Claudia Sheinbaum has won the Mexican presidential elections. A member of current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s leftist Moreno party, Obrador will be both the first woman and the first Jewish person to become President of Mexico. Sheinbaum, a climate “scientist,” has strongly emphasized her sex, telling supporters, “For the first time in 200 years of the Republic, I will become the first woman president of Mexico. We have achieved a plural, diverse, and democratic Mexico.” Conversely, she has downplayed her Jewish heritage, saying, “Of course I know where I come from, but my parents were atheists,” and insisting she “never belonged to the Jewish community.”
Her Ashkenazi paternal and Sephardic maternal grandparents migrated to Mexico from Lithuania and Bulgaria, respectively.
The Mexican presidency is an important matter for the U.S., with the flood of illegal aliens and fentanyl across the southern border having reached unprecedented heights with Obrador in the Mexican presidential palace and Joe Biden in the White House.
President Obrador, known as AMLO, has shown little enthusiasm for tackling the crises. “We do not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl” in Mexico, he said in 2023, telling Americans the drug is “their problem.”
The same year, Obrador said the “flow of migrants” will continue unless the U.S. meets a series of Mexican demands, including an end to the trade embargo against communist Cuba, the lifting of sanctions against communist Venezuela, the legalization of millions of Mexican illegals, and tens of billions of dollars in payouts to Latin America.
Sheinbaum has said she will continue Obrador’s foreign policy with “pride” and “will always tell [the U.S.] it’s better to build bridges rather than walls.”
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