What the neighbors are up to ...

Mexico's power class is not all men any longer.

Or so women aspiring to run for president hope.

The Los Angeles Times has shared a fascinating glimpse of two women from very different political parties with sharp differences who are trying to get into the ring to compete in the coming presidential election.

MEXICO CITY — The two presidential front-runners grew up exposed to sharply different visions of what a woman in Mexico could aspire to be.

In her impoverished home in the state of Hidalgo, Xóchitl Gálvez faced beatings from her alcoholic father, who once threatened to kill her mother. She’d hear the men in her family quip, “Women are only good for the petate (a bed) and the metate (a stone to grind grains).”

Claudia Sheinbaum grew up hearing her parents, both scientists and former student activists, talk politics in their home in the state of Mexico [City]. She saw firsthand what a woman could accomplish, spending a night at age 15 at a hunger strike with Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, the pioneering crusader for the disappeared whose work helped build Mexico’s human rights movement. ...

Contrary to what a casual US news consumer might expect, Gálvez, a sitting senator, seeks to lead the more rightward leaning party coalition, while Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor, comes out of the current president's left-populist party.

Both speak loudly about the role of gender in the election:

“Mexico is no longer written with the M of machismo ... but M of mother, M of mujer” or woman, Sheinbaum declared to thousands of supporters just before leaving her post as mayor to enter the presidential race.

Gálvez has called Mexico’s president a “machista” and told reporters, “You need many ovaries like the ones I have to confront such a powerful man.” 

Though the two major parties may put forward women candidates, Mexican political scientists caution this election will likely turn on voters' evaluation of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). 

“People vote for women without a problem. What matters is the political party, and you have to understand that Mexico is not a feminist country,” said Karolina Gilas, a political scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM. “Mexican society continues to be very conservative.”

While the presidential hopefuls can’t ignore feminist issues in a country where an average of 10 women a day were slain last year, the movement doesn’t have the weight to tip a national election either, Gilas said.

The election will be held June 2, 2024.

• • •

Two comments from me: 

1) Around the world, women seem able to make more incursions into the highest elective offices than we see here in the USofA. Latin America has elected women leaders in Argentina, Chile, even Nicaragua and Honduras. Way back in the mid-1960s, I remember marveling that Mrs. Bandaranaike could become the first premier of post-colonial Sri Lanka. A wise professor who had lived in the country explained to me when a government/system of government was in the process of finding it's feet, there might be more room for women. 

Perhaps if we get through the current trauma with US democracy intact, we'll be in a season in this country when unprecedented space opens ... we'll see.

2) Thanks to the Los Angeles Times for the best mainstream coverage of Mexico available to me. We are not alone on this continent and the neighbors matter.