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Tag: claudia sheinbaum

  • US State Department urges US citizens to stay safe in Jalisco after El Mencho killing

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    The U.S. State Department warned U.S. citizens in Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Michoacan, Guerrero and Nuevo Leon states to remain in safe places due to ongoing security operations after the Mexican army killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, “El Mencho,” was killed on Sunday, decapitating what had become Mexico’s most powerful cartel and giving the government its biggest prize yet to show the Trump administration its efforts.Oseguera Cervantes was wounded in an operation to capture him on Sunday in Tapalpa, Jalisco, about a two-hour drive southwest of Guadalajara, and he died while being flown to Mexico City, the Defense Department said in a statement. The state is the base of the cartel known for trafficking huge quantities of fentanyl and other drugs to the United States.During the operation, troops came under fire and killed four people at the location. Three more people, including Oseguera Cervantes, were wounded and later died, the statement said. Two others were arrested and armored vehicles, rocket launchers and other arms were seized. Three members of the armed forces were wounded and receiving medical treatment.Roadblocks and burning vehiclesThe killing of the powerful drug lord set off several hours of roadblocks with burning vehicles in Jalisco and other states. Such tactics are commonly used by the cartels to block military operations. Jalisco canceled school in the state for Monday.Videos circulating on social media showed plumes of smoke billowing over the tourist city of Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco, and people sprinting through the airport of the state’s capital in panic. On Sunday afternoon, Air Canada announced it was suspending flights to Puerto Vallarta “due to an ongoing security situation” and advised customers not to go to their airport.In Guadalajara, the state capital, burning vehicles blocked roads. Mexico’s second-largest city is scheduled to host matches during this summer’s soccer World Cup.Canada’s embassy in Mexico warned its citizens in Puerto Vallarta to shelter in place and generally to keep a low profile in Jalisco.Jalisco Gov. Pablo Lemus told residents to stay at home and suspended public transportation.US had offered up to $15 million for his captureThe U.S. State Department had offered a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest of El Mencho. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, is one of the most powerful and fastest-growing criminal organizations in Mexico and was born in 2009.In February, the Trump administration designated the cartel as a foreign terrorist organization.Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, like her predecessor, has criticized the “kingpin” strategy of previous administrations that took out cartel leaders only to trigger explosions of violence as cartels fractured. While she has remained popular in Mexico, security is a persistent concern and since U.S. President Donald Trump took office a year ago, she has been under tremendous pressure to show results against drug trafficking.Known as aggressive cartelThe Jalisco cartel has been one of the most aggressive cartels in its attacks on the military — including on helicopters — and is a pioneer in launching explosives from drones and installing mines. In 2020, it carried out a spectacular assassination attempt with grenades and high-powered rifles in the heart of Mexico City against the then head of the capital’s police force and now federal security secretary.The DEA considers the cartel to be as powerful as the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico’s most infamous criminal groups, with a presence in all 50 U.S. states. It is one of the main suppliers of cocaine to the U.S. market and, like the Sinaloa cartel, earns billions from the production of fentanyl and methamphetamines. Sinaloa, however, has been weakened by infighting after the loss of its leaders Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, both in U.S. custody.Oseguera Cervantes, 59, was originally from Aguililla in the neighboring state of Michoacan. He had been significantly involved in drug trafficking activities since the 1990s. When he was younger, he migrated to the U.S., where he was convicted of conspiracy to distribute heroin in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 1994 and served nearly three years in prison.Following his release from custody, Oseguera Cervantes returned to Mexico and reengaged in drug trafficking activity with drug lord Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, alias “Nacho Coronel.” After Villarreal’s death, Oseguera Cervantes and Erik Valencia Salazar, alias “El 85”, created the Jalisco New Generation Cartel around 2007.Initially, they worked for the Sinaloa Cartel, but eventually split, and for years, the two cartels have battled for territory across Mexico.Indicted several times in the United StatesSince 2017, Oseguera Cervantes has been indicted several times in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.The most recent superseding indictment, filed on April 5, 2022, charges Oseguera Cervantes with conspiracy and distribution of controlled substances (methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl) for the purpose of illegal importation into the United States and use of firearms during and in connection with drug trafficking offenses. Oseguera Cervantes is also charged under the Drug Kingpin Enforcement Act for directing a continuing criminal enterprise.Last year, people searching for missing relatives found piles of shoes and other clothing, as well as bone fragments at what authorities later said was a Jalisco cartel recruitment and training site.__AP writer María Verza contributed to this report.

    The U.S. State Department warned U.S. citizens in Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Michoacan, Guerrero and Nuevo Leon states to remain in safe places due to ongoing security operations after the Mexican army killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

    Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, “El Mencho,” was killed on Sunday, decapitating what had become Mexico’s most powerful cartel and giving the government its biggest prize yet to show the Trump administration its efforts.

    Oseguera Cervantes was wounded in an operation to capture him on Sunday in Tapalpa, Jalisco, about a two-hour drive southwest of Guadalajara, and he died while being flown to Mexico City, the Defense Department said in a statement. The state is the base of the cartel known for trafficking huge quantities of fentanyl and other drugs to the United States.

    During the operation, troops came under fire and killed four people at the location. Three more people, including Oseguera Cervantes, were wounded and later died, the statement said. Two others were arrested and armored vehicles, rocket launchers and other arms were seized. Three members of the armed forces were wounded and receiving medical treatment.

    Roadblocks and burning vehicles

    The killing of the powerful drug lord set off several hours of roadblocks with burning vehicles in Jalisco and other states. Such tactics are commonly used by the cartels to block military operations. Jalisco canceled school in the state for Monday.

    Videos circulating on social media showed plumes of smoke billowing over the tourist city of Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco, and people sprinting through the airport of the state’s capital in panic. On Sunday afternoon, Air Canada announced it was suspending flights to Puerto Vallarta “due to an ongoing security situation” and advised customers not to go to their airport.

    In Guadalajara, the state capital, burning vehicles blocked roads. Mexico’s second-largest city is scheduled to host matches during this summer’s soccer World Cup.

    Canada’s embassy in Mexico warned its citizens in Puerto Vallarta to shelter in place and generally to keep a low profile in Jalisco.

    Jalisco Gov. Pablo Lemus told residents to stay at home and suspended public transportation.

    US had offered up to $15 million for his capture

    The U.S. State Department had offered a reward of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest of El Mencho. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, is one of the most powerful and fastest-growing criminal organizations in Mexico and was born in 2009.

    In February, the Trump administration designated the cartel as a foreign terrorist organization.

    Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, like her predecessor, has criticized the “kingpin” strategy of previous administrations that took out cartel leaders only to trigger explosions of violence as cartels fractured. While she has remained popular in Mexico, security is a persistent concern and since U.S. President Donald Trump took office a year ago, she has been under tremendous pressure to show results against drug trafficking.

    Known as aggressive cartel

    The Jalisco cartel has been one of the most aggressive cartels in its attacks on the military — including on helicopters — and is a pioneer in launching explosives from drones and installing mines. In 2020, it carried out a spectacular assassination attempt with grenades and high-powered rifles in the heart of Mexico City against the then head of the capital’s police force and now federal security secretary.

    The DEA considers the cartel to be as powerful as the Sinaloa cartel, one of Mexico’s most infamous criminal groups, with a presence in all 50 U.S. states. It is one of the main suppliers of cocaine to the U.S. market and, like the Sinaloa cartel, earns billions from the production of fentanyl and methamphetamines. Sinaloa, however, has been weakened by infighting after the loss of its leaders Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, both in U.S. custody.

    Oseguera Cervantes, 59, was originally from Aguililla in the neighboring state of Michoacan. He had been significantly involved in drug trafficking activities since the 1990s. When he was younger, he migrated to the U.S., where he was convicted of conspiracy to distribute heroin in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 1994 and served nearly three years in prison.

    Following his release from custody, Oseguera Cervantes returned to Mexico and reengaged in drug trafficking activity with drug lord Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, alias “Nacho Coronel.” After Villarreal’s death, Oseguera Cervantes and Erik Valencia Salazar, alias “El 85”, created the Jalisco New Generation Cartel around 2007.

    Initially, they worked for the Sinaloa Cartel, but eventually split, and for years, the two cartels have battled for territory across Mexico.

    Indicted several times in the United States

    Since 2017, Oseguera Cervantes has been indicted several times in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

    The most recent superseding indictment, filed on April 5, 2022, charges Oseguera Cervantes with conspiracy and distribution of controlled substances (methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl) for the purpose of illegal importation into the United States and use of firearms during and in connection with drug trafficking offenses. Oseguera Cervantes is also charged under the Drug Kingpin Enforcement Act for directing a continuing criminal enterprise.

    Last year, people searching for missing relatives found piles of shoes and other clothing, as well as bone fragments at what authorities later said was a Jalisco cartel recruitment and training site.

    __

    AP writer María Verza contributed to this report.

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  • Zapotec tomb from 600 CE marks Mexico’s most ‘significant archaeological discovery’ in last decade

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    The Zapotecs were a major pre-Hispanic civilization that flourished in Oaxaca from circa 700-500 BC until the Spanish conquest.

    A Zapotec tomb from 600 CE was discovered by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced during a late January press conference.

    The Zapotecs were a major pre-Hispanic civilization that flourished in Oaxaca from circa 700-500 BC until the Spanish conquest. The indigenous Zapotec peoples today are their modern descendants.

    The find constitutes the most “significant archaeological discovery of the last decade in Mexico,” according to Sheinbaum.

    “This is an exceptional discovery due to its level of preservation and the insights it provides into Zapotec culture: its social organization, funerary rituals, and worldview, preserved in its architecture and mural paintings,” Mexico’s Culture Minister Claudia Curiel de Icaza further explained in her own social media post.

