Mexico’s election of its first female — and Jewish — president is being seen as a double edged sword among political observers of one of North America’s Three Amigo trading partners.Liberals, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, hailed the election of 61-year old Claudia Sheinbaum as a victory for progressive values in a country plagued by surging political violence.Meanwhile, the peso fell about 3% against the US dollar immediately after the vote results were announced on fears the new leader will implement anti-market ‘reforms’.The self described ‘lifelong leftist’ was elected on a platform of fighting climate change, gender equality and reconciliation with native peoples — all causes near and dear to Trudeau’s heart..“They (the cartels) make an agreement and say, ‘this person is going to be mayor; we don’t want anyone else to register to run’, and anybody who does, well, they know what to expect,”Andrés Manuel López Obrador.Even more endearing to the likes of Trudeau, she joined the Mexican government as a climate scientist after serving on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel later shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore, and author of An Inconvenient Truth.The irony is that largest election in Mexican history saw the assassination of at least 30 mayoral and municipal candidates. Up until March, there were more than 1,700 targeted attacks against people working in politics or government officials.Drug cartels routinely run their own candidates in local elections or finance campaigns of those who support them.Sheinbaum is expected to maintain the ‘hands-off’ enforcement policies of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has even publicly acknowledged the failure of those policies to reduce crime. “They (the cartels) make an agreement and say, ‘this person is going to be mayor; we don’t want anyone else to register to run’, and anybody who does, well, they know what to expect,” he said in April.When he was elected, López Obrador dismantled the federal police and replaced it with a quasi-military National Guard which in turn been accused of corruption. He has accused naysayers as suffering from a “delirium of necrophilia.”.Apart from political intimidation, more than 30,000 people a year have murdered in Mexico each year for the last five years. There are more than 110,000 people listed as ‘missing’ — more than any other country in the world — and many suspect there have been tens of thousands more.When she was elected mayor of Mexico City in 2018, Sheinbaum vowed to fight violence against women. Instead of going down, it has steadily increased during her term. The city presently sees at least 10 women and girls killed daily — more than than 90% of those are either unreported or un-prosecuted.That’s notwithstanding strained relations with the US over border enforcement, drugs and human trafficking — which could get worse of Donald Trump is reelected president this November. Earlier this spring even Canada’s Liberal government reimposed a visa requirement for Mexican visitors over an increase in ineligible refugee claims and human smuggling.Canada is hosting the North American Leader’s summit later this year which López Obrador threatened to boycott if there was no “respectful treatment” of Mexico. Although a date has yet to be set for the gathering, the confab is sure to be dominated by immigration issues as well as trade, given that the USMCA — or ‘NAFTA 2.0’ — is to be reviewed in 2025.Over two million Canadians visited Mexico in 2019, prior to the pandemic, and the country hosts about 50,000 snowbirds who live there during the winter.
