Sheinbaum takes on cartels, Trump and the legacy of 1968

Summary

One of Claudia Sheinbaum’s earliest childhood memories is visiting political prisoners with her parents, a moment that helps explain why she calls herself a “child of 1968” — the year protest movements erupted around the globe. In Mexico, mass student protests targeted the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had governed Mexico since 1929. Often described as the “perfect dictatorship,” the PRI maintained the illusion of democracy through symbolic elections while suppressing dissent. After months of protests, a crowd of activists assembled in Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas on October 2, 1968. Helicopters circled overhead and flares were reportedly fired into the crowd, before snipers opened fire from nearby rooftops. As bodies fell, a panicked crowd scrambled for cover. Estimates vary, but up to 300 were believed to have been killed and more than a thousand arrested, effectively quashing the movement. Sheinbaum has recalled how her mother and father took her to visit their friend and protest leader Raul Alvarez Garín at Lecumberri prison. To this day, she considers him one of her mentors. Decades later, that political inheritance helped shape the career that won her the presidency in 2024. “She’s the first woman to become president of the Mexican republic – a country that, because of our culture and the way we’ve been raised, is very macho; a country that seems eternally in crisis,” said Baltazar Gomez Perez, an old friend of Sheinbaum’s and a history professor at the National Autonomous University (UNAM).