs for children, but critically de-escalated Mexico’s response to increasingly capable cartels like the “New Generation” cartel. AMLO’s National Guard continues to collaborate with various gangs, but its intensity is far comparable to Felipe Calderon’s offensives of the mid-2000s.

Mexico City’s loose policies have had predictable consequences. The country set consecutive homicide records in 2019 and 2020, and has endured six years in a row of more than 30,000 killings per year. Meanwhile, Mexican investigators and prosecutors have managed to convict a perpetrator in a mere 7 percent of murder cases. This, combined with record levels of cross-border human trafficking and intensifying inter-cartel fighting, underscores the apparent fragility of the Governor of the Republic.

Sheinbaum will inherit Mexico’s ongoing crisis from AMLO, albeit in a stronger political position than Harris will inherit from Biden. AMLO has tapped Mexico’s considerable oil and gas reserves, despite rising crime, to deliver steady economic growth and even more impressive long-term projections. It is this economic promise, in contrast to the Biden-era malaise in the Americas, that fueled Sheinbaum’s 33-point victory in the June general election. The margin of victory for AMLO and Sheinbaum’s progressive Morena party, built on delivering on core economic promises, has forged a new center in the Mexican body politic.

Mexico’s traditional center-right parties did not lose the election for lack of effort. Mexico’s main opposition candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez, repeatedly made a point of Morena’s moral ambivalence and the country’s horrific criminal record. Gálvez concluded her failed campaign by criticizing the “hugs, not bullets” strategy: “What has been the strategy of this government? Give the country to organized crime.” Unfortunately, Gálvez’s promise to end “hugs for criminals” did not resonate with Mexican voters. In a country desensitized by decades of gruesome and public displays of bloodshed, the center-right’s criticism of lenient law enforcement paled in comparison.

It remains to be seen whether the same ambivalence and callousness has spread to the United States. Cartel violence, drug trafficking, and human trafficking are slow-burning candles. The frequency and regularity of cartel violence make it difficult for the media and the public to grasp its full scope. The Mexican electorate has chosen to continue its time-tested national tradition of looking the other way. Some polls, still hotly contested, suggest that Americans may be leaning toward a similar decision. In important ways, it is a choice to realize our Latin American future. Either way, the decisions made in Mexico over the next six years and in the United States over the next four years could cost or save the lives of untold thousands of people.

Harris and Sheinbaum may bring a new, female face to an old crisis, but their choice to continue the failed policies of the past will only perpetuate the chaos that has long plagued their countries. Will the American electorate choose to meaningfully address human suffering, or will they Fashion to manipulate them and thus persuade them to join the Mexican exhibition of empty symbolism?