MEXICO CITY � Claudia Sheinbaum, a U.S.-educated scientist-turned-
politician, was elected Sunday as Mexico�s first female president,
shattering gender barriers in a country known for a culture of machismo
and high rates of violence against women.

�In 200 years of the Mexican republic, I have become the first woman
president,� she told supporters in her acceptance speech, describing her
victory as a win for all women. �I did not arrive alone,� she said. �We
all arrived.�

The leftist former mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum, 62, will also become
the first president of Jewish ancestry in this overwhelmingly Catholic
country.

She will lead a prosperous but polarized nation that in recent years has
been plagued by widespread gang violence. And she will be closely watched
to see how she navigates the long shadow of her mentor, outgoing President
Andr�s Manuel L�pez Obrador.

Sheinbaum was elected in landslide fashion, according to preliminary vote
counts, which showed her winning with 58% of the vote compared with 30%
for her closest rival, X�chitl G�lvez Ruiz.

A successful businesswoman, G�lvez ran a spirited campaign representing an
opposition coalition, but who ultimately could not overcome the well-oiled
machinery of Morena, Sheinbaum�s political party. Trailing in third behind
the women was Jorge �lvarez M�ynez, a member of Congress.

Sheinbaum is the protege and hand-picked successor of L�pez Obrador, who
founded Morena in 2011 and who has since transformed it into a political
behemoth that has drawn comparisons to the Institutional Revolutionary
Party, which ruled Mexico in autocratic fashion for most of the 20th
century.

L�pez Obrador, who under the constitution is limited to a single six year
term, is a deeply polarizing figure: Supporters laud him for helping lift
millions out of poverty while critics assail him for disregarding
democratic norms and failing to curb cartel violence.

Although L�pez Obrador was not on the ballot, many viewed the election as
a referendum on his term.

Many Sheinbaun supporters said they believed she would advance L�pez
Obrador�s trademark anti-poverty policies, particularly his government�s
welfare payments to students and elderly people.

�She is going to continue with all the help that the president has given
us,� said Rosa Maria Velazco, a 52-year-old teacher. �She will continue to
support the poorest.�

G�lvez supporters, on the other hand, largely said they backed her because
she promised to change the course set by L�pez Obrador.

�I�m very angry at this government,� said Julieta Jujnovsky, 45, a
professor of biology.

She said she didn�t oppose L�pez Obrador�s ideology so much as his style
of governing. �He doesn�t want any opposition,� said Jujnovsky, who
described the president�s efforts to reform the Supreme Court, slash the
number of seats in Mexico�s legislature and overhaul the country�s
elections institute as part of a �deterioration� of Mexico�s democracy.
�Democracy depends on counterweights and listening to the other side,� she
said.

How Sheinbaum will mange to mend the divisions so evident during L�pez
Obrador�s term is one of the many questions hanging over her presidency.
And, while L�pez Obrador has vowed to retire from politics, many wonder
whether he will indeed stay away from the political fray that has animated
his entire adult life.

Sheinbaum, for her part, has dismissed such questions as misogynist.

Her victory was a groundbreaking development in a country where women were
barred from voting until 1954.

Her success is in some way a culmination of years of efforts by Mexican
authorities to impose gender equality in a nation where politics was
traditionally a male affair. A 2019 constitutional reform set quotas
requiring gender parity in all elected posts at the federal, state and
municipal levels

Today, more than half of the members of Mexico�s congress are women, the
fourth highest rate in the world. Eight of the nation�s 31 governors are
female and a woman heads the Supreme Court.

Some voters expressed wonderment that Mexico had elected a female leader
before much of the rest of the world, including the United States.

�Never in my entire life did I imagine that a woman would be president of
my country,� said Cristina Navarrete Santill�n, 76, who voted for
Sheinbaum in Mexico City alongside her two daughters and two
granddaughters. �I am glad to be alive to see it.�

Sunday�s election was Mexico�s largest ever, with voters also choosing a
new Congress, eight state governors, the Mexico City mayor and some 20,000
local office-holders nationwide.

