Claudia Sheinbaum, former Head of Government of Mexico City, is the candidate of the ruling Morena party for the June 2024 elections, in which the successor to the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will be elected.
Claudia Sheinbaum has a degree in Physics and obtained a master’s and a doctorate in Energy Engineering. She has received several recognitions for her career in academia.
She was born in Mexico City in 1962, has two children and a grandchild. Her partner is Jesús María Tarriba, whom she met at university while both were studying Physics, and who is currently a financial risk specialist at the Bank of Mexico.
In 2018, she was elected Head of Government of Mexico City, becoming the first elected woman to hold that position. But her desire to be part of Mexican politics began in 2000 when she assumed the Secretary of the Environment of the Federal District with López Obrador as head of the District, until 2006.
In 2015, she was the first woman elected as the head in Tlalpan, a position she held until 2017. In the following months, already in 2018, she became part of the leadership of the Government of Mexico City until June 2023, when after 4 years in power she decided to leave her position in the city to run for the presidential candidacy with the Morena party — of which she is a founder — and thus succeed her party colleague Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
As part of her campaign in Morena, Sheinbaum is called the coordinator of Defense of the Transformation, whose mission, as indicated on her LinkedIn profile, is to defend and promote the values of the Fourth Transformation of Public Life in Mexico, the central axis of AMLO’s policy.
Academic Career
She has dedicated much of her life to university teaching, and the focus of her study has been renewable energies and climate change.
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to which Sheinbaum contributed, received the Nobel Peace Prize. This panel was made up of more than 600 academics and researchers who collaborated on a series of reports to disseminate greater knowledge about climate change and address the problem. Sheinbaum was a contributing author to a working group that wrote a chapter in a panel report. The Nobel was awarded to the organization, not the contributors.
On her social networks, Sheinbaum defines herself as a scientist, humanist, with a deep love for her country and her people.
Hand in Hand with López Obrador
In 2000, during López Obrador’s government in Mexico City, Sheimbaum worked as a public official and served as Secretary of the Environment. Since then, the relationship between Sheinbaum and López Obrador has been close, so much so that as his successor in the capital, she continued and reaffirmed López Obrador’s social policy programs and projects. These would include scholarships for young people and pensions for the elderly.
She accompanied him in his three political campaigns for the presidency, until 2018, when López Obrador was elected president, in the elections in which Sheinbaum was also voted to be Head of Government of Mexico City, with 47% of the votes, 16 points more than her closest competitor.
Now, Claudia Sheinbaum is betting on the good political moment that her party is experiencing with President López Obrador and has pointed out that Mexico is ready to have a woman at the forefront of the presidency.
Sheinbaum’s Key Proposals
In early March, Sheimbaum presented in the Zócalo of Mexico City 100 points that design her project for the elections in case of winning and that expose 5 key proposals in her campaign.
- Security Strategy in 5 axes, where she addresses issues that remedy and reduce the citizen insecurity suffered by 60% of the population for living in the country, according to INE data in 2023.
- Free and Scientific Education. All educational levels must be free.
- Economy with social orientation of spending and increase of the minimum wage. Prioritize resources, guarantee social policies, combat poverty, and eradicate inequality.
- Regulation of Water Use. She intends to regulate the exploitation, use, and control of water, as well as the technification of agricultural irrigation.
- Energy Transition: more renewable energies. It will help reduce spending on water, electricity, and gas.
If Sheinbaum reaches the federal Executive power, she would be the first woman in political history to hold the position of president of Mexico.
Sheinbaum’s Approach to the Migration Crisis
On one of the main issues guiding the relationship between the United States and Mexico, migration, the Morena candidate believes that it will be necessary to continue insisting with the United States and Canada to have legal migration, because the northern countries need labor, she said at a press conference in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, on March 2.
Sheinbaum emphasized that she will insist, above all, that the best way, the one that solves the problem in the long term, is to invest in the places where the people who migrate come from.
“This is going to be and will continue to be our position, which is cooperation for development. That there be support for Mexico, but mainly for Central America and other countries where there is migration to the United States,” said the candidate who was supported by President López Obrador.
Sheinbaum assures that Mexico already supports programs such as Sembrando Vida for young people from El Salvador and Honduras. However, she emphasizes that “the United States can support more” and reach many more young people in Central America so that they do not have to emigrate. “It will be much cheaper than building the wall, than fences… much cheaper than any other form of border patrols, and it also addresses the underlying issue,” she said in Ciudad Juárez.
Regarding the economic sphere between the two countries, in her press conference in Ciudad Juárez, Sheinbaum highlighted the issue of nearshoring or the relocation of companies. She assured that it should be taken advantage of to go beyond being a place for maquiladoras and achieve the creation of value chains that generate greater benefits.
Source: CNN
