Claudia Sheinbaum wins landslide to become Mexico’s 1st woman president
Claudia Sheinbaum will become Mexico’s first female president, inheriting the project of her mentor and outgoing leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador whose popularity among the poor helped drive her triumph.
Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won the presidency with between 58.3 per cent and 60.7 per cent of the vote, according to a rapid sample count by Mexico’s electoral authority. That is set to be the highest vote percentage in Mexico’s democratic history.
Sheinbaum is the first woman to win a general election in the United States, Mexico or Canada.
The ruling coalition was also on track for a possible two-thirds super majority in both houses of Congress, which would allow the coalition to pass constitutional reforms without opposition support, according to the range of results given by the electoral authority.
On her way to vote on Sunday morning, Sheinbaum told journalists it was a “historic day” and that she felt at ease and content. Her victory represents a major step for Mexico, a country known for its macho culture, with her six-year term beginning Oct. 1 once results are finalized.
Mexico’s largest-ever elections have also been the most violent in modern history, with the killing of 38 candidates. The deadly violence has stoked concerns about the threat of warring drug cartels to democracy. On Sunday, two people were killed at polling stations in Puebla state.
Sheinbaum, who has led convincingly in opinion polls over her main competitor Xochitl Galvez, will be tasked with confronting organized crime violence. More people have been killed during the mandate of outgoing president Lopez Obrador than during any other administration in Mexico’s modern history, although the homicide rate has come down over his term.
2 dead on Sunday
The violence was not limited to candidates. Two people were killed in violence at polling centres on Sunday as people cast their ballots.
Voting was suspended at one polling place after a person was killed in a shooting in Coyomeapan, a town in the state of Puebla, the state electoral authority reported in the afternoon. The state attorney general confirmed another death at a polling centre in Tlanalapan, also in Puebla.
The deadly violence stoked concerns about the threat of warring drug cartels to democracy.
Long lines at polling stations
Galvez, a senator who represents an opposition coalition comprised of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the right-wing PAN and the leftist PRD party, chatted with supporters before casting her ballot early Sunday.
“God is with me,” Galvez said, adding that she was expecting a difficult day.
There were long lines of voters outside polling places, even before they opened at 8 a.m. local time, with some reports of delayed openings.
“It seems like a dream to me. I never imagined that one day I would vote for a woman,” said 87-year-old Edelmira Montiel, a Sheinbaum supporter in Mexico’s smallest state of Tlaxcala.
“Before we couldn’t even vote, and when you could, it was to vote for the person your husband told you to vote for. Thank God that has changed and I get to live it,” Montiel added.
Almost 100 million Mexicans were eligible to vote in Sunday’s election. Other key positions were also up for grabs, including eight governorships and both chambers of Congress.
‘Flooded with blood’
“The country is flooded with blood as a result of so much corruption,” said Rosa Maria Baltazar, 69, a voter in Mexico City’s upper-middle-class Del Valle neighbourhood. “I wish for a change of government for my country, something for a better life.”
Lopez Obrador loomed over the campaign, seeking to turn the vote into a referendum on his political agenda. Sheinbaum has rejected opposition claims that she would be his “puppet,” though she has pledged to continue many of his policies including those that have helped Mexico’s poorest.
Video from the scene obtained by Reuters shows people running and screaming after a stage collapsed in San Pedro Garza Garcia, in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
Challenges ahead for Sheinbaum also include addressing electricity and water shortages and luring manufacturers to relocate as part of the nearshoring trend, in which companies move supply chains closer to their main markets. The election winner also will have to wrestle with what to do with Pemex, the state oil giant that has seen production decline for two decades and is drowning in debt.
Both candidates promised to expand welfare programs, though Mexico has a large deficit this year and sluggish GDP growth of just 1.5 per cent expected by the central bank next year.
Trump presidency could complicate U.S. relationship
Sheinbaum will also face tense negotiations with the United States over the huge flows of U.S.-bound migrants crossing Mexico and security co-operation over drug trafficking at a time when the U.S. fentanyl epidemic rages.
Mexican officials expect these negotiations to be more difficult if the U.S. presidency is won by Donald Trump in November.
Trump, the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, has vowed to impose 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese cars made in Mexico and said he would mobilize special forces to fight the cartels.
Published at Mon, 03 Jun 2024 02:00:37 +0000
Hunter Biden faces criminal trial over gun purchase
Jury selection begins Monday in a federal gun case against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter after the collapse of a deal with prosecutors that would have avoided the spectacle of a trial so close to the 2024 election.
Hunter Biden has been charged in Delaware with three felonies stemming from a 2018 firearm purchase when he was, according to his memoir, in the throes of a crack addiction.
He has been accused of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application used to screen firearms applicants when he said he was not a drug user and illegally having the gun for 11 days.
If he were to be convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison, though first-time offenders do not get anywhere near the maximum and it’s unclear whether the judge would give him time behind bars.
He is also facing a separate trial in California, scheduled to start in September, on charges of failing to pay $1.4 million US in taxes.
Both cases were to have been resolved through a deal with prosecutors last July, the culmination of a years-long investigation into his business dealings, but the lawyers squabbled over the agreement, could not come to a resolution and the deal fell apart.
Attorney General Merrick Garland then appointed the top investigator as a special counsel in August, and a month later Hunter Biden was indicted.
This trial isn’t about Hunter Biden’s foreign business affairs — which Republicans have seized on without evidence to try to paint the Biden family as corrupt. But it will excavate some of his darkest moments and put them on display.
Hunter Biden was with his father all weekend before the case began, biking with his dad and attending church together. The president’s wife, Jill, was on hand at the courthouse on Monday morning.
The president said in a statement early Monday that he wouldn’t comment on the criminal trial but that he had “boundless love for my son, confidence in him, and respect for his strength.”
“Hunter’s resilience in the face of adversity and the strength he has brought to his recovery are inspiring to us,” the statement read.
Former romantic partners could testify
The case against Hunter Biden stems from a period when, by his own public admission, he was addicted to crack. His descent into drugs and alcohol followed the 2015 cancer death of his brother, Beau Biden. He bought and owned a gun for 11 days in October 2018 and indicated on the gun purchase form that he was not using drugs.
Prosecutors have said they’re planning to use as evidence his published memoir, and they may also introduce contents from a laptop that he left at a Delaware repair shop and never retrieved.
Prosecutors are also planning to call as witnesses his ex-wife and his brother’s widow, Hallie, with whom Hunter Biden became romantically involved.
Biden’s defence has accused prosecutors of cherry-picking evidence, and they’ve argued the case never would have been brought had the defendant not been the president’s son. They got the judge agree to their bid to keep out of the jury’s presence other details about Hunter Biden’s past, including a child-support case in Arkansas and his dismissal from the Navy after a positive drug test.
The judge will ask a group of prospective jurors a series of questions to determine whether they can serve impartially on the jury, including whether they have donated to political campaigns or run for political office. She will ask whether their views about the 2024 presidential campaign prevent them from being impartial.
She’s also going to ask whether prospective jurors believe Hunter Biden is being prosecuted because his father is the president.
The trial comes just days after Donald Trump, the Republican party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, was convicted of 34 felonies in New York City. A jury found the former president guilty of a scheme to cover up a hush money payment to a porn actor to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential campaign. The two criminal cases are unrelated, but their proximity underscores how the criminal courtroom has taken centre stage during this campaign.
Published at Mon, 03 Jun 2024 13:27:29 +0000
