What Claudia Sheinbaum Has Achieved for Mexico |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
What Claudia Sheinbaum Has Achieved for Mexico
Photograph Source: Eneas De Troya – CC BY 4.0
In less than two years, Mexico’s first woman president has instituted numerous social welfare improvements, while her rhetoric on foreign policy – even if her actions have in some cases lagged – consistently supports Global South nations such as Cuba and Venezuela, as they face barbaric assault from the world’s hyper-capitalist, would-be hegemon, the U.S. Claudia Sheinbaum gave Mexico the women’s well-being pension, universal education scholarships, “In-Home Healthcare Outreach,” worker rights and wages enhancements, which, among other things, upped the minimum wage, gender equality protections, universal healthcare expansion and constitutional enshrinement of social rights. These are not minute or insignificant contributions to the well-being of ordinary people. Each of these improves life immensely. Taken altogether, they add up to a social welfare revolution for Mexico’s poor and middle class.
According to Stephanie Brewer, writing for the Washington Office on Latin America on October 1, 2025, Sheinbaum aims to expand her excellent predecessor’s, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s (AMLO’s) ruling party’s agenda. This plan is called the “Fourth Transformation.” Scheinbaum’s first annual report “demonstrated continuity in government priorities and showed that [AMLO’s party] MORENA’s policies have brought progress in poverty reduction.” Brewer adopts a critical tone toward some of AMLO’s policies, saying, “a year later, we can conclude that Sheinbaum has not changed course on these [supposedly regressive for democracy] policies.”
This article, cleaving to a U.S. media platitude in re AMLO, worries about the separation of powers, as if here the American model, which has failed so miserably in the arena where AMLO combated poverty, even when all those powers were quite separate, were some sort of holy grail. Maybe for some people it is. But for a country like Mexico, experiencing not merely extensive poverty but actual widespread destitution when AMLO took power, the issue is and was a matter of priorities. And AMLO’s priority was food, clothing, jobs, education and medicine for the poor – a priority that........