It’s hard to call Sunday anything less than a tragedy for the violence-ridden country of Mexico.
In the culmination of a race dominated not only by the scourge of the country’s criminal cartels but the looming threat of the ruling faction turning it into a one-party state, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum was elected to a six-year term to replace outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Sheinbaum was the chosen candidate of the far-left López Obrador and his party, Morena.
While it was unclear Monday whether she had the two-thirds supermajority that Morena had hoped for in order to make radical changes to the country’s constitution — the official results will be determined by a vote count Saturday, according to The New York Times — preliminary counts showed her with nearly 60 percent of the vote, compared with 28 percent for the candidate for the opposition coalition, Fuerza y Corazón por México.
The result was met with considerable celebration in Zócalo, the main square of Mexico City.
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Exit polls in Mexico show Claudia Sheinbaum winning the presidency by a wide margin. But the electoral commission has yet to release its customary quick count, a statistical analysis of trends that usually reveal a winner. Either way, the celebration has begun at the Zocalo. pic.twitter.com/eSvKRLjGlI
— Eyder Peralta (@eyderp) June 3, 2024
“We women have landed in the presidency,” Sheinbaum, who will become the first female president of Mexico, told the crowd after the projected victory, according to The Associated Press. “We are going to govern for everyone.”
If “governing for everyone” means continuing López Obrador’s legacy beyond the single six-year term that Mexican presidents serve, as Sheinbaum has promised, we got a very ugly look at just what that will entail on Sunday, when election-related brutality continued and reminders of the violence that has long plagued our neighbor to the south were everywhere.
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In the central Mexican town of Cuitzeo, for instance, a candidate for town council was killed by two hitmen mere hours before the polls opened.
“Candidate Israel Delgado Vega was chatting with men near his home when two men on a motorcycle shot him dead, according to local prosecutors,” the AP reported.
“Less than a day later, all that remained at the scene of his death were flowers and candles. Few wanted to speak about his death.”
The report noted that López Obrador “promised to reduce violence while in office. He employed a strategy known as ‘hugs not bullets’ focusing on not confronting cartels and instead addressing social ills fueling cartel recruitment, like poverty.
“But under the leader, cartels have expanded control in much of the country and raked in money — not just from drugs but from extorting legal industries and migrant smuggling. They’ve also fought with more sophisticated tools like bomb-dropping drones and improvised explosive devices.”
Last week, a mayoral candidate in the southern Mexican town of Coyuca de Benitez became the 22nd candidate for local office killed since September, according to Agence France-Presse. Some estimates place the estimate even higher; the nongovernmental organization Data Civica said that at least 30 politicians have been killed this election cycle.
And it wasn’t just politicians who were facing violence, either. Also in Chiapas, the same state in which Israel Delgado Vega was killed, a voter was kidnapped from a polling station by armed men in the town of San Fernando.
“Two armed men burst into a local market where a voting station was set up and kidnapped the man. The man later appeared beaten up in another place, prosecutors said,” the AP reported, adding that the state has been the site of a “brutal war for control of the lucrative migrant and drug smuggling routes along the country’s southern border with Guatemala.”
If violence wasn’t already one of the key issues in this year’s election, the AP also noted that a not-insignificant portion of the electorate was writing in names of the country’s more than 110,000 missing people instead of one of the presidential candidates.
“Among them was Victoria Delgadillo, in Xalapa in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz. She founded the ‘Xalapa Connections’ collective and is looking for her daughter, Yureny Citlali Hernández, who disappeared in 2011 at the age of 26, and 12 other young women,” the report said.
“Such families have criticized the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who they say has sought to minimize the problem of people going missing amid ongoing violence in Mexico,” the AP reported.
“I voted for Yureny, for Pilar, for Carmen and all those many who have been disappeared,” Delgadillo said. “Vote for whoever you vote for, we mothers of the disappeared have to work with whoever is left.”
Well, Mexico did vote for whoever it voted for, and it voted for six more years of the same far-left party that has brought us the ineffectual “hugs not bullets” strategy.
The fruits of this tack could be seen throughout our neighbor to the south on Election Day.
If a candidate in America were killed by hitmen and a voter was dragged from the polls by armed thugs, it would be considered a travesty of incalculable proportions. In Mexico, it was just another day that ended in Y.
If the results of the 2024 Mexican elections were bad for America, which has seen the brutal fruit of this tack in dealing with cartel violence and human trafficking, rest assured they’ll be far worse for the country that inflicted this suicidal electoral wound upon itself.
