By Diego Oré
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – When Claudia Sheinbaum – the frontrunner to become Mexico’s next president – was only six years old. Her parents actively participated in protests during one of the darkest periods in the country’s modern history.
The year was 1968, the Institutional Revolutionary Party had ruled Mexico with an iron fist for decades, and the country was engulfed by large demonstrations pushing for democratic change. In one horrific incident, as many as 400 students were killed by soldiers and paramilitary forces during a protest.
The tragedy only galvanized her parents, and Sheinbaum grew up in a family steeped in activism.
The clear favorite to succeed popular President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Sunday’s elections and likely to make history as Mexico’s first female president, Sheinbaum, 61, says she owes a lot to her father as a chemical engineer and her mother as a cell biologist.
They brought with them a passion for politics, a love of nature and a deep interest in science, she said in a biopic released last year and directed by her son.
“I grew up with that duality: the belief that politics can transform the world alongside an academic and scientific mindset,” Sheinbaum said.
Looking back, it seems only logical that she would become a student protester, climate scientist and politician.
Sheinbaum’s values aligned with Lopez Obrador’s policies, which she has pledged to continue.
She wants to take up his mantle as defender of the state, strengthen public control over natural resources and strengthen its welfare programs and flagship infrastructure projects. In a slight departure, she has called for a greater emphasis on the use of renewable energy.
FROM PROTESTS TO POLITICS
The second of three children, Sheinbaum comes from a Jewish family, including her mother’s parents who migrated to Mexico from Bulgaria when they fled Nazi aggression in the 1930s.
Sheinbaum grew up in Mexico City, learned to play the guitar and studied ballet, details her critics have used to portray her as elitist and out of touch with ordinary Mexicans.
Her activism started early.
At 15, she volunteered to help groups of mothers search for their missing children, a long-standing problem in a country with a history of raging gang violence.
Around that time she met a leading human rights activist and left-wing politician Rosario Ibarrawho would later become the first woman to run for president in 1982. Sheinbaum would later say that her ruling left-wing MORENA party had taken on Ibarra’s fight.
Sheinbaum became an active participant in student movements in the 1980s, joining protests against state intervention in education policy.
In 1995, she received her PhD in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. While preparing her dissertation, she spent time at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, where she improved her fluency in English.
Sheinbaum pursued a teaching and academic career in the years that followed, including a stint on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which would later share the Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore.
Her political career began in 2000, when Lopez Obrador, then newly elected mayor of Mexico City, appointed her as his environmental chief. He had only recently met her, but it was clear that he wanted a scientist with progressive values to help deal with the megacity’s acute pollution and transportation problems.
She left City Hall to take on the role of chief spokesperson for Lopez Obrador’s first campaign for president in 2006, which he narrowly lost.
In 2015, she was chosen to lead Mexico City’s largest municipality, Tlalpan.
In that role, she faced accusations of poor management after an earthquake in 2017 caused the collapse of a primary school, killing 19 children. The school has only recently been expanded with an extra floor.
But that didn’t stop her from winning a historic election victory in 2018 as the capital’s first female mayor, the same year Lopez Obrador’s third attempt at becoming president proved successful in a landslide.
During her tenure, she won praise for improving security, with the capital’s murder rate falling by 50%.
But she also faced criticism for a 2021 subway crash that left 26 dead, an incident later blamed in part on inadequate safety inspections and deferred maintenance under her watch. Sheinbaum denied that maintenance was to blame.
(Reporting by Diego Oré; Editing by David Alire Garcia and Edwina Gibbs)
