On Sunday, June 2, Mexico heads to the polls to pick the next leader of their republic. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is term-limited by the Mexican constitution and the nation is at a crossroads.
Candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, is expected to win the election. She has enjoyed a comfortable double-digit lead in polls for months. She is part of the ruling Morena party and is expected to carry on with the policies of the current administration.
The strongest challenge to Sheinbaum is Xochitl Gálvez, an opposition senator and tech entrepreneur. She has been a fierce critic of the outgoing president.
The election has become a referendum on López Obrador's term which has seen positive economic development and the stabilization of violence with the drug cartels, although they remain a horrible problem for the nation. But López Obrador remains popular with the working-class and poor, rural voters who had long felt ignored by the political system.
Mexicans will also vote for 128 senators, 500 congressional representatives and for nearly 20,000 local government positions. But cartel violence has become a serious problem for the lower-level elections. At least 145 candidates and supporters have been murdered this last year and many more have been forced to resign from their races.
Many are watching the presidential election and anticipating the election of the nation’s first female president. But it’s not clear this would do anything to reduce the levels of gender-based violence. Both frontrunner Sheinbaum and Gálvez have promised that they would address high rates of femicide.
Guest:
Will Freeman is a Latin America fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mexico City Day Zero
Mexico City is dealing with a water crisis. It’s predicted that the metropolitan region, home to nearly 22 million people, may run out of water in June described as “Day Zero.”
Years of low rainfall, longer dry periods and high temperatures have added stress to an overwhelmed water system already needing major repairs.
The lower income parts of the sprawling city have always been forced to live with unreliable water delivery but now the problem has spread to the more expensive colonias. And now the water scarcity problem has reached the point where the taps soon run dry for huge swaths of the city.
Guest:
Kasha Patel is the deputy weather editor for the Capital Weather Gang at The Washington Post, covering weather, climate change and the environment.
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*This interview will be recorded on Tuesday, May 28, 2024.