Preliminary results showed that Morena performed well in the congressional
elections, and would, as part of a coalition with two allied parties,
likely have a super-majority that would allow it to easily pass
legislation.

In the United States, which is home to nearly 11 million people born in
Mexico, migrants who in the past were able only to vote in Mexican
elections by mail could vote for the first time in person at consulates.

Long lines of voters stretched for blocks in cities that included Chicago
and Orlando, Fla. In Los Angeles, the line at the Mexican Consulate in
MacArthur Park wrapped around the block twice, with some people arriving
as early as 4 a.m.

Voters draped in Mexican flags waited patiently as mariachi music blasted.

Laura Torres, who arrived with a group from Oxnard, said she had waited
six hours to vote and would wait another six if necessary. The group
planned to vote for Sheinbaum.

In some parts of Mexico, voters also lined up before dawn.

That was the case in the middle-class neighborhood of San Andres
Totoltepec, where Sheinbaum, an environmental engineer by training, was
reared and where she voted early Sunday.

As the candidate took her place in a line of about 100 people to cast her
ballot, the crowd broke out in chants of �Presidenta!�

Sheinbaum, an environmental engineer, spent much of her career as an
academic, although she was raised in a highly political family.

Both her parents were active in the 1968 student movement, best known for
the infamous Tlatelolco massacre in which Mexican security forces killed
scores of protesters in the capital. Her first husband was a leftist
politican.

When L�pez Obrador was elected mayor of Mexico City in 2000, he launched
Sheinbaum�s political career by making her secretary of environment for
the capital.

She later joined his breakaway political group, the National Regeneration
Movement, known as Morena, and was elected in 2015 as borough president of
Tlalpan, a district in southern Mexico City.

Three years later, she was elected mayor of Mexico City and he was elected
president in a landslide victory for Morena.

L�pez Obrador vowed to put the �poor first� in a country that he said had
been hijacked by a corrupt and conservative elite. L�pez Obrador�s
approval rating still tops 60%, making him one of the most popular leaders
in Latin America.

When he departs office in October, he will leave his successor with a
strong economy that has been bolstered by the relocation of foreign firms
from Asia and elsewhere to Mexico. The Mexican peso has been among the
world�s strongest currencies.

But the next president will also inherit a number of crises, including
dire water shortages, a struggling healthcare system, stubborn inequality
and violence from criminal gangs and cartels so severe that the U.S. State
Department warns its citizens not to travel to many Mexican states.

L�pez Obrador�s controversial �hugs not bullets� strategy � which
prioritizes social programs for the young over direct confrontations with
cartels � has failed to stop the country�s violence, although homicides
have fallen some during the last six years. Security is by far Mexicans�
main concern, polls show.

SALINAS DEL MARQUES, OAXACA - DECEMBER 07: Mateo Martinez Mendoza, 27,
prepares salt evaporation ponds for the upcoming season on Wednesday, Dec.
7, 2022 in Salinas del Marques, Oaxaca. Martinez Mendoza works with his
father Carlos Estrada Cruz, 63, both generational salt field miners. Salt
evaporation ponds are artificial basins designed to extract salt from the
seawater. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is the skinniest part of Mexico, just
above the southern tip. It's incredibly poor and rural: a real postcard of
the Mexico that has been left behind by NAFTA and globalization. President
of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is building a train line through it
that will connect the port of Salina Cruz on the Pacific Coast with the
port of Coatzacoalcos on the Gulf Coast. The hope is that this new
overland route 1,000 miles north of the Panama Canal will attract trade.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
WORLD & NATION

While voters were fiercely split on the issues at the heart of the race,
many on both sides of the political divide were elated to have the chance
to vote for a woman.

Fewer than a third of the countries in the United Nations have ever had a
female leader, according to a Pew Research Center analysis from last year.