Mexico’s first female president takes the oath of office and promises to help the poor

Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as Mexico’s new president on Tuesday, becoming the country’s first female president and the first president of Jewish descent in the largely Roman Catholic country. Her victory comes 70 years after women in Mexico gained the right to vote.

The daughter of activist academics, Sheinbaum, 62, was also the first female mayor of Mexico City, Mexico’s capital. She resigned from that position last year because of her presidential campaign, which received the support of her predecessor and political mentor, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

She has pledged to continue the social welfare programs for the country’s poor that Lopez Obrador established, despite Mexico’s current massive budget deficit and sluggish economy.

Sheinbaum also faces a country ravaged by violence, with battles between drug cartels often breaking out on the streets of the northwestern city of Culiacan, where many cartels are based. Local security forces have had little luck in quelling the violence.

As mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum won praise for reducing the city’s homicide rate by raising the salaries of an expanded police force, a strategy she vowed to replicate across the country.

Sheinbaum also takes the helm of Mexico just as the country is undertaking a legal overhaul, a move led by Lopez Obrador. The controversial reform will eventually replace all Mexican judges with new ones, elected by popular vote.

Former President Ernesto Zedillo, who was critical of the overhaul, recently said this in a guest essay in Britain Economist magazine that “our hard-won democracy will, for all practical purposes, be transformed into a one-party autocracy.”

However, Sheinbaum said: “The legal system reforms will not affect our trade relations, nor private Mexican investments, nor foreign investments. On the contrary, there will be a bigger and better rule of law and democracy for all.”

The first trip for the new president, a former climate scientist with a doctorate in energy engineering, will be to Acapulco, the resort on Mexico’s Pacific coast that was lashed last week by rain from Category 3 Hurricane John after it struck last year. had been destroyed. year due to Hurricane Otis.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.