Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador passed down the presidential sash to his protégé, Claudia Sheinbaum on Oct. 1, ending a polarizing six years in office. Ms. Sheinbaum became the first female president of Mexico, where a 2014 political reform required gender parity in political candidacies. She becomes the first Jewish head of state, too, though Ms. Sheinbaum identifies as non-religious.
“After 200 years of the Republic and 300 years of the colony…for the first time we women have arrived to lead the destiny of our beautiful nation,” she told the country as lawmakers witnessing the inauguration chanted, “¡Presidenta!”
“In our government, we will guarantee all freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement,” she said. “Freedom is a democratic principle and we are democrats. Human rights will be respected and we will never use the force of the state to repress the people.”
Despite the historic moment, much of the media discourse during the transition has focused on the man who preceded her: Mr. López Obrador, commonly called “AMLO,” and his political project, which he calls, “The Fourth Transformation.”
Improved relations?
Mexicans have expressed overwhelming optimism for the new Sheinbaum administration. That is a common sentiment in a nation that limits presidents to a single six-year term in office. Incoming administrations, even from the same party, are seen as an opportunity for a thorough renewal. According to a poll in the Mexico City daily El Financiero, Ms. Sheinbaum begins her term with a 67 percent approval rating.
Mexico’s bishops also wished Ms. Sheinbaum well. They urged her to govern for all Mexicans, even though she has a congressional majority large enough to permit constitutional changes without seeking support from her political opposition.
“We need to live in a democratic state that respects human rights for all citizens, strengthening the institutions that guarantee the full exercise of these rights and fostering a culture of mutual respect and citizen participation,” the Mexican bishops’ conference said in a statement released on Sept. 30.
The National Dialogue for Peace—a project for addressing the root causes of crime and violence in Mexico led by the bishops’ conference, the Conference of Religious Superiors of Mexico and the Jesuits’ Mexico province—also wished Ms. Sheinbaum well, while urging her to pay attention to the country’s many victims of violence.
“The humanitarian emergency that many municipalities in the country are experiencing due to chronic violence, forced displacement or natural phenomena can only be overcome with the participation of [Mexico’s] different social sectors,” the dialogue’s leaders said in a statement on Oct. 1. “The responsibility is immense, but so is the opportunity to team up with the government you lead.”
The change of government follows six years of increasingly tense relations with Mr. López Obrador for Mexico’s Catholic hierarchy, as the former president forged closer ties with Evangelical pastors. Mexico’s Jesuits also endured difficult relations with the president, though observers say some individual Jesuits strongly backed AMLO’s political project.
The president reacted angrily when many Jesuits, joined by other church leaders, demanded justice and improved public security after the 2022 slayings of two elderly priests. Javier Campos, S.J., and Joaquín Mora, S.J., were murdered by a well-known local crime boss when they attempted to protect a man chased into their parish in the rugged Sierra Tarahumara region. The case provoked challenges from Jesuit and other church leaders of the former president’s “hugs, not bullets” approach to containing the nation’s spiraling criminal violence crisis and the growing power of regional drug cartels.
Santiago Aguirre and his team at the Jesuit-sponsored Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center in Mexico City expect that their relationship with the new president may be much better than their experience with Mr. López Obrador, an at times heavy-handed populist.
A national agenda for peace
They also had high hopes for Mr. López Obrador when he assumed the presidency. But Centro Pro ended up a target of the former president’s wrath because of its work accompanying families of 43 teacher trainees from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who disappeared in 2014 after being abducted in Iguala, in the state of Guerrero. The mass murder appears to have been perpetrated by police acting in cahoots with drug cartels.
Mr. López Obrador repeatedly railed against Centro Pro from the bully pulpit of his morning press conference. He accused the center of “manipulating” the Ayotzinapa families and claimed bizarrely that Centro Pro, one of Mexico’s oldest and most renowned human rights organizations, was “conservative” and “not what it was before.” The former president’s scorn came as a surprise for the center, which has a history of accompanying the victims of some of Mexico’s most notorious human rights violations.
The former president’s rhetorical attacks came as the investigation into the Ayotzinapa atrocity was stalled by Mexico’s military. As a candidate, Mr. López Obrador had promised to get to the truth of the disappearances by appointing a truth commission and special prosecutor. But Army brass—key AMLO allies—resisted presidential orders to open army archives and refused to make its personnel available to investigators.
“What occurred with Ayotzinapa illustrates the problems the López Obrador administration had with justice and security issues,” Mr. Aguirre told America. He said the president broke a promise to the students’ families to fully investigate the massacre.
The Jesuits’ call for a reworking of the president’s policy of “hugs, not bullets” toward the drug cartels and the Centro Pro’s work on the Ayotzinapa case put both the center and the Jesuit province in the difficult situation of confronting Mr. López Obrador, a leader who remained wildly popular throughout his term.
“His words carry a lot of weight,” Mr. Aguirre said in a previous interview with America in April. “If he’s making negative statements about your organization or institutions or people in his morning press conferences, that causes serious reputational damage.”
