The race for Mexico’s presidency is in its final three months. There are three candidates, but only two count.
The polling leader is Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City who is the candidate of the Moral Regeneration Party, MORENA, which was founded by current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador after he lost the 2006 election to Felipe Calderon. AMLO, as the president is known, won the presidency in 2018 by a large margin after losing in 2006 and 2012. Sheinbaum is his personal choice to be the next president.
He expects her to continue his personal campaign to reestablish Mexico as a one-party state, as it was when he entered politics and government under the ruling Party of the Institutional Revolution — the infamous PRI.
Sheinbaum is the daughter of Eastern European Jewish parents (Ashkenazi father born in Lithuania who immigrated to Mexico as a child in the 1920s, and a Sephardic mother whose family fled Bulgaria in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust). She graduated from the National University of Mexico as an environmental engineer.
Running second in polling but improving is free-enterprise champion Xochitl Galvez, former elected mayor of the Mexico City borough of Miguel Hidalgo and federal Senator of the National Action Party, or PAN. She is the candidate of that party, the Democratic Party of the Revolution (PRD) and PRI — the so-called “Broad Front for Mexico.”
Galvez was born to an indigenous family of an 100% Otomi Indian father and a Otomi/European mestizo mother. She graduated from the National University with degrees in computer engineering.
Before she entered elective politics, Galvez was the first general director of the National Institute of Indigenous People, a cabinet position created by President Vicente Fox that resembles a combination of the our Secretary of Interior and director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Her business background has drawn attacks from AMLO. A company she founded in 1992 became so successful that AMLO illegally released her business tax returns in an effort to smear her. Additionally, rumors were spread that she leveraged illegal profits for her engineering firm through sweetheart contracts with the borough she ran in Mexico City.
AMLO remains a staunch opponent, viciously campaigning against Galvez and her supporters, whom he claims are a right-wing group intent on keeping people in poverty and in ripping off the system by stealing billions of pesos in a traditional Mexican way — through political corruption.
The third candidate is Jorge Alvarez Maynez, a state legislature representative of the leftist Citizens Movement Party. He offers little.
Sheinbaum promises to continue what AMLO has called the Fourth Transformation of Mexico, which translates into an anti-business government that forms its own enterprises to allegedly help Mexico’s poor. AMLO, who has been called the “Mexican Trump,” has sought to dissolve the non-partisan national institute that oversees elections, and just this month tried unsuccessfully to have the state monopolize electric power generation.
Polls this week show that Galvez picking up support, following a 10-point jump in the weeks before.
Election day is Saturday, June 2. Sheinbaum would continue AMLO’s corrupt policies. Galvez is who should become president of Mexico for the next six years.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a Marine Corps veteran, political consultant, prolific author and host of the Contreras Report on YouTube and Facebook.