    “A powerful testament to the ancient grandeur of Mexico, which is now being researched, protected, and shared with the public.”

    An owl, which to the Zapotec’s symbolized night and death, is carved into the stone above the entrance to the antechamber, its beak curved and protruding to cover the painted face of an individual believed to be a Zapotec lord, according to a statement by the INAH.

    It is possible that the painted face was the “portrait of the ancestor to whom the tomb was dedicated, and to whom his descendants turned as an intercessor with the divinities,” the INAH explained.

    Calendrical names are carved into the threshold’s structural lintel (upper beam that spans an opening), INAH described, adding that both a male and female figure, “perhaps the guardians of the place,” are carved into the threshold’s jambs.

    Each figure is dressed in a headdress and carrying artifacts in both hands, INAH said.

    Murals painted in ochre, white, green, red, and blue were found on the walls of the burial chamber, the statement added, depicting an in situ “procession of figures carrying bags of copal and walking toward the entrance.”

    INAH to continue preserving, researching the finds

    According to the INAH, the tomb is being compared with other Zapotec funerary complexes, to further understanding of the “social, artistic, and symbolic complexity of this civilization.”

    Conservation and preservation of the site, as well as continued research, are being carried out by an interdisciplinary team from the INAH Oaxaca Center, the statement went on.

    Such work includes stabilizing the burial chamber’s mural “whose condition is delicate due to the presence of roots, insects, and abrupt changes in environmental conditions.”

    As well, the statement further noted, “ceramic, iconographic, and epigraphic analyses are being developed, as well as physical anthropology studies, in order to deepen knowledge of the rituals, symbols, and funerary practices associated with the tomb.”

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  • Train derails in southern Mexico, killing 13 and injuring dozens

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    A train carrying 250 people has derailed partially in southern Mexico, killing at least 13 people and injuring 98, according to officials.

    The Mexican Navy said that the Interoceanic Train linking the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz went off the rails on Sunday as it passed a curve near the town of Nizanda.

    It said that 98 people were injured and that, “unfortunately, 13 people lost their lives”.

    The train was carrying nine crew members and 241 passengers at the time of the accident. Of those on board, 139 were reported to be out of danger, while 36 of the 98 injured were still receiving medical assistance.

    In a statement posted on X, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that at least five of those injured were in “serious” condition.

    Sheinbaum said she has directed the secretary of the navy and other senior personnel to travel to the area and assist the families of those affected. She added that the Ministry of Interior is coordinating the response to the incident.

    Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said it was opening an investigation to determine the cause of the accident.

    Uno Noticias Television, a Mexican channel, reported that emergency units were near the site of the accident but faced difficulty in accessing the area.

    Images circulating on social media and posted by Mexican news outlets showed one of the carriages of the train on its side, while another was completely separated from the train tracks.

    Translation: Passenger train derailed. Interoceanic in the Isthmus. This Sunday, the Interoceanic passenger train derailed, 5 kilometres south of Nizanda, belonging to Asuncion Ixtaltepec, Oaxaca. Injuries have been reported; the train had departed from Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, and was heading to Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz. Emergency units are near the area, but the difficult access to the site is complicating rescue efforts.

    Video clips posted online also showed some of the passengers trapped in the derailed carriages.

    A passenger was quoted by Mexico’s La Razon newspaper as saying that before the derailment, the train “was coming very fast”.

    “We don’t know if it lost its brakes,” the passenger told La Razon.

    In a statement posted on X, Oaxaca Governor Salomon Jara Cruz expressed his government’s “heartfelt condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in this unfortunate accident”.

    The train runs between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, and carries both passengers and freight.

    On December 20, a train on the same route collided with a cargo truck attempting to cross the tracks, although the incident did not result in any deaths.

    The line was inaugurated in 2023 as a major infrastructure project under then-President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to develop southeast Mexico.

    The initiative was designed to modernise the rail link across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a land bridge connecting Mexico’s Pacific port of Salina Cruz with Coatzacoalcos on the Gulf Coast.

    The Mexican government has sought to develop the Isthmus into a strategic trade corridor, expanding ports, railways and industrial infrastructure with the goal of creating a route that could compete with the Panama Canal.

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  • Exclusive-Head of Pemex’s production arm to step down in coming days, sources say

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    By Adriana Barrera

    MEXICO CITY, Dec 18 (Reuters) – Mexico’s state oil company Pemex is preparing to replace the head of its exploration and production arm, just months after he returned ​to the post, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as the company struggles ‌to stem a decline in crude output.

    Angel Cid Munguía resumed leadership of Pemex Exploration and Production (PEP) in early May. He previously ‌held the role until the end of former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s term, which ended when President Claudia Sheinbaum took office last October.

    The change at the helm of PEP would be the third under Sheinbaum, who has pledged to keep national oil output averaging 1.8 million barrels per day through the end ⁠of her term in 2030. That ‌target looks increasingly difficult as mature fields decline, new discoveries fall short and offshore projects Zama and Trion, which Pemex is developing with partners, move slowly.

    Two of ‍the sources said Cid is expected to be succeeded by Octavio Barrera Torres, an electronics engineer appointed in May as deputy director of design, engineering and project execution at PEP as part of a company restructuring.

    “It seems he ​didn’t deliver on promises to boost production,” one source said of Cid, who had served as ‌an adviser to Energy Minister Luz Elena Gonzalez before returning to Pemex.

    Pemex did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Cid’s possible departure, which would come after the signing of the first mixed contracts, a new partnership scheme with private firms aimed at lifting oil and gas output.

    The program has so far drawn little interest from the industry, hampered by Pemex’s heavy debt load.

    Cid and Torres did ⁠not immediately respond to Reuters emails seeking comment on the ​leadership change at PEP.

    Reuters reported this week that Pemex had ​awarded five of the 11 mixed contracts it aimed to finalize before year-end, deals it estimated could add nearly 70,000 barrels per day (bpd) to current output of 1.6 ‍million bpd, including partners. The ⁠awards have faced repeated delays.

    Pemex also faces more than $100 billion in financial debt despite multibillion-dollar capital injections and tax breaks from the government.

    Between January and September, the company received around 380 ⁠billion pesos ($21.13 billion) in government contributions, an increase of more than 150% from the same period last year, according to ‌Pemex data.

    ($1 = 17.9821 Mexican pesos)

    (Reporting by Adriana Berrera; Writing by Adriana Berrera and Sarah ‌Kinosian; Editing by Ana Isabel Martinez and Chizu Nomiyama )

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  • Mexico plans to build Latin America’s most powerful supercomputer

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    MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico unveiled plans Wednesday to build what it claims will be Latin America’s most powerful supercomputer — a project the government says will help the country capitalize on the rapidly evolving uses of artificial intelligence and exponentially expand the country’s computing capacity.

    Dubbed “Coatlicue” for the Mexica goddess considered the earth mother, the supercomputer would be seven times more powerful than the region’s current leader in Brazil, José Merino, head of the Telecommunications and Digital Transformation Agency.

    President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her morning news briefing that the location for the project had not been decided yet, but construction will begin next year.

    “We’re very excited,” said Sheinbaum, an academic and climate scientist. “It is going to allow Mexico to fully get in on the use of artificial intelligence and the processing of data that today we don’t have the capacity to do.”

    Merino said that Mexico’s most powerful supercomputer operates at 2.3 petaflops — a unit to measure computing speed, meaning it can perform one quadrillion operations per second. Coatlicue would have a capacity of 314 petaflops.

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    Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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  • Sexual harassment in Mexico drives women to look for rides with other women

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    MEXICO CITY (AP) — When a male driver from a popular rideshare app asked Ninfa Fuentes for her phone number during a ride through Mexico City, she froze. But when he repeatedly pressed her about her Valentine’s Day plans, a rush of terror flooded her body.

    What should have been a quiet ride home at the end of the workday three years ago turned into a nightmare that many women in Mexico experience daily: holding their breath until they know they’ve made it home alive.

    “I felt like I was dying,” Fuentes, 48, said. An international economics researcher and a survivor of sexual violence, she has not used public transportation or ride-hailing services since.

    The conversation around startling levels of sexual harassment and gender-based violence came roaring back this week after Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, was captured in video being groped by a drunk man.

    Following the incident, Sheinbaum said she had pressed charges against the man and unveiled a plan to make sexual harassment a crime across all Mexican states — a bid to make it easier for women to report such assaults in a country where an average of 10 women are killed daily.

    A safe space for women

    After her frightening rideshare app experience, Fuentes turned to AmorrAs, a self-managed feminist network that provides safe transportation — and support — for women in Mexico City and its suburbs.

    AmorrAs seeks to offer a solution to the endemic problem of sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence that women routinely face on Mexico’s rideshare apps and public transit.

    The network was founded by 29-year-old Karina Alba following the 2022 killing of Debanhi Escobar, who was found dead days after getting out of a taxi on a dark highway in the northern city of Monterrey.

    Alba founded AmorrAs with the hope of providing safe rides for women, choosing her mother, taxi driver Ruth Rojas, to be the network’s first driver. The network now has more than 20 women-only “ally” drivers, serving more than 2,000 women per year.

    “My dream was to contribute to society in some way,” said Alba. “I decided to do so by creating a safe space for women, one where they can live with dignity and free from violence.”

    Riding with an ally

    On a recent afternoon, 38-year-old Dian Colmenero received a WhatsApp message from Alba confirming that the woman she was going to drive was waiting at her workplace. On the receiving end, the passenger read a message with the trip details, her “ally” driver’s name and number, and a reassuring pink heart emoji. Her “ally” driver would be with her soon.

    For security reasons, women have to schedule their rides with AmorrAs in advance by filling a form. The price for each ride then varies based on the distance traveled.