Though he cannot confirm it as an act of retaliation, Mr. Aguirre said, Centro Pro’s finances have been reviewed by government tax authorities, and Pegasus spyware was surreptitiously installed on staff smartphones—a surveillance effort they considered retribution for their work confronting the military.
Following the murders of Fathers Campos and Mora, the Jesuits joined the Mexican bishops’ conference and the Conference of Religious Superiors of Mexico in organizing the National Dialogue for Peace, a series of peace forums convened around the country. The forums offered an opportunity for victims of violence and families of the more than 100,000 missing in Mexico to be heard.
The organizers published the National Agenda for Peace, a series of recommendations drawn from the forums and experts in peacebuilding and public security for the next government to follow. They invited the three presidential candidates to sign the document at a March ceremony.
Two of the candidates signed without hesitation. But the frontrunner, Ms. Sheinbaum, insisted that the document’s diagnosis was too “pessimistic”—echoing the comments of Mr. López Obrador, who downplayed violence as exaggerations pushed by the press or “our adversaries.” She especially took exception to the agenda’s assessment that “our common home and social fabric are in a process of accelerated degradation” and that “fear, powerlessness, distrust and uncertainty are prevalent” in Mexico.
In the end, however, she signed the document with the words, “Let’s keep talking.” Three weeks later, she met with the Mexican bishops’ conference at its biannual retreat to do so.
Ms. Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former Mexico City mayor, promises to continue Mr. López Obrador’s populist political agenda. She has also backed his constitutional changes on militarization and the courts. She has so far showed few signs of a willingness to break with her predecessor, though she pledged to prioritize clean energy—albeit through the state-run electric and oil companies.
On security, she boasts halving the homicide rate as mayor of Mexico City between 2018 and 2023 through professional policing and law enforcement cooperating with the prosecutor’s office. Critics, however, charged that Mexico City officials achieved the lower numbers by classifying deaths as “events of undetermined intention,” rather than homicides. The criminal impunity rate in the capital topped 99 percent, according to México Evalúa, an independent public policy think-tank, meaning only 1 out of every 100 crimes committed in the capital is ever solved.
Jorge Atilano, S.J., who has spent the past decade overseeing Jesuit projects for building peace and repairing Mexico’s social fabric, remains sanguine about the Sheinbaum administration. He says the forum organizers have stayed in touch with the new president’s team. The National Agenda for Peace is moving into next steps, seeking to implement proposals that emerged during its forums.
He believes that the church and the new president will be able to continue a constructive dialogue. “Not only is that the expectation, but what we have experienced. We believe that there will be openness.”
The AMLO legacy
How far the new president can move beyond the shadow—and the continuing influence—of her predecessor remains an open question. Mr. López Obrador boasts of transforming Mexico, pointing to five million Mexicans lifted out of poverty during his term. He hiked the minimum wage and launched a program of cash stipends for seniors, single mothers and students. He also built a suite of megaprojects ranging from airports to a refinery to railways circling the Yucatán Peninsula and crossing the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
But violence tore through swaths of the country as he pursued his security policy of “hugs, not bullets.” The security strategy remained ill-defined, however, though observers say the army has at times taken a soft-on-crime approach with drug cartels. “Groups of hitmen and drug cartels are abusing this,” Bishop Salvador Rangel, a prelate known for brokering local peace accords with rival criminal groups in southern Guerrero state, said in an April interview.
AMLO left office with a bang, using his final month as president to push through a series of constitutional changes. One measure places the national guard (a militarized police force) under army command—part of a process of militarization in Mexico that accelerated under Mr. López Obrador. Mr. Aguirre warned the policy risked giving “a blank check” to the country’s notoriously secretive military.
Another change overhauled the judiciary, putting all judges, magistrates and supreme court justices to popular vote. The new policy also lowered qualifications for jurists and created an elected disciplinary body that legal analysts say will allow partisan control over the courts.
Mr. López Obrador’s final moves, designed to solidify the control of political institutions by his Morena Party, “allows us to say that Mexico is approaching democratic erosion,” Mr. Aguirre said. Mexico is becoming one of the “countries that elect democratic governments that later undermine basic institutions of democracy.”
Still, Mr. Aguirre finds redeeming qualities in the “fourth transformation”—among them expanded social spending and prioritizing of the poor. “There were important steps to better protect social rights and in a country with so much poverty such as Mexico, we think that’s relevant,” Mr. Aguirre said. “But if we look at civil and political rights, our balance is negative.”
“López Obrador’s main achievement in these six years is that the poor felt recognized: ‘Someone who cared about us, looked out for us, protected us,’” Father Atilano said. “Claudia Sheinbaum’s high vote count is the evidence of people’s gratitude for López Obrador recognizing them,” he said. “This has generated the perception that oligarchs no longer govern the country.”
But Mr. López Obrador has been far less successful in addressing insecurity and impunity, he said. “It’s not just about reducing homicides, but also about reducing disappearances.”
