Mexico will most probably elect a woman president nine months from now.
Mexico, where women weren’t permitted to vote until the 1950s, already has a woman heading the Mexican Supreme Court. That’s just one example of how women in Mexico have progressed politically in such a short time.
Take Baja California, the ultimate rebel state that in 1989 led the way out of a 70-year-long semi-dictatorship when it threw off the ruling PRI party’s economic strangulation.
In 2021 women were elected mayors of Tijuana, with its 2 million people; Tecate, the famous beer-making city just east of Tijuana; the beach city of Rosarito; and the state capital of Mexicali. Capping off the election, a woman was elected governor of Baja California.
That female political sweep would have delighted my great-grandmother who died shortly after women were permitted to vote in Mexico. She had been involved in Mexican politics since she joined Francisco Madero’s 1910 effort to rid Mexico of dictator Porfirio Diaz who had ruled Mexico with an iron fist since the 1870s.
My great-grandmother was born in a dictatorship, she matured into a woman during revolution and in 1940 helped found the opposition to the ruling party that truly irritated the generals who ran Mexico.
She detested the ruling party chokehold on Mexico that stole the country’s oil wealth and communized poor indigenous people with free land given out to tribes throughout the country in return for political support. She attacked criminals like the founder of the PRI political party, President Plutarco Elias Calles, a former teacher who had emerged from the revolution as an army general who hand picked presidents until he was flown to San Diego to live in exile.
It was the election of 1940 that affected me even though I wasn’t born until the second week of 1941 in Mexico City. My great-grandmother had helped General Juan Almazan organize a presidential campaign that most Army men and Army veterans of the Revolution supported.
General Alamazan was popular. Despite not being able to vote, great-grandmother Maria organized women, raised money and gave speeches. She tended to her granddaughter, my mother and looked forward to my birth.
The election came complete with communist thugs roaming the streets of Mexico city attacking Almazan supporters. I’m told supporters protected our house until the government announced that General Manuel Avila Camacho of the ruling party had won with a Soviet-like 97% of the vote.
Avila Camacho bided his time. The very day my congressman father died in an auto accident Avila Camacho sent secret police to our house in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City to load us on a train to Ciudad Juarez on the Texas border. FBI agents welcomed us to America.
Fast forward to 2023 and women are everywhere politically in Mexico.
The political party of current leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO for short, is dominated by men, but the candidate ALMO favors to replace him as President is Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City whose Jewish family immigrated from Eastern Europe.
Her opponent is an indigenous Otomi Indian, Xochitl Galvez Ruiz, who is a computer engineer, businesswoman and federal senator.
Which woman will win the presidency? The former mayor and cabinet member with a PhD in environmental science or the successful businesswoman who sold tamales and jello on the streets to help her poor Indian family and became a computer engineer and federal senator?
How to choose? Look to see who AMLO attacks. He hates Senator Galvez. That’s who my great-grandmother would choose. Me too.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a Marine Corps veteran, political consultant, prolific author and host of the Contreras Report on YouTube and Facebook.