    Colmenero, who works in marketing when she is not driving with AmorrAs, stole a kiss from her partner and petted her old Yorkie before heading out to one of the city’s financial districts.

    “Before driving with AmorrAs, I had experienced violence on public transport, on the subway, and even with ride-hailing apps,” she said. “I once had to ride with a driver who told me and my partner that he had beaten up several women.”

    Colmenero greeted her regular passenger, Ninfa Fuentes, with a warm hug. They chatted about their families, the book Fuentes is writing and their shared recent ADHD diagnosis.

    As the noise of the Mexican capital’s traffic rattles the car, Fuentes peers out the window, confident that she will arrive home safe and sound.

    A history of violence against women

    According to the National Public Security System’s Executive Secretariat, Mexico has reported 61,713 sex crimes so far in 2025, including 8,704 reports of sexual harassment.

    The National Citizen Observatory on Femicide says sex crimes in Mexico are the least reported due to the high level of stigma surrounding them and the lack of credibility authorities often extend to women’s reports.

    Lawyer Norma Escobar, 32, collaborates with AmorrAs, offering legal support to women who say they have been harassed or assaulted.

    On more than one occasion, Escobar said she heard a forensic doctor in the gender crimes department of the Mexico state’s Attorney General’s Office dismiss women filing a sexual assault complaint, telling them “Nothing has happened to you, there have been worse cases.”

    Escobar, who handles harassment cases on the street and on public transportation, said that the absence of a forensic doctor has on occasions prevented women from officially filing a report.

    A spokesperson from Mexico state’s Attorney General’s Office, when reached by The Associated Press, said they had no knowledge of the doctor’s alleged comment, but when problems have been discovered the office has taken action against those involved.

    Experts and advocates say the history of violence against women in Mexico is rooted in deep-seated cultural machismo and systemic gender inequality, alongside a justice system riddled with problems.

    “Seeing that the authorities downplay it, women end up often giving up on their cases,” said Escobar, noting that when it comes to ensuring women’s access to justice, “there is a lack of attention, commitment and professionalism from authorities.”

    Riding with a hand on the door

    Like many other women in Mexico, Nejoi Meddeb, 30, always traveled with her hand locked on the door handle so she could escape if needed. That is how 23-year-old Lidia Gabriela Gómez died in 2022 when she jumped out of a moving taxi in Mexico City after the driver took a different route than the one she had requested.

    Maria José Cabrera, a 28-year-old engineer, said she was followed by a man when she got off a minibus on her way to the train. She ran to take refuge in the subway car reserved for women only. On another occasion, in one of the city’s mixed subway cars, she said a man touched her inappropriately and, by the time she reacted, he was gone.

    Cabrera, who now rides with AmorrAs, said she also avoided wearing skirts and never went anywhere without making sure that someone she trusts was monitoring her journey — a common internalized protocol for many women in Mexico.

    “For me, AmorrAs represents being able to do things I couldn’t do before,” said Cabrera. “I really enjoy going to concerts. It shouldn’t be like that but if it weren’t for them, I probably wouldn’t be able to do it.”

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    Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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  • Peru bans Mexico’s President Sheinbaum as diplomatic dispute grows

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    Peru has declared Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum a “persona non grata” who is unable to enter the country, days after severing ties with Mexico amid an escalating diplomatic dispute.

    Peru’s Congress voted 63 to 34 on Thursday in favour of symbolically barring Sheinbaum from the country after her government granted asylum to former Peruvian Prime Minister Betssy Chavez, after she fled to the Mexican embassy in Peru’s capital Lima.

    The designation of “persona non grata” is typically reserved for foreign diplomats and compels them to leave a host country, and is seen as a rebuke to their government.

    President of Peru’s Congress Fernando Rospigliosi said the move was a show of support for the government and its decision to break off relations with Mexico, according to Mexico’s El Pais newspaper.

    During a debate on Thursday, Ernesto Bustamante, an MP who sits on Peru’s Congressional Foreign Relations Committee, also accused Sheinbaum of having ties to drug traffickers.

    “We cannot allow someone like that, who is in cahoots with drug traffickers and who distracts her people from the real problems they should be addressing, to get involved in Peruvian affairs,” Bustamante said, according to El Pais.

    Chavez, who is on trial for her participation in an alleged 2022 coup attempt, earlier this week fled to the Mexican embassy in Lima, where she was granted political asylum.

    Peru’s Foreign Minister Hugo de Zela called the decision by Mexico City an “unfriendly act” that “interfered in the internal affairs of Peru”.

    Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has maintained that it was acting in accordance with international law, and the move in “no way constitutes an intervention in Peru’s internal affairs”.

    Lima has yet to offer safe passage for Chavez to leave the embassy and travel to Mexico.

    Chavez, a former culture minister, briefly served as prime minister to President Pedro Castillo from late November to December 2022.

    Charges against the former minister stem from an attempt by President Castillo in December 2022 to dissolve the Peruvian Congress before he was quickly impeached and arrested.

    Chavez, who faces up to 25 years in prison if found guilty, has denied involvement in the scheme. She was detained from June 2023 until September of this year, and then released on bail while facing trial.

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  • Mexico’s President Sheinbaum presses charges after groping attack on street

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    Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has called for sexual harassment to be made a crime nationwide after being groped on the street while greeting supporters near the presidential palace in Mexico City.

    Sheinbaum, 63, said on Wednesday that she had pressed charges against the man and would review nationwide legislation on sexual harassment following the attack by a drunk man who put his arm around her shoulder, and with the other hand touched her hip and chest, while attempting to kiss her neck.

    Mexico’s first woman president removed the man’s hands before a member of her staff stepped between them. The president’s security detail did not appear to be nearby at the moment of the attack, which was caught on camera.

    The man was later arrested.

    “My thinking is: If I don’t file a complaint, what becomes of other Mexican women? If this happens to the president, what will happen to all the women in our country?” Sheinbaum told her regular morning news conference on Wednesday.

    In a post on social media, the president said the attack was “something that many women experience in the country and in the world”.

    Translation: I filed a complaint for the harassment episode that I experienced yesterday in Mexico City. It must be clear that, beyond being president, this is something that many women experience in the country and in the world; no one can violate our body and personal space. We will review the legislation so that this crime is punishable in all 32 states.

    Sheinbaum explained that the incident occurred when she and her team had decided to walk from the National Palace to the Education Ministry to save time. She said they could walk the route in five minutes, rather than taking a 20-minute car ride.

    She also called on states across Mexico to look at their laws and procedures to make it easier for women to report such assaults and said Mexicans needed to hear a “loud and clear, no, women’s personal space must not be violated”.

    Mexico’s 32 states and Mexico City, which is a federal entity, all have their own criminal codes, and not all states consider sexual harassment a crime.

    “It should be a criminal offence, and we are going to launch a campaign,” Sheinbaum said, adding that she had suffered similar attacks in her youth.

    The incident has put the focus on Mexico’s troubling record on women’s safety, with sexual harassment commonplace and rights groups warning of a femicide crisis, and the United Nations reporting that an average of 10 women are murdered every day in the country.

    About 70 percent of Mexican women aged 15 and over will also experience at least one incident of sexual harassment in their lives, according to the UN.

    The attack also focused criticism on Sheinbaum’s security detail and on her insistence on maintaining a degree of intimacy with the public, despite Mexican politicians regularly being a target of cartel violence.

    But Sheinbaum dismissed any suggestion that she would increase her security or change how she interacts with people following the incident.

    At nationwide rallies in September to mark her first year in power, the president allowed supporters to embrace her and take selfies.

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  • Man arrested after groping Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on street

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    Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday that the harassment she suffered from a drunk man in the street near Mexico’s seat of government was an assault on all women, and that’s why she decided to press charges against him.

    Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada had announced overnight that the man was arrested.

    In a video circulating widely on social platforms, the man appeared to lean in for a kiss and touch the president’s body with his hands on Tuesday. She gently pushed his hands away, maintaining a stiff smile as she turned to face him. She could be heard saying, in part, “Don’t worry.”

    On Wednesday, Sheinbaum was firm in emphasizing that this was not the first time she had suffered such harassment and that the problem went far beyond her. 

    “No man has the right to violate that space,” she said, in a video the Mexican government shared on social media when it announced charges had been filed. 

    “I decided to press charges because this is something that I experienced as a woman, but that we as women experience in our country,” Sheinbaum continued, adding that she also experienced it earlier in her life, as a student.

    “My reflection is that if I do not report the crime, what condition does that leave Mexican women in?” she said. 

    The incident also raised questions about the president’s security. Sheinbaum explained that she and her team had decided to walk from the National Palace to the Education Ministry to save time. She said they could walk it in five minutes, rather than taking a 20-minute car ride. She said she would not change how she acts.

    Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum gives a morning press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City, Monday, Nov. 3, 2025.

    Marco Ugarte / AP


    Speaking out in solidarity with the president, Brugada used some of Sheinbaum’s own language about being elected Mexico’s first woman president to emphasize that harassment of any woman — in this case Mexico’s most powerful — is an assault on all women. When Sheinbaum was elected, she said that it wasn’t just her coming to power, it was all women. 

    “If they touch the president, they touch all of us,” Brugada wrote in a statement released Wednesday. Her statement went on to note that Sheinbaum’s references to the collective “arrival” of women to power in Mexico is “not a slogan, it’s a commitment to not look the other way, to not allow misogyny to continue to be veiled in habits, to not accept a single additional humiliation, not another abuse, not a single femicide more.”

    Mexico’s National Governors Conference also voiced their support for the president as news broke that she would bring charges against the man.

    “From CONAGO we condemn any aggression against women, in this case the aggression toward the president of Mexico,” the group said in a statement shared on social media. “Every form of violence against a woman is unacceptable and should have no place in a society that aspires to live with respect and equality.” 

