“Who is going to hang the flag in the rectory?” the student leaders of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) asked the militancy in the middle of the fight against the rector Jorge Carpizo, who promoted the collection of tuition fees in the public entity. It was January 1987.
A 24-year-old physics student emerged from the crowd. “Me,” she said, amid chants of “strike, strike!”
The young woman climbed to the roof of the emblematic building, put up the banner and inaugurated a new protest against neoliberalism that at that time, in the midst of an economic crisis, was taking hold in Mexico and was beginning to appear in the largest university in Latin America.
Almost 40 years later, that passionate student has just won the elections for the presidency of Mexico. Her name is Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. Many Mexicans simply call her “Claudia.” She is 61 years old, has 2 children, a master’s degree and a doctorate. She was mayor of CDMX. And from October 1 she will be the first head of state in the country’s history.
“I have always been like this, very fanciful,” she told journalist Arturo Cano about that protest, who published a biography in 2023. “Not so much anymore, I have more responsibilities,” Sheinbaum added.
Her friend, advisor and colleague Diana Alarcón explains: “It’s not that I have stopped being a rebel. The thing is that she changed the place where she is, her position in the movement, but she did not change the conviction that she assumed from a very young age to fight for the people.”
That place will now be the presidency of a country of 130 million inhabitants with 36% poverty, an extensive border with the United States, an alarming rate of femicides and partially subjugated by organized crime.
A country that has just been governed by a skilled politician who ends his term with 60% approval, a stable economy and a certain sense of optimism among the majorities: Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The popularity of AMLO, as he is known in Mexico, explains part of the ease with which Sheinbaum won, who beat Xóchilt Gálvez by more than 30 percentage points and will probably be the most voted candidate in history, with more than 30 million of votes.
But Sheinbaum, in addition to being a key piece of the Obrero project, of the so-called Fourth Transformation, is a rigorous scientist who has applied her award-winning research into successful public policies.
where does it come from
Sheinbaum was born on June 24, 1962 in CDMX.
His father, Carlos Sheinbaum, was a businessman and chemist whose parents, Ashkenazi Jews, arrived from Lithuania to Mexico in 1920. His mother, Annie Pardo, is a biologist and doctor whose parents, Sephardic Jews, arrived from Bulgaria in 1940.
Both sons of persecuted Jews. Both, leftist militants in the UNAM. Both, pioneers in their scientific work.
Pardo, in fact, received the National Science Award in 2022 for his contributions to cell biology.
Claudia grew up in Tlalpan, an upper-middle class neighborhood in the south of the capital, among protest songs, meetings with international artists and ballet and Argentine bass drum classes.
He says that he had breakfast, lunch and dinner talking about politics, and that he went with his parents to prison to visit his friends imprisoned for militancy.
He went to a secular school, for expatriates, that promotes student autonomy: Manuel Bartolomé Cossío.
And he developed a meticulous, organized, energetic personality, who seeks to verify his ideas before drawing conclusions and gives orders without euphemisms or detours. She wakes up every day at 4 am.
“She’s shy, so she can be seen as serious, but once you sit down with her she is warm, funny and empathetic,” says Alarcón. Facets that he wanted to express during the campaign.
“I am a daughter of ’68,” she often says, referring to the global protest movement in which her parents participated.
And just like the 60s, the 80s were a key moment for Mexico: the neoliberal model was consolidated, which for many would translate into inequality and poverty, and corruption scandals began to hit the powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which He ruled since 1917.
Sheinbaum kept one foot in militancy, where she met Carlos Ímaz, a politician from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR) whom she married in 1987, and another in academia, where she earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in Energy Engineering. and Environmental and signed several theses, including one on the efficient use of wood stoves in rural communities.
In 1995, the family moved to California, where he pursued a doctorate in Education and she completed hers. There they consolidated the cosmopolitan, educated profile, fluent in English, in which they grew up and in which they raised their children, who today are filmmakers and history teachers.
They separated in 2016 and 7 years later, Claudia married Jesús María Tarriba, her boyfriend from university with whom she met again on Facebook, and who, like her, is a physicist, leftist and is linked to public management: he is a Bank official. from Mexico.
“She is a very intense woman, very interesting, very empathetic,” Tarriba said about her.
How he entered politics
In the 2000 elections, the historic PRI lost the presidential election for the first time in more than 70 years and in CDMX a leftist militant from Tabasco, in the poor south of the country, who was known by the acronym, won the mayor’s office. of his two names and two surnames.
That’s when AMLO and Sheinbaum meet. He, newly elected, was looking for a technical profile for his Environment Secretariat and a friend, a mathematics professor and member of the UNAM, recommended this sophisticated physicist, expert in Energy.
