Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, the first female president of Mexico?

In October 1968, one of the most fateful episodes in the recent history of Mexico occurred when members of the Army and a paramilitary squad murdered between 300 and 400 university students who were protesting seeking democratic change in the country, after decades of PRI government. .

Claudia Sheinbaum, who on Sunday became the first female president of Mexico, was six years old at the time, but her parents’ participation in the student movement would mark her life.

She has confessed that, from her father, a chemical engineer, she inherited her “passion for politics and love for nature” and from her mother, a cell biologist, “a taste for science.”

“We grew up very close to what social movements were, especially those linked to the university, and that marked us,” Sheinbaum has said in previous interviews.

In my family, the values ​​of honesty, honesty, responsibility, discipline and studies were very important, I grew up with those values,” he added.

The second of three siblings, Sheinbaum was born on June 24, 1962 in the Mexican capital into a family of Jewish origin. Her paternal grandfather came to Mexico from Lithuania in the 1920s and her maternal family arrived from Bulgaria after fleeing Nazism.

As a child, Sheinbaum studied ballet and learned to play the guitar.

At the age of 15 she became involved with the movement of mothers searching for their children who had disappeared by the State, led by Rosario Ibarra, a renowned human rights activist and leftist politician who was the first woman to run for president in Mexico in 1982. .

Later, he actively participated in the student movement of 1986, which questioned state intervention in the educational field.

After graduating as a physicist in 1989 from the public National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), she completed a master’s degree and then a doctorate at the same university in energy engineering. While preparing her doctoral thesis, she enjoyed an academic stay on a scholarship at the University of California.

own path

In 2000, Sheinbaum formally began his political career.

A friend put her in contact with the now outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was about to take over as mayor of Mexico City in December of that year and was looking for a left-wing scientist to help him with the environmental problem in the populous capital. She accepted the position of Secretary of the Environment.

She held the portfolio until 2006, when she became spokesperson for López Obrador’s campaign for the presidential election that year. A year later, in 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as part of a UN panel of experts for her efforts to spread knowledge about climate change.

In 2015, she became the first woman elected as Delegational Head of Tlalpan, the largest mayor’s office in Mexico City. In 2017 she left office early to participate in the campaign for the capital elections, which she won in mid-2018 to become the first woman elected mayor of the city.

When he receives the baton on October 1, he will face the task of forging his own path, including the delicate balancing act between advancing López Obrador’s statist economic policies and advancing issues he sees as his weaknesses, such as the environment and insecurity.

López Obrador and Sheinbaum “ideologically agree,” said Renata Turrent, an ally of the elected candidate.

“Many programmatic issues will be similar or will continue. On fundamental issues the same policy will be maintained (but) she has other priorities, another training, another way of executing her project and other ways, she is different (…) they come from different trajectories,” he added in a recent interview with Reuters.

Sheinbaum has proposed deepening López Obrador’s project but with a personal seal, extrapolating his achievements in the capital to the country to tackle insecurity and promote renewable energies.

People on her team describe her as an “honest, capable, hard-working and stubborn” woman.

But her critics, such as opposition deputy Guillermo Huerta, have classified her as “cynical”, recalling that, according to an audit report, the accident in the capital’s subway in 2021 that left 26 dead was due to maintenance deficiencies during her management.

In addition, they blame her for the same number of deaths – including 19 children – for having allowed the construction of an extra floor in a school that collapsed after a powerful earthquake in September 2017 while she governed Tlalpan.

Soft-spoken, slow-speaking, and strong-tempered, he prides himself on making the Mexican capital, one of the most populous cities in the world, safer, improving its public transportation network, and increasing environmental sustainability.

“Rest assured, we will be up to the task,” Sheinbaum said early Monday morning in a speech from the capital’s emblematic square of El Zócalo.

At the end of last year, she married her college boyfriend, Jesús María Tarriba. She has a biological daughter from her first relationship and she considers her “child” to be the descendant of her first husband, Carlos Imaz, who made her a grandmother last year.

Connect with the Voice of America! Subscribe to our channels Youtube, WhatsApp and to the newsletter. Turn on notifications and follow us on Facebook, x and instagram.