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  • A Mayor’s Assassination Reignites Mexico’s Debate Over Confronting Cartels

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    MEXICO CITY—Since taking office last year as mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo often led police raids wearing his bulletproof vest and cowboy hat to fulfill his mandate to end endemic extortion in the avocado capital of the world.

    The 40-year-old Manzo knew that the criminal gangs he confronted had more resources and superior weaponry. He was gunned down on Saturday as he officiated a candle-lighting ceremony for Day of the Dead, one of the main religious festivities in Mexico’s western Michoacán state.

    Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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    José de Córdoba

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  • Mexican mayor killed during Day of the Dead celebrations

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    A mayor in Mexico’s western state of Michoacan was shot dead in a plaza in front of dozens of people who had gathered for Day of the Dead festivities, authorities said.Local politicians in Mexico are frequently victims of political and organized crime violence.The mayor of the Uruapan municipality, Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodríguez, was gunned down Saturday night in the town’s historic center. He was rushed to a hospital, where he later died, according to state prosecutor Carlos Torres Piña.A city council member and a bodyguard were also injured in the attack.The attacker was killed at the scene, Federal Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch told journalists Sunday.The attack on the mayor was carried out by an unidentified man who shot him seven times, García Harfuch said. The weapon was linked to two armed clashes between rival criminal groups operating in the region, he added.“No line of investigation is being ruled out to clarify this cowardly act that took the life of the mayor,” García Harfuch said.Michoacan is one of Mexico’s most violent states and is a battleground among various cartels and criminal groups fighting for control of territory, drug distribution routes and other illicit activities.On Sunday, hundreds of Uruapan residents, dressed in black and holding up photographs of Manzo Rodríguez, took to the town’s streets to accompany the funeral procession and bid farewell to the slain mayor. They chanted “Justice! Justice! Out with Morena!,” a reference to the ruling party of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.In recent months, the Uruapan mayor had publicly appealed to Sheinbaum on social media for help to confront the cartels and criminal groups. He had accused Michoacan’s pro-government governor, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, and the state police of corruption.At the head of the procession, a man led Manzo Rodríguez’s black horse, with one of the mayor’s signature hats placed on the saddle. A group of musicians, also dressed in black, followed and played mariachi songs.In the narrow streets of the agricultural town, where avocados are the main crop, dozens of police and military officers stood guard around the area.The attack on Manzo Rodríguez, a former Morena legislator, was captured on video and shared on social media. The footage shows dozens of residents and tourists, some in costume and with painted faces, enjoying the event surrounded by hundreds of lit candles, marigold flowers and skull decorations. Then several gunshots ring out and people run for cover.In another video, a person is seen lying on the ground as an official performs CPR while armed police officers guard the area.Manzo Rodríguez had been under protection since December 2024, three months after taking office. His security was reinforced last May with municipal police and 14 National Guard officers, García Harfuch said, without specifying what prompted the measure.Manzo Rodríguez, who some nicknamed “The Mexican Bukele” in reference to the tough security policies of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, took office as mayor of Uruapan after winning that year’s midterm elections with an independent movement.The mayor’s killing follows the death of Salvador Bastidas, mayor of the municipality of Tacambaro, also in Michoacan. Bastidas was killed in June along with his bodyguard as he arrived at his home in the town’s Centro neighborhood.In October 2024, journalist Mauricio Cruz Solís was also shot in Uruapan shortly after interviewing Manzo Rodríguez.

    URUAPAN, MEXICO —

    A mayor in Mexico’s western state of Michoacan was shot dead in a plaza in front of dozens of people who had gathered for Day of the Dead festivities, authorities said.

    Local politicians in Mexico are frequently victims of political and organized crime violence.

    The mayor of the Uruapan municipality, Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodríguez, was gunned down Saturday night in the town’s historic center. He was rushed to a hospital, where he later died, according to state prosecutor Carlos Torres Piña.

    A city council member and a bodyguard were also injured in the attack.

    The attacker was killed at the scene, Federal Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch told journalists Sunday.

    The attack on the mayor was carried out by an unidentified man who shot him seven times, García Harfuch said. The weapon was linked to two armed clashes between rival criminal groups operating in the region, he added.

    “No line of investigation is being ruled out to clarify this cowardly act that took the life of the mayor,” García Harfuch said.

    Michoacan is one of Mexico’s most violent states and is a battleground among various cartels and criminal groups fighting for control of territory, drug distribution routes and other illicit activities.

    On Sunday, hundreds of Uruapan residents, dressed in black and holding up photographs of Manzo Rodríguez, took to the town’s streets to accompany the funeral procession and bid farewell to the slain mayor. They chanted “Justice! Justice! Out with Morena!,” a reference to the ruling party of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

    In recent months, the Uruapan mayor had publicly appealed to Sheinbaum on social media for help to confront the cartels and criminal groups. He had accused Michoacan’s pro-government governor, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, and the state police of corruption.

    At the head of the procession, a man led Manzo Rodríguez’s black horse, with one of the mayor’s signature hats placed on the saddle. A group of musicians, also dressed in black, followed and played mariachi songs.

    In the narrow streets of the agricultural town, where avocados are the main crop, dozens of police and military officers stood guard around the area.

    The attack on Manzo Rodríguez, a former Morena legislator, was captured on video and shared on social media. The footage shows dozens of residents and tourists, some in costume and with painted faces, enjoying the event surrounded by hundreds of lit candles, marigold flowers and skull decorations. Then several gunshots ring out and people run for cover.

    In another video, a person is seen lying on the ground as an official performs CPR while armed police officers guard the area.

    Manzo Rodríguez had been under protection since December 2024, three months after taking office. His security was reinforced last May with municipal police and 14 National Guard officers, García Harfuch said, without specifying what prompted the measure.

    Manzo Rodríguez, who some nicknamed “The Mexican Bukele” in reference to the tough security policies of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, took office as mayor of Uruapan after winning that year’s midterm elections with an independent movement.

    The mayor’s killing follows the death of Salvador Bastidas, mayor of the municipality of Tacambaro, also in Michoacan. Bastidas was killed in June along with his bodyguard as he arrived at his home in the town’s Centro neighborhood.

    In October 2024, journalist Mauricio Cruz Solís was also shot in Uruapan shortly after interviewing Manzo Rodríguez.

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  • Trump Says Xi Will Help Fight Fentanyl. Will China Follow Through?

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    For years, the U.S. and China have been locked in a pattern on the deadly issue of fentanyl. The White House pressures Beijing to stop Chinese companies from exporting chemicals used to make the drug to Mexico. Beijing takes incremental steps in exchange for Washington dialing down economic pressure—only for China to drag its feet when relations deteriorate.

    President Trump, after a summit on Thursday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said tariffs he had imposed on China over its role in the fentanyl trade would be lowered to 10% from 20% because of Beijing’s “very strong action” in cracking down and Xi’s commitment to do more.

    Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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    Brian Spegele

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  • News Analysis: Trump channels past Latin American aggressions in new crusade: ‘We’re just gonna kill people’

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    MEXICO CITY — They’re blowing up boats in the high seas, threatening tariffs from Brazil to Mexico and punishing anyone deemed hostile — while lavishing aid and praise on allies all aboard with the White House program.

    Welcome to the Monroe Doctrine 2.0, the Trump administration’s bellicose, you’re-with-us-or-against-us approach to Latin America.

    Not yet a year into his term, President Trump seems intent on putting his footprint in “America’s backyard” more than any recent predecessor. He came to office threatening to take back the Panama Canal, and now seems poised to launch a military attack on Venezuela and perhaps even drone strikes on cartel targets in Mexico. He vowed to withhold aid from Argentina if this week’s legislative elections didn’t go the way he wanted. They did.

    The Navy’s USS Stockdale docks at the Frigate Captain Noel Antonio Rodriguez Justavino Naval Base, near entrance to the Panama Canal in Panama City, Panama, on Sept. 21.

    (Enea Lebrun/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    “Every president comes in promising a new focus on Latin America, but the Trump administration is actually doing it,” said James Bosworth, whose firm provides regional risk analysis. “There is no country in the region that is not questioning how the U.S. is playing Latin America right now.”

    Fearing a return to an era when U.S. intervention was the norm — from outright invasions to covert CIA operations to economic meddling — many Latin American leaders are trying to craft please-Trump strategies, with mixed success. But Trump’s transactional proclivities, mercurial outbursts and bullying nature make him a volatile negotiating partner.

    “It’s all put Latin America on edge,” said Michael Shifter, past president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based research group. “It’s bewildering and dizzying and, I think, disorienting for everyone. People don’t know what’s coming next.”

    In this super-charged update of U.S. gunboat diplomacy, critics say laws are being ignored, norms sidestepped and protocol set aside. The combative approach draws from some old standards: War on Drugs tactics, War on Terrorism rationales and Cold War saber-rattling.

    Facilitating it all is the Trump administration’s formal designation of cartels as terrorist groups, a first. The shift has provided oratorical firepower, along with a questionable legal rationale, for the deadly “narco-terrorist” boat strikes, now numbering 14, in both the Caribbean and Pacific.

    “The Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere,” is how Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, has labeled cartels, as he posts video game-esque footage of boats and their crews being blown to bits.

    Lost is an essential distinction: Cartels, while homicidal, are driven by profits. Al Qaeda and other terror groups typically proclaim ideological motives.

    Another aberration: Trump doesn’t see the need to seek congressional approval for military action in Venezuela.

    “I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war,” Trump said. “I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.”

