What Madam President Means for Mexico

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Mexico prepares to elect its first woman president, Haiti’s gangs vow to fight a U.N.-backed intervention, and regional films compete at Cannes.

Mexico’s Likely First Presidenta

Mexico is in the throes of its first presidential campaign with two women leading the race. Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and former Sen. Xóchitl Gálvez top polls ahead of the June 2 general elections, virtually guaranteeing that the country will soon inaugurate its first female head of state.

It is a milestone both for Mexico and for Latin America. Countries across the region have embraced mandatory gender quotas in public offices, and none with more fervor than Mexico. A 2019 constitutional reform mandated that elected and appointed positions at all levels of government must be gender-balanced. As a result, political parties looked to women to fill senior candidate slots.

Sheinbaum has at least a 15 percent advantage over Gálvez in most recent polls. But even the third-ranking, male presidential candidate Jorge Álvarez Máynez reflects the reach of Mexican feminism: He chose a veteran feminist politician, Patricia Mercado, to coordinate his platform for part of the campaign; Mexican magazine Quién called her the “third woman” in the race.

Although they stand for different political ideologies—Sheinbaum represents the governing left-leaning Morena party, Gálvez heads a more pro-market opposition alliance, and Álvarez fronts a centrist group—the candidates agree on many gender-related issues.

All three say they support the Mexican Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to decriminalize abortion in federal health centers. They also promise to launch a publicly funded system to provide different types of care work and pledge to reduce gender-based violence. In Mexican politics today, openly criticizing feminism usually leads to candidates “being canceled on social media and losing votes,” abortion rights lawyer Ninde Molina told Foreign Policy.

Still, Molina and many other activists are approaching the milestone election with a mindset of determination rather than euphoria. The fact that a politician is a woman “does not guarantee that she is a democrat or a defender of human rights” or feminist principles, Molina wrote for Este País this month.

According to Molina, the woman presidential candidates have shied away from offering detailed stances on abortion during the campaign, other than to support the Supreme Court decision. The same goes for Álvarez. That nuance matters because 19 of Mexico’s 32 federal jurisdictions have yet to decriminalize the procedure. Many public hospitals don’t offer abortions even where they are legal, Molina added, and Mexico’s public health care system is often short on abortion pills.

The candidates have been more specific about their plans to combat gender-based violence. All three pledged to create new violence prevention programs and strengthen prosecutors’ capacity to investigate femicides.

As Mexico City mayor, Sheinbaum carried out similar policies on the local level, Mexican doctoral candidate Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert wrote in a profile of the politician for Foreign Policy. These included staffing prosecutors’ offices with female lawyers trained to work from a gendered perspective. During Sheinbaum’s tenure, lethal violence in the capital fell by 32 percent, according to estimates made by feminist group Intersecta.

Plans for a national care system endorsed by all three candidates, meanwhile, have advanced in Mexico’s congress but not yet become law. Broadly, the program would devote more public money to funding care workers and facilities for newborns, children, the elderly, and disabled people. It would also reorganize existing day-care, disability, and pension systems to allow people without formal work contracts to pay for and receive care.

When it comes to feminist demands in Mexico, there is significant consensus—including on the ideological right, political scientist Mónica Tapia told Foreign Policy. The challenge is translating that agenda into results. “Our big lesson learned here in Mexico is that parity is necessary, but not sufficient” to advance progressive gender goals, Tapia said.

To help promote lasting change, Tapia helped co-found Aúna, a group that recruits and trains female candidates for political office who are committed to a range of policies intended to reduce gender and economic inequalities and boost environmental protection.

Aúna has coached candidates from both left-wing and right wing-parties; some have later cooperated on legislation while serving in the Mexico City government. Aúna is inspired by similar initiatives for women and nontraditional candidates in the United States, Colombia, and Brazil. Fifty Aúna candidates are running in the June 2 elections at the legislative and gubernatorial level.

While parity requirements have helped lead Mexico to its symbolic presidential election, Tapía said, “a wider ecosystem” of activists is moving feminist demands forward across the country.

Upcoming Events

Friday, May 15: Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo meet in Tapachula, Mexico.

Sunday, May 19: The Dominican Republic holds general elections.

Wednesday, May 22: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development hosts a conference on economic and trade policies in Latin America.

Sunday, June 2: Mexico holds general elections.