AMLO often expresses that “commissions matter more than positions,” and she was tasked with two heavy-duty tasks in times of urbanization: cleaning one of the most polluted cities in the world and building the second floor of a huge highway.
Sheinbaum delivered: today the air in CDMX is less dirty—although there is pollution—and the second floors of the Periférico help to cross the capital without traffic jams.
When AMLO’s mayoralty ended in 2005, Claudia returned to academia, did consulting work and was part of a team that won the Nobel Peace Prize for its contribution to the study of climate change.
But she always maintained that other foot in politics: she was a spokesperson for AMLO’s failed presidential campaigns in 2006 and 2012, and in 2015 she won the mayoralty of Tlalpan, the CDMX delegation where she grew up.
Three years later, in the same elections that AMLO won the presidency, Sheinbaum won the head of government of the colossal capital, being the first woman to do so.
His management was marked by the partial reduction of insecurity, the proliferation of bicycle lanes and the construction of the largest metro cable in the world.
But nothing more notable than her handling of the covid-19 pandemic, with which AMLO distanced himself: while he dismissed the danger of the virus, she set off alarms; While he did not wear a mask, she did, and also promoted its use.
The Mexican capital had one of the highest vaccination rates internationally.
But with the promotion, naturally, came the accusations.
During the 2017 earthquake, for example, a school collapsed in Tlalpan, leaving 17 children dead. The opposition and some of the family members blamed her for not closing the campus when flaws in its construction were reported.
Then, in 2021, an accident on line 12 of the CDMX metro left 27 dead. The mayor launched an investigation that showed deficiencies in construction, between 2014 and 2015, when the city was already governed by the Obreros. The elected president, once again, was the target of attacks.
Now, in the campaign, those scandals resurfaced, as well as the unproven accusations of plagiarism in his academic theses, the episodes of “abuse of force” in the repression of protests in the city (some of them by feminists), the cases of alleged corruption during the AMLO government and the idea that she is a “peona”, a “puppet”, of the authoritarian president for some.
“Twice in my life I asked her why she submitted to this harsh politics,” says Alarcón, a friend of Sheinbaum since the 70s: when she ran for mayor of Tlaplan and when she did the same in CDMX.
“And in both cases he told me the same thing: ‘out of responsibility, because it’s what we have to do’.”
For a physicist recognized in international academia, who was born in a privileged position in society, entering politics did not seem like the most comfortable decision, argues Alarcón, who has a doctorate in Economics.
“But that’s why people see that they can trust her, that she’s not going to steal, that she’ll do the best she can; because she does not seek power for power’s sake, but because she has a sense of responsibility towards her society,” she adds.
How he becomes president
Despite the scandals, more than 60% of Chilangos approved Sheinbaum’s administration in CDMX.
That placed her as the favorite to succeed AMLO in the close race against the heavyweights of the left – all men – within Morena, the ruling coalition.
“AMLO, over time, learned to respect her,” says Jorge Zepeda Patterson, a journalist and political commentator who has interviewed and profiled them.
“He learned to consider her the most suitable person to succeed him; “She realized that she is someone who fulfills responsibility, that she may not be a politician, but that she is a tremendous public administrator.”
The so-called “Mexican humanism” that places Sheinbaum and AMLO, despite their differences, in the same movement proposes a transformation of the country as relevant as independence, the liberal reforms of the 19th century and the Mexican Revolution. Hence, precisely, they call it the Fourth Transformation.
Sheinbaum’s government plan contemplates “100 steps for transformation,” among which are increasing university and school scholarships, giving pensions to women dedicated to caring, strengthening medical diagnostic and mental health systems, building hundreds of thousands of homes and bring gender pay parity to constitutional status.
There has been much speculation about what Sheinbaum will be like as president: if she will have her “own stamp”—as she promised during the campaign—if AMLO will give her orders, if she will continue pragmatism towards the US, if she will be able to meet the demands of women and if It will manage to keep the governors, military and traditional politicians under control.
“What I can assure you is that she will be her,” says Alarcón, her friend and advisor.
“In the 80s it was time to hang the flag in the UNAM rectory and she did it, and now what we have to do is build universities and I have no doubt that she will do it, being her, being Claudia.”
Keep reading:
* Mexico: Claudia Sheinbaum and the long shadow of Lóp ez Obrador
* Elections in Mexico: What are the similarities and differences between Claudia Sheinbaum and AMLO
* Claudia Sheinbaum thanks for becoming “the first female president of Mexico”
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