    A supporter of Venezuela wearing a t-shirt depicting US President Donald Trump and the slogan "Yankee go home"

    A supporter of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro wearing a T-shirt depicting President Trump and the slogan “Yankee go home” takes part in a rally on Thursday in Caracas against U.S. military activity in the Caribbean.

    (Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)

    Trump’s unpredictability has cowed many in the region. One of the few leaders pushing back is Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, like Trump, has a habit of incendiary, off-the-cuff comments and social media posts.

    The former leftist guerrilla — who already accused Trump of abetting genocide in Gaza — said Washington’s boat-bombing spree killed at least one Colombian fisherman. Petro called the operation part of a scheme to topple the leftist government in neighboring Venezuela.

    Trump quickly sought to make an example of Petro, labeling him “an illegal drug leader” and threatening to slash aid to Colombia, while his administration imposed sanctions on Petro, his wife, son and a top deputy. Like the recent deployment of thousands of U.S. troops, battleships and fighter jets in the Caribbean, Trump’s response was a calculated display of power — a show of force designed to brow-beat doubters into submission.

    Colombian President Gustavo Petro speaks at a rally

    At a rally in support of Colombian President Gustavo Petro in Bogota on Oct. 24, a demonstrator carries a sign that demands respect for Colombia and declares that, contrary to Trump’s claims, Petro is not a drug trafficker.

    (Juancho Torres/Anadolu via Getty Images)

    Amid the whirlwind turns in U.S.-Latin American relations, the rapid unraveling of U.S.-Colombia relations has been especially startling. For decades Colombia has been the linchpin of Washington’s anti-drug efforts in South America as well as a major trade partner.

    Unlike Colombia and Mexico, Venezuela is a relatively minor player in the U.S.-bound narcotics trade, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. And yet the White House has cast Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolás Maduro, as an all-powerful kingpin “poisoning” American streets with crime and drugs. It put a $50-million bounty on Maduro’s head and massed an armada off the coast of Venezuela, home to the world’s largest petroleum reserves.

    U.S. President Donald Trump talks during a cabinet meeting

    President Trump talks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Oct. 9. Others, from left to right are, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

    (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

    An exuberant cheerleader for the shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions-later posture is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has for years advocated for the ouster of left-wing governments in Havana and Caracas. In a recent swing through the region, Rubio argued for a more muscular interdiction strategy.

    “What will stop them is when you blow them up,” Rubio told reporters in Mexico City. “You get rid of them.”

    That mindset is “chillingly familiar for many people in Latin America,” said David Adler, of the think tank Progressive International. “Again, you’re doing extrajudicial killings in the name of a war on drugs.”

    U.S. intervention in Latin America dates back more than 200 years, when President James Monroe declared that the United States would reign as the hemispheric hegemon.

    In ensuing centuries, the U.S. invaded Mexico and annexed half its territory, dispatched Marines to Nicaragua and Haiti and abetted coups from Chile to Brazil to Guatemala. It enforced a decades-long embargo against communist Cuba — while also launching a botched invasion of the island and trying to assassinate its leader —and imposed economic sanctions on left-wing adversaries in Nicaragua and Venezuela.

    Motivations for these interventions varied from fighting communism to protecting U.S. business interests to waging a war on drugs. The most recent full-on U.S. assault against a Latin American nation — the 1989 invasion of Panama — also was framed as an anti-drug crusade. President George H.W. Bush described the country’s authoritarian leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega, as a “drug-running dictator,” language that is nearly identical to current White House descriptions of Maduro.

    American Army troops arrive in Panama to depose former ally Manuel Noriega in 1989.

    American Army troops arrive in Panama to depose former ally Manuel Noriega in 1989.

    (Jason Bleibtreu/Sygma via Getty Images)

    But a U.S. military invasion of Venezuela presents a challenge of a different magnitude.

    Venezuela is 10 times larger than Panama, and its population of 28 million is also more than tenfold that of Panama’s in 1989. Many predict that a potential U.S. attack would face stiff resistance.

    And if curtailing drug use is really the aim of Trump’s policy, leaders from Venezuela to Colombia to Mexico say, perhaps Trump should focus on curtailing addiction in the U.S., which is the world’s largest consumer of drugs.

    To many, the buildup to a potential intervention in Venezuela mirrors the era preceding the 2003 Iraq war, when the White House touted not drug trafficking but weapons of mass destruction — which turned out to be nonexistent — as a casus belli.

    Arrival Of The Us Troops In Safwan, First Iraqi Village After The Koweiti Border. On March 21, 2003

    Iraqi officers surrender to U.S. troops on a road near Safwan, Iraq, in March, 2003.

    (Gilles Bassignac/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

    “Somehow, the United States of America has found a way to combine two of its greatest foreign policy failures — the Iraq War and the War on Drugs — into a single regime change narrative,” Adler said.

    Further confounding U.S.-Latin American relations is Trump’s personality-driven style: his unabashed affection for certain leaders and disdain for others.

    While Venezuela’s Maduro and Colombia’s Petro sit atop the bad-hombre list, Argentine President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — the latter the self-described “world’s coolest dictator” — are the darlings of the moment.

    US President Donald Trump greets Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's president

    President Trump greets Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as he arrives at the White House on April 14.

    (Al Drago/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

    Trump has given billions of dollars in aid to bail out the right-wing Milei, a die-hard Trump loyalist and free-market ideologue. The administration has paid Bukele’s administration millions to house deportees, while maintaining the protected status of more than 170,000 Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S.

    “It’s a carrot-and-stick approach,” said Sergio Berensztein, an Argentina political analyst. “It’s fortunate for Argentina that it gets the carrot. But Venezuela and Colombia get the stick.”

    Trump has given mixed signals on Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The two leftists lead the region’s largest nations.

    Trump has wielded the tariff cudgel against both countries: Mexico ostensibly because of drug trafficking; Brazil because of what Trump calls a “witch hunt” against former president Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing Trump favorite convicted of attempting a coup after he, like Trump, lost a bid for reelection.

    Paradoxically, Trump has expressed affection for both Lula and Sheinbaum, calling Lula on his 80th birthday “a very vigorous guy” (Trump is 79) and hailing Sheinbaum as a “lovely woman,” but adding: “She’s so afraid of the cartels that she can’t even think straight.”

    Sheinbaum, caught in the crosswinds of shifting policy dictates from Washington, has so far been able to fight off Trump’s most drastic tariff threats. Mexico’s reliance on the U.S. market highlights a fundamental truth: Even with China expanding its influence, the U.S. still reigns as the region’s economic and military superpower.

    Sheinbaum has avoided the kind of barbed ripostes that tend to trigger Trump’s rage, even as U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats creep closer to Mexico’s shores. Publicly at least, she seldom shows frustration or exasperation, once musing: “President Trump has his own, very special way of communicating.”

    Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell, Kate Linthicum

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  • Dozens dead in Mexico after severe flooding; escaped tiger caught

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    Heavy rainfall in Mexico caused severe flooding and landslides across several states, leaving at least 37 people dead, authorities said on Saturday.

    The Security Ministry said 117 cities and municipalities in five states in the east and centre of the country are heavily affected by the ongoing rainfall.

    At least 6,700 soldiers were deployed to provide emergency aid and clear roads, President Claudia Sheinbaum said. “We are not leaving anyone behind; we are taking care of families who have lost a loved one,” Sheinbaum wrote on X.

    Many of the victims were caught in landslides, according to authorities.

    The states of Veracruz, Hidalgo, Puebla, San Luis Potosí and Querétaro were worst affected by the storms. At least 34,000 houses as well as hospitals, schools, roads and bridges have been damaged. Some localities remain cut off from the outside world due to avalanches. Tens of thousands of households are without electricity.

    In the eastern state of Veracruz, where five people lost their lives, the overflowing Cazones River flooded the city of Poza Rica, which has nearly 190,000 inhabitants. Around 35% of the local population was affected by the flood, Governor Rocío Nahle reported. Many people were forced to wait on rooftops and in trees for rescue by boats or from the air. Hundreds were brought to emergency shelters. The smaller town of Álamo was also underwater.

    In the central state of Hidalgo, 22 people died, according to government reports. In the state of Puebla, there were at least nine fatalities with more people missing. A 6-year-old was buried under tons of rock and mud from a landslide in the state of Querétaro.

    Mexico is at the end of its annual rainy season, which lasts about six months and usually ends in early November.

    The heavy rainfall of recent days is partly due to the tropical cyclones Priscilla and Raymond in the Pacific, as well as weather phenomena in the Gulf of Mexico. Meteorologists forecast further rain in the coming days.

    Tiger escapes, later caught

    In one municipality in the central state of Puebla, a tiger escaped when the zoo flooded, but was later captured by authorities.

    In Xicotepec, home to around 80,000 people, the San Marcos River overflowed its banks and flooded the surrounding area. Numerous houses were destroyed, the mayor stated in a video.

    When the tiger escaped from the Animalia zoo, the Mexican environmental authority had warned residents to be cautious.