What We’re Following

Chinese cars in Mexico. On Tuesday, Chinese automaker BYD unveiled a new product: a midsize hybrid-electric pickup truck called the Shark. The debut took place in Mexico City rather than in China; so far, the Shark is only available in Mexico. The launch came the same day that the United States announced sweeping new tariffs on Chinese green technologies, including a 100 percent levy on electric vehicles.

BYD’s Americas director said she did not anticipate the tariffs would affect the firm’s Mexico operations, as BYD’s vehicles were designed for sale outside the U.S. market. BYD is due to announce the site of a new plant in Mexico later this year and is also expanding in Brazil.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said Tuesday that Washington was currently in talks with industry representatives and partner countries about how to respond to China’s use of production in Mexico as a workaround to U.S. tariffs. So far, Mexico has not wholly embraced U.S. economic policies toward China.

Citing concerns about a flood of cheap imports, known as dumping, Mexico followed Washington last month in imposing new tariffs on aluminum imports from multiple countries, including China—only to remove them weeks later, citing an aluminum shortage.

People flee their neighborhoods after armed gangs terrorized the Delmas 24 and Solino areas of Port-au-Prince on May 2.Clarens Siffroy/AFP via Getty Images

Haiti gears up for battle. In the last two weeks, a string of military planes have arrived in Port-au-Prince with equipment to build facilities that will soon house an international stabilization force. The United Nations-authorized mission will be led by some 1,000 police officers from Kenya and supporting personnel from Chile, Jamaica, Grenada, Paraguay, Burundi, Chad, Nigeria, and Mauritius.

Kenyan officers are due to arrive in Haiti around the time of Kenyan President William Ruto’s state visit to Washington later this month, the Miami Herald reported. A towering challenge awaits the force. Haiti’s weeks-old transitional government, which will coordinate with the officers, is already plagued by infighting. The gangs wreaking havoc in Haiti, meanwhile, have often cooperated.

Gang leader Jimmy Chérizier, known Barbecue, told NPR in an interview on Saturday that the foreign forces should prepare themselves for a long battle.

LatAm at Cannes. Several films from Latin America are competing at the Cannes Film Festival this week. Contenders for the top prize, the Palme d’Or, include joint Mexican-French production Emilia Pérez, a musical comedy about a cartel leader who undergoes gender-transition surgery, and Brazil’s Motel Destiny, a thriller based on a roadside motel in the northern state of Ceará.

Other festival sessions feature more regional films. Transmitzvah, about a Yiddish-singing star who returns to his home in Buenos Aires, celebrates Argentina’s Jewish community. Chilean cinema will be on display in the mixed live-action and stop-motion The Hyperboreans.

Meanwhile, the book The Falling Sky, by Brazilian Indigenous Yanomami Shaman Davi Kopenawa and French anthropologist Bruce Albert, will see its second major adaptation at the festival, as a documentary. Its earlier adaption was as a parade of floats and dancers in this year’s Rio de Janeiro carnival.

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In Focus: The DR’s Election

Dominican President Luis Abinader votes during a local election in Santo Domingo on Feb. 18.Francesco Spotorno/AFP via Getty Images

The Dominican Republic shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with turbulent Haiti. But despite the dramatic upheaval next door, the Dominican Republic is coasting toward what is expected to be a smooth general election this weekend. Centrist incumbent President Luis Abinader enjoys an approval rating around 70 percent and is projected to win reelection.

The Dominican Republic’s tourism-driven economy has recovered well from the COVID-19 pandemic, growing to become Latin America’s seventh largest. It now outranks both Ecuador and Venezuela in total GDP, despite its population of roughly 11 million people compared to Ecuador’s 18 million and Venezuela’s 28 million.

Abinader has focused on keeping the country open to foreign investment while carrying out an anti-corruption agenda and boosting social spending. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel” to accomplish basic policy objectives, he told the Financial Times. Dominican and U.S. officials have pitched the Dominican Republic as a potential nearshoring site due to its stability and economic growth.

But Abinader does have some critics, in part because his efforts to keep the Dominican Republic’s fortune separate from Haiti’s have included new restrictive measures against Haitian migrants. His administration is building a wall along the country’s border with Haiti and has overseen historically high levels of deportations of Haitians.

Abinader’s main opponents share his hard-line stance toward Haitian migrants.