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  • It’s been a decade since 43 students disappeared in Mexico. Their parents still fight for answers

    It’s been a decade since 43 students disappeared in Mexico. Their parents still fight for answers

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    Clemente Rodríguez has been documenting the long search for his missing son with tattoos. First, it was an ink drawing of a turtle — a symbol of 19-year-old Christian Rodríguez’s school — with a smaller turtle on its shell. Then, an image of Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, accompanied by the number 43. Later, a tiger for strength and a dove for hope.”How else is my son going to know that I have been looking for him?” asked Rodríguez. To the heartbroken father, the body art is evidence that he never stopped searching — proof he could perhaps one day show to his boy.On Sept. 26, 2014, Christian Rodríguez, a tall boy who loved to folk dance and had just enrolled in a teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero, disappeared along with 42 classmates. Every year since, on the 26th of each month, Clemente Rodríguez, his wife, Luz María Telumbre, and other families meet at the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa and take a long bus ride to the capital, Mexico City, to demand answers.They will do so again next week, on the 10th anniversary of their sons’ disappearance.”It is hard, very hard,” Clemente Rodríguez said.Rodríguez and the other parents are not alone. The 43 students are among more than 115,000 people still reported as missing in Mexico, a reflection of numerous unresolved crimes in a country where human rights activists say violence, corruption and impunity have long been the norm.Over the years, authorities have offered different explanations. The previous administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto said that the students were attacked by security forces linked to a local drug cartel, and that the bodies were then turned over to organized crime figures, who burned their bodies in a dump and threw their ashes in a river. A bone fragment of one of the students was later found in the river.President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration confirmed the source of the attack. But the current justice department — along with the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights and a Truth Commission formed specifically to investigate the students’ disappearance — refuted the story about the incineration of the bodies in a dump. They accused top former officials of planting the bone fragment in the river to suit their narrative. They also unearthed clues in a different location, including bone fragments from one of Christian’s feet.But the families still don’t have any solid answers about what happened to the students. For his part, Clemente Rodríguez is far from convinced that his son is dead. Not long after the students disappeared, parents took matters into their own hands, charging into remote, often gang-controlled mountain towns to search for their children. They encountered others who had been displaced by violence. Fear was everywhere.”When I left the house, I never knew if I would come back alive,” Rodríguez said.During the search, Christina Bautista, the 49-year-old mother of missing student Benjamin Ascencio, says strangers told her they’d been searching for a son for three years or a daughter for five. She had thought it would be a matter of weeks.”I couldn’t take it, I took off running,” she said. “How could there be so many disappeared?”Dozens of bodies were found, but not those of their children. A decade of fighting to keep the case alive has turned the parents’ lives inside out. Before his son’s disappearance, Rodríguez sold jugs of water from the back of his pickup and tended a small menagerie of animals in the town of Tixtla, not far from the school. Telumbre sold handmade tortillas cooked over a wood fire. When the students vanished, however, they dropped everything. Parents sold or abandoned their animals, left fields untended and entrusted grandparents with the care of other children.Rodríguez, 56, has since managed to partially reassemble his clutch of livestock and has planted some corn on the family’s plot of land. The family’s main income, however, comes from homemade crafts sold on trips to Mexico City: mats woven from reeds; bottles of an uncle’s locally brewed mezcal decorated with twine and colorful tiger faces; and cloth napkins embroidered by Telumbre.Sometimes the stocky, soft-spoken Rodríguez visits his land to think or to release his anger and sadness. “I start to cry, let it all go,” he said.Parents also find solace at the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa. The school, which trains students to teach in poor remote villages, is part of a network of rural educational facilities with a long history of radical activism. School walls painted with slogans demanding justice for the missing students also display murals honoring Che Guevara and Karl Marx. For the poorest families, Ayotzinapa offers a way out: Students receive free room, board and an education. In exchange, they work. The atmosphere has militaristic undertones: New students’ heads are shaved and the first year is about discipline and survival. They are tasked with tending cattle, planting fields and commandeering buses to drive to protests in the capital. The students who disappeared in 2014 were abducted from five buses they had taken over in the city of Iguala, 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of the school.Parents arrived at Ayotzinapa little by little from villages deep in the mountains. They gathered on the school’s basketball court, a concrete pad under a pavilion where 43 chairs still hold photos of each of the missing students. In the years since, a certain codependency has developed. The school’s fight for justice is fueled by the parents’ grief and anger. The school’s students, meanwhile, “are our strong arm,” Bautista says. “Here is where the movement started.”Students treat the parents respectfully and affectionately, greeting them as “aunt” or “uncle” as they pass through the guarded gates.In late August, Rodríguez and other parents met for the last time with López Obrador, who leaves office at the end of this month.The exchange was a grave disappointment.”Right now, this administration is just like that of Enrique Peña Nieto,” Rodríguez said. “He’s tried to mock us” by hiding information, protecting the Army and insulting the families’ lawyers, he said. López Obrador continues to insist that his government has done its best to find answers. He cites dozens of arrests, including that of a former attorney general charged with obstructing justice. He has downplayed the role of the military, however. Years ago, López Obrador declared the students’ abduction a “state crime,” pointing to the involvement of local, state and federal authorities, including the Army.The families met in July with López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who will take office Oct. 1, but she made no promises or commitments. After the August meeting, Rodríguez posed for a portrait in the National Palace, his gaze firm and his fist raised.Like other parents, he vows to keep fighting. “During these 10 years, we have learned a lot about obfuscation … lies,” Rodríguez said. Top military and government authorities “have the answers,” he added. “They can reveal them.”

    TIXTLA, México —

    Clemente Rodríguez has been documenting the long search for his missing son with tattoos.

    First, it was an ink drawing of a turtle — a symbol of 19-year-old Christian Rodríguez’s school — with a smaller turtle on its shell. Then, an image of Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, accompanied by the number 43. Later, a tiger for strength and a dove for hope.

    “How else is my son going to know that I have been looking for him?” asked Rodríguez. To the heartbroken father, the body art is evidence that he never stopped searching — proof he could perhaps one day show to his boy.

    On Sept. 26, 2014, Christian Rodríguez, a tall boy who loved to folk dance and had just enrolled in a teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero, disappeared along with 42 classmates. Every year since, on the 26th of each month, Clemente Rodríguez, his wife, Luz María Telumbre, and other families meet at the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa and take a long bus ride to the capital, Mexico City, to demand answers.

    They will do so again next week, on the 10th anniversary of their sons’ disappearance.

    “It is hard, very hard,” Clemente Rodríguez said.

    Rodríguez and the other parents are not alone. The 43 students are among more than 115,000 people still reported as missing in Mexico, a reflection of numerous unresolved crimes in a country where human rights activists say violence, corruption and impunity have long been the norm.

    Over the years, authorities have offered different explanations. The previous administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto said that the students were attacked by security forces linked to a local drug cartel, and that the bodies were then turned over to organized crime figures, who burned their bodies in a dump and threw their ashes in a river. A bone fragment of one of the students was later found in the river.

    President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration confirmed the source of the attack. But the current justice department — along with the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights and a Truth Commission formed specifically to investigate the students’ disappearance — refuted the story about the incineration of the bodies in a dump. They accused top former officials of planting the bone fragment in the river to suit their narrative. They also unearthed clues in a different location, including bone fragments from one of Christian’s feet.

    But the families still don’t have any solid answers about what happened to the students. For his part, Clemente Rodríguez is far from convinced that his son is dead.

    Not long after the students disappeared, parents took matters into their own hands, charging into remote, often gang-controlled mountain towns to search for their children. They encountered others who had been displaced by violence. Fear was everywhere.

    “When I left the house, I never knew if I would come back alive,” Rodríguez said.

    During the search, Christina Bautista, the 49-year-old mother of missing student Benjamin Ascencio, says strangers told her they’d been searching for a son for three years or a daughter for five. She had thought it would be a matter of weeks.

    “I couldn’t take it, I took off running,” she said. “How could there be so many disappeared?”

    Dozens of bodies were found, but not those of their children.

    A decade of fighting to keep the case alive has turned the parents’ lives inside out. Before his son’s disappearance, Rodríguez sold jugs of water from the back of his pickup and tended a small menagerie of animals in the town of Tixtla, not far from the school. Telumbre sold handmade tortillas cooked over a wood fire.

    When the students vanished, however, they dropped everything. Parents sold or abandoned their animals, left fields untended and entrusted grandparents with the care of other children.

    Rodríguez, 56, has since managed to partially reassemble his clutch of livestock and has planted some corn on the family’s plot of land. The family’s main income, however, comes from homemade crafts sold on trips to Mexico City: mats woven from reeds; bottles of an uncle’s locally brewed mezcal decorated with twine and colorful tiger faces; and cloth napkins embroidered by Telumbre.

    Sometimes the stocky, soft-spoken Rodríguez visits his land to think or to release his anger and sadness. “I start to cry, let it all go,” he said.

    Parents also find solace at the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa.

    The school, which trains students to teach in poor remote villages, is part of a network of rural educational facilities with a long history of radical activism. School walls painted with slogans demanding justice for the missing students also display murals honoring Che Guevara and Karl Marx.

    For the poorest families, Ayotzinapa offers a way out: Students receive free room, board and an education. In exchange, they work.

    The atmosphere has militaristic undertones: New students’ heads are shaved and the first year is about discipline and survival. They are tasked with tending cattle, planting fields and commandeering buses to drive to protests in the capital. The students who disappeared in 2014 were abducted from five buses they had taken over in the city of Iguala, 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of the school.

    Parents arrived at Ayotzinapa little by little from villages deep in the mountains. They gathered on the school’s basketball court, a concrete pad under a pavilion where 43 chairs still hold photos of each of the missing students.

    In the years since, a certain codependency has developed. The school’s fight for justice is fueled by the parents’ grief and anger. The school’s students, meanwhile, “are our strong arm,” Bautista says. “Here is where the movement started.”

    Students treat the parents respectfully and affectionately, greeting them as “aunt” or “uncle” as they pass through the guarded gates.

    In late August, Rodríguez and other parents met for the last time with López Obrador, who leaves office at the end of this month.

    The exchange was a grave disappointment.

    “Right now, this administration is just like that of Enrique Peña Nieto,” Rodríguez said. “He’s tried to mock us” by hiding information, protecting the Army and insulting the families’ lawyers, he said.

    López Obrador continues to insist that his government has done its best to find answers. He cites dozens of arrests, including that of a former attorney general charged with obstructing justice. He has downplayed the role of the military, however. Years ago, López Obrador declared the students’ abduction a “state crime,” pointing to the involvement of local, state and federal authorities, including the Army.

    The families met in July with López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who will take office Oct. 1, but she made no promises or commitments.

    After the August meeting, Rodríguez posed for a portrait in the National Palace, his gaze firm and his fist raised.

    Like other parents, he vows to keep fighting.

    “During these 10 years, we have learned a lot about obfuscation … lies,” Rodríguez said. Top military and government authorities “have the answers,” he added.

    “They can reveal them.”

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  • Sexist tropes and misinformation swirl online as Mexico prepares to elect its first female leader

    Sexist tropes and misinformation swirl online as Mexico prepares to elect its first female leader

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    Mexican voters are poised to elect their first female president, a cause of celebration for many that has also touched off a flurry of false and misogynist online claims, blurring the lines behind fact and fiction.

    The two leading candidates, both women, have had to respond to demeaning attacks about their appearance, their credentials and their ability to lead the nation.

    The candidate considered the favorite in Sunday’s contest, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, has also faced slurs about her Jewish background as well as repeatedly debunked claims she was born in Hungary. This week, in an apparent bid to undermine her candidacy, a social media account impersonating a legitimate news outlet posted fake, AI-generated audio of Sheinbaum admitting that her campaign was failing in a key Mexican state.

    AS IT HAPPENED

    Catch the highlights from the AP’s coverage as Claudia Sheinbaum made history.

    The wave of election misinformation facing voters in Mexico is the latest example of how the internet, social media and AI are fueling the spread of false, misleading or hateful content in democracies around the world, warping public discourse and potentially influencing election outcomes.

    “We have a general atmosphere of disinformation here in Mexico, but it’s slightly different from what is happening in India, or the U.S.,” said Manuel Alejandro Guerrero, a professor and communications researcher at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

    In Mexico’s case, that misinformation is the result of growing distrust of the news media, violence committed by drug cartels, and rapid increases in social media usage coupled with a lag in digital literacy. Guerrero added one more contributing factor now familiar to Americans: political leaders who willingly spread disinformation themselves.

    Over 50 countries go to the polls in 2024

    Sheinbaum is a member of the Morena party, led by current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. She faces opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez and Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the small Citizen Movement party.

    Compared with election misinformation spread about male candidates, the attacks against Gálvez and Sheinbaum often take a particularly personal nature and focus on their gender, according to Maria Calderon, an attorney and researcher from Mexico who works with the Mexico Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., that studies online politics.

    “I was surprised by how cruel the comments could be,” said Calderon, whose analysis found that attacks on female candidates like Sheinbaum and Gálvez typically focus on their appearance, or their credentials, whereas misinformation about male candidates is more often about policy proposals.

    “A lot of direct attacks on their weight, their height, how they dressed, the way they behave, the way they talk,” Calderon said.

    She suggested that some of the sexism can be traced back to Mexico’s “machismo” culture and strong Catholic roots. Women only received the right to vote in Mexico in 1953.

    Lopez Obrador has spread some of the false claims targeting Gálvez, as he did last year when he erroneously said she supported plans to end several popular social programs if elected. Despite her efforts to set the record straight, however, the narrative continues to dog her campaign, showing just how effective political misinformation can be even if debunked.

    Con artists have also gotten in on the misinformation business in Mexico, using AI deepfake videos of Sheinbaum in an effort to peddle investment scams, for instance.

    “You’ll see that it’s my voice, but it’s a fraud,” Sheinbaum said after one deepfake of her supposedly pitching an investment scam went viral.

    As they have in other nations, the tech companies that operate most of the major social media platforms say they have rolled out a series of programs and policies designed to blunt the effect of misinformation ahead of the election.

    Meta and other U.S.-based tech platforms have been criticized for focusing most of their efforts on misinformation in English while taking a “ cookie-cutter ” approach to the rest of the globe.

    “We are focused on providing reliable election information while combating misinformation across languages,” according to a statement from Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, about its election plans.

    The specter of violence has haunted the election since the first campaigns began. Dozens of candidates for smaller offices have been killed or abducted by criminal gangs. Drug cartels have spread terror in the lead up to the election, spraying campaign rallies with gunfire, burning ballots and preventing polling places from being set up.

    “This has been the most violent election that Mexico has had since we started recording elections,” Calderon said.

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  • Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, elected as Mexico’s first woman president?

    Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, elected as Mexico’s first woman president?

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    Claudia Sheinbaum, who will be Mexico’s first woman leader in the nation’s more than 200 years of independence, captured the presidency by promising continuity.

    The 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor and lifelong leftist ran a disciplined campaign capitalizing on her predecessor’s popularity before emerging victorious in Sunday’s vote, according to an official quick count. But with her victory now in hand, Mexicans will look to see how Sheinbaum, a very different personality from mentor and current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will assert herself.

    While she hewed close to López Obrador politically and shares many of his ideas about the government’s role in addressing inequality, she is viewed as less combative and more data-driven.

    Sheinbaum’s background is in science. She has a Ph.D. in energy engineering. Her brother is a physicist. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Sheinbaum said, “I believe in science.”

    Claudia Sheinbaum casts her vote in Mexico City
    Claudia Sheinbaum casts her vote during the presidential elections on June 2, 2024, in Mexico City.

    Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images


    Observers say that grounding showed itself in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her city of some 9 million people took a different approach from what López Obrador espoused at the national level.

    While the federal government was downplaying the importance of coronavirus testing, Mexico City expanded its testing regimen. Sheinbaum set limits on businesses’ hours and capacity when the virus was rapidly spreading, even though López Obrador wanted to avoid any measures that would hurt the economy. And she publicly wore protective masks and urged social distancing while the president was still lunging into crowds.

    Mexico’s persistently high levels of violence will be one of her most immediate challenges after she takes office Oct. 1. The country has seen a 150% uptick in violence, with 37 candidates assassinated during this election cycle, according to a report by the Mexico City-based consultancy Integralia. As CBS News’ Enrique Acevedo reports, the murders were linked to cartels who control much of the drug trade in the United States.

    On the campaign trail she said little more than that she would expand the quasi-military National Guard created by López Obrador and continue his strategy of targeting social ills that make so many young Mexicans easy targets for cartel recruitment.

    “Let it be clear, it doesn’t mean an iron fist, wars or authoritarianism,” Sheinbaum said of her approach to tackling criminal gangs, during her final campaign event. “We will promote a strategy of addressing the causes and continue moving toward zero impunity.”

    Sheinbaum has praised López Obrador profusely and said little that the president hasn’t said himself. She blamed neoliberal economic policies for condemning millions to poverty, promised a strong welfare state and praised Mexico’s large state-owned oil company, Pemex, while also promising to emphasize clean energy.

    “For me, being from the left has to do with that, with guaranteeing the minimum rights to all residents,” Sheinbaum told the AP last year.

    In contrast to López Obrador, who seemed to relish his highly public battles with other branches of the government and also the news media, Sheinbaum is expected by many observers to be less combative or at least more selective in picking her fights.

    “It appears she’s going to go in a different direction,” said Ivonne Acuña Murillo, a political scientist at Iberoamerican University. “I don’t know how much.”

    As one of the U.S.’ most crucial economic partners, leaders in Washington will be watching closely to see which direction Mexico takes — “particularly in terms of Mexican stability and Mexican reliability for the U.S.,” said political analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor. 

    Sheinbaum will also be the first person from a Jewish background to lead the overwhelmingly Catholic country.

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  • Mexico’s projected presidential winner Claudia Sheinbaum says competitors have conceded

    Mexico’s projected presidential winner Claudia Sheinbaum says competitors have conceded

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    MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s projected presidential winner Claudia Sheinbaum said Sunday night that her two competitors had called her and conceded her victory.

    “I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said with a smile, speaking at a downtown hotel shortly after electoral authorities announced a statistical sample showed she held an irreversible lead.

    “We have demonstrated that Mexico is a democratic country with peaceful elections,” she said.

    THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

    MEXICO CITY (AP) — Climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum held an irreversible lead Sunday in the race that would make her Mexico’s first woman president, according to an official quick count.

    The National Electoral Institute’s president said Sheinbaum had between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote, according to a statistical sample. Opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez had between 26.6% and 28.6% of the vote and Jorge Álvarez Máynez had between 9.9% and 10.8% of the vote.

    The governing party candidate campaigned on continuing the political course set over the last six years by her political mentor President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

    His anointed successor, the 61-year-old Sheinbaum led the campaign wire-to-wire despite a spirited challenge from Gálvez. This was the first time in Mexico that the two main opponents were women.

    “Of course, I congratulate Claudia Sheinbaum with all my respect who ended up the winner by a wide margin,” López Obrador said shortly after electoral authorities announcement. “She is going to be Mexico’s first (woman) president in 200 years.”

    If the margin holds it would approach his landslide victory in 2018. López Obrador won the presidency after two unsuccessful tries with 53.2% of the votes, in a three-way race where National Action took 22.3% and the Institutional Revolutionary Party took 16.5%.

    Earlier, Gálvez wrote on the social platform X, “The votes are there. Don’t let them hide them.”

    Sheinbaum is unlikely to enjoy the kind of unquestioning devotion that López Obrador has enjoyed. Both belong to the governing Morena party.

    In Mexico City’s main colonial-era main plaza, the Zocalo, Sheinbaum’s lead did not initially draw the kind of cheering, jubilant crowds that greeted López Obrador’s victory in 2018.

    Fernando Fernández, a chef, 28, joined the relatively small crowd, hoping for a Sheinbaum victory, but even he acknowledged there were problems.

    “You vote for Claudia out of conviction, for AMLO,” Fernández said, referring to López Obrador by his initials, as most Mexicans do. But his highest hope is that Sheinbaum can “improve what AMLO couldn’t do, the price of gasoline, crime and drug trafficking, which he didn’t combat even though he had the power.”

    Also in the crowd, Itxel Robledo, 28, a business administrator, expressed hope that Sheinbaum would do what López Obrador didn’t. “What Claudia has to do is put professionals in every area.”

    Elsewhere in the city, Yoselin Ramírez, 29, said she voted for Sheinbaum, but split her vote for other posts because she didn’t want anyone holding a strong majority.

    “I don’t want everything to be occupied by the same party, so there can be a little more equality,” she said without elaborating.

    The main opposition candidate, Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur and former senator, tried to seize on Mexicans’ concerns about security and promised to take a more aggressive approach toward organized crime.

    Nearly 100 million people were registered to vote, but turnout appeared to be slightly lower than in past elections. Voters were also electing governors in nine of the country’s 32 states, and choosing candidates for both houses of Congress, thousands of mayorships and other local posts, in the biggest elections the nation has seen and ones that have been marked by violence.

    The elections were widely seen as a referendum on López Obrador, a populist who has expanded social programs but largely failed to reduce cartel violence in Mexico. His Morena party currently holds 23 of the 32 governorships and a simple majority of seats in both houses of Congress. Mexico’s constitution prohibits the president’s reelection.

    Sheinbaum promised to continue all of López Obrador’s policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays youths to apprentice.

    Gálvez, whose father was Indigenous Otomi, rose from selling snacks on the street in her poor hometown to start her own tech firms. A candidate running with a coalition of major opposition parties, she left the Senate last year to focus her ire on López Obrador’s decision to avoid confronting the drug cartels through his “hugs not bullets” policy. She pledged to more aggressively go after criminals.

    The persistent cartel violence and Mexico’s middling economic performance were the main issues on voters’ minds.

    Julio García, a Mexico City office worker, said he was voting for the opposition in Mexico City’s central San Rafael neighborhood. “They’ve robbed me twice at gunpoint. You have to change direction, change leadership,” the 34-year-old said. “Continuing the same way, we’re going to become Venezuela.”

    On the fringes of Mexico City in the neighborhood of San Andres Totoltepec, electoral officials filed past 34-year-old homemaker Stephania Navarrete, who watched dozens of cameramen and electoral officials gathering where frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum was set to vote.

    Navarrete said she planned to vote for Sheinbaum despite her own doubts about López Obrador and his party.

    “Having a woman president, for me as a Mexican woman, it’s going to be like before when for the simple fact that you say you are a woman you’re limited to certain professions. Not anymore.”

    She said the social programs of Sheinbaum’s mentor were crucial, but added that deterioration of cartel violence in the past few years was her primary concern in this election.

    “That is something that they have to focus more on,” she said. “For me security is the major challenge. They said they were going to lower the levels of crime, but no, it was the opposite, they shot up. Obviously, I don’t completely blame the president, but it is in a certain way his responsibility.”

    In Iztapalapa, Mexico City’s largest borough, Angelina Jiménez, a 76-year-old homemaker, said she came to vote “to end this inept government that says we’re doing well and (still) there are so many dead.”

    She said the violence plaguing Mexico really worried her so she planned to vote for Gálvez and her promise to take on the cartels. López Obrador “says we’re better and it’s not true. We’re worse.”

    López Obrador claims to have reduced historically high homicide levels by 20% since he took office in December 2018. But that’s largely a claim based on a questionable reading of statistics. The real homicide rate appears to have declined by only about 4% in six years.

    Just as the upcoming November rematch between U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump has underscored deep divisions in the U.S., Sunday’s election revealed how severely polarized public opinion is in Mexico over the direction of the country, including its security strategy and how to grow the economy.

    Beyond the fight for control of Congress, the race for Mexico City mayor — a post now considered equivalent to a governorship — is also important. Sheinbaum is just the latest of many Mexico City mayors, including López Obrador, who went on to run for president. Governorships in large, populous states such as Veracruz and Jalisco are also drawing interest.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Fabiola Sánchez contributed to this report.

    ___

    Follow the AP’s coverage of global elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/global-elections/

    Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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  • The Latest | Mexico votes in historic elections marred by cartel violence and deep division

    The Latest | Mexico votes in historic elections marred by cartel violence and deep division

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    Mexicans vote Sunday in historic elections weighing gender, democracy and populism, as they chart the country’s path forward shadowed by cartel violence.

    With two women leading the contest, Mexico will likely elect its first female president — a major step in a country long marked by its macho culture. The election is also the biggest in the country’s history. More than 20,000 congressional and local positions are up for grabs, according to the National Electoral Institute.

    Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, has maintained a comfortable double-digit lead in opinion polls for months. Xóchitl Gálvez, an opposition senator and tech entrepreneur, represents a coalition of parties that have had little historically to unite them other than their recent opposition to outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

    Mexico goes into Sunday’s election deeply divided: Friends and relatives no longer talk politics for fear of worsening unbridgeable divides, while drug cartels have split the country into a patchwork quilt of warring fiefdoms. The atmosphere is literally heating up with a wave of unusual heat, drought, pollution and political violence.

    Currently:

    — More populist policies or tougher fight with cartels? Mexicans weigh choice as they pick new leader.

    — Mexico’s drug cartels and gangs appear to be playing a wider role in Sunday’s elections than before.

    — Mexicans choose between continuity and change in election overshadowed by violence.

    — Violence clouds the last day of campaigning for Mexico’s election.

    Follow AP election coverage around the world at https://apnews.com/hub/global-elections

    Here’s the latest in Mexico’s election:

    STORES OFFER FREE GOODS FOR SUNDAY VOTERS

    MEXICO CITY — Thousands of Mexican stores are advertising offers of free goods for customers who come in Sunday and show ink on their finger, a security measure to prevent anyone from voting twice.

    The offers are intended to encourage voting.

    Some outlets in the nation’s largest convenience store chain, Oxxo, are offering voters a free cup of coffee. The national restaurant chamber said some members will be offering discounts on food or beverage as well.

    HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION CRITICIZES ELECTORAL AUTHORITIES

    MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s once-autonomous National Human Rights Commission issued an unusual statement criticizing electoral authorities.

    The commission, which has largely followed and supported the policies of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed on Saturday electoral authorities have not acted forcefully enough against “slander,” a term frequently used by López Obrador in reaction to any criticism.

    Elections in Mexico are run by the independent National Electoral Institute, and the commission is supposed to have no role in the process.

    Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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  • More populist policies or tougher fight with cartels? Mexicans weigh choice as they pick new leader

    More populist policies or tougher fight with cartels? Mexicans weigh choice as they pick new leader

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    MEXICO CITY – Voters choosing Mexico’s next president are deciding Sunday between a former academic who promises to further the current leader’s populist policies and an ex-senator and tech entrepreneur who pledges to up the fight against deadly drug cartels.

    In an election likely to give Mexico its first woman president, nearly 100 million people are registered to vote in the race to replace outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Voters will also elect governors in nine of the country’s 32 states, and choose candidates for both houses of Congress, thousands of mayorships and other local posts.

    The elections are widely seen as a referendum on López Obrador, a populist who has expanded social programs but largely failed to reduce cartel violence in Mexico. His Morena party currently holds 23 of the 32 governorships and a simple majority of seats in both houses of Congress. Mexico’s constitution prohibits the president’s reelection.

    Morena hopes to gain the two-thirds majority in Congress required to amend the constitution to eliminate oversight agencies that it says are unwieldy and wasteful. The opposition, running in a loose coalition, argues that would endanger Mexico’s democratic institutions.

    Both major presidential candidates are women, and either would be Mexico’s first female president. A third candidate from a smaller party, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, trails far behind.

    Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is running with the Morena party. Sheinbaum, who leads in the race, has promised to continue all of López Obrador’s policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays youths to apprentice.

    Opposition presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, whose father was Indigenous Otomi, rose from selling snacks on the street in her poor hometown to start her own tech firms. A candidate running with a coalition of major opposition parties, she left the Senate last year to focus her ire on López Obrador’s decision to avoid confronting the drug cartels through his “hugs not bullets” policy. She has pledged to more aggressively go after criminals.

    The persistent cartel violence, along with Mexico’s middling economic performance, are the main issues on voters’ minds.

    The Mexican peso has strengthened against the U.S. dollar in recent years, mainly because of high domestic interest rates and a huge surge in money sent home by migrants. But the gross domestic product has averaged only about 1% growth per year under the current president.

    López Obrador claims to have reduced historically high homicide levels by 20% since he took office in December 2018. But that’s largely a claim based on a questionable reading of statistics; the real homicide rate appears to have declined by only about 4% in six years.

    About 675,000 Mexicans living abroad are registered to vote, but in the past only a small percentage have done so. Voting is not mandatory in Mexico, and overall turnout has hovered around 60% in recent elections. That compares to turnout in recent U.S. presidential elections. An exception was in 2020, when the matchup between then-President Donald Trump and future President Joe Biden pushed U.S. voter turnout to 67%, its highest point in decades.

    Just as the upcoming November rematch between Biden and Trump has underscored deep divisions in the U.S., Sunday’s election has revealed how severely polarized public opinion is in Mexico over the direction of the country, including its security strategy and how to grow the economy.

    Beyond the fight for control of Congress, the race for Mexico City — whose top post is now considered equivalent to a governorship — is also important. Sheinbaum is just the latest of many Mexico City mayors, including López Obrador, who went on to run for president. Governorships in large, populous states such as Veracruz and Jalisco are also drawing interest.

    Polls open at 8 a.m. and close at 6 p.m. in most of the country. The first preliminary, partial results are expected by 9 p.m., after the last polls in different time zones close.

    Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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