The trouble with Claudia Sheinbaum

Claudia Sheinbaum during the launch of her last government report in Mexico City in July, 2023. Photo: María Ruíz.

Reportage • Eliana Gilet • September 15, 2023 • Leer en Castellano

Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is expected to become Mexico’s first woman president, personifying the advance of equality feminism. Last week, she was selected to represent Morena—Mexico’s governing party—in the 2024 national elections.

Although Sheinbaum has had a long political career, she has also been the butt of often sexist criticism that ties her success to her connection with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Trained in physics and engineering, her interest in environmental issues and her activism within the Party of the Democratic Revolution (which in the 1990s was the nucleus of the electoral left) earned her a space in Mexico City’s government in 2000, as Secretary of the Environment during López Obrador’s administration. Later, she was at the head of some the 16 boroughs of the capital. Her public persona exploded when she was elected head of government of Mexico City in July of 2018. 

But the last two years of Sheinbaum’s administration in Mexico City were riddled with conflict due to a lack of communication. Distance with some women's organizations and grassroots feminists grew, as they suffered the consequences of her closed-mindedness in the face of their demands. 

The most notorious case was the eviction of the "Okupa Cuba," which Sheinbaum ended by sending the police into a conflict that at its heart exposed the institutional orphanhood that families of victims of violence in Mexico are in. The occupiers demanded attention by taking radical action: taking over the headquarters of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) located at 60 República de Cuba Street in Mexico City’s historic downtown. The protesters turned the building into a shelter for women victims of violence and supported by others in solidarity. 

The occupation of the CNDH began on September 7, 2020. It evidenced how of a generation of very young women, including teenagers, took up the demand for the end of macho violence, which has expanded throughout Latin America since the emergence of Ni una menos (Not one less) in Argentina in 2005. The Okupa was a punk and graffitied space, which developed multiple internal conflicts that gradually isolated it from a broader base of support. It restricted access to the press and attempted an even more difficult dialogue with the city government, which chose to evict the occupiers on April 15, 2022. 

"For the social movement, the Okupa was a historic event, which for various circumstances ended without the strength it had at the outset," said Karen Castillo, a photojournalist and spokesperson for the Collective to Free Karla Tello and Magda Soberanes. The Collective was founded when the two activists were imprisoned in the wake of the eviction. "By the time they were evicted, the situation had changed a lot".

Tello and Soberanes spent ten months in the Santa Martha Acatitla women's prison, in eastern Mexico City, for possession of marijuana. They were acquitted in February of this year. Now they are on probation for robbery and a third charge in which the CNDH and the Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) are accusing them of theft and damage to historic buildings. 

For their part, the two women, considered Mexico City’s first feminist prisoners, are accusing the government of torture and fabrication.

Castillo pointed at how the use of criminal justice as a tool to resolve a social conflict was clear when investigations into 15 other members of the Okupa were opened, reducing their participation or ending it all together. The use of infiltrators and plainclothes police in feminist demonstrations in the city was also evident, and played a role in destabilizing the movement. 

The response of supporters of Tello and Soberanes was to document the repressive events online via the Observatorio Memoria y Libertad. Among other violent events documented in the city, Castillo highlights the three-day police siege against women of the Triqui community following a violent pre-dawn eviction of their sit-in near the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

A sign in Mexico City on March 8, 2023 reads “how disappointing to have to vote for Sheinbaum.” Photo: Dawn Marie Paley.

Direct action, dialogue and differing visions

The importance of tourism and real estate in Mexico City came through strongly with Sheinbaum's refusal to accept that the Glorieta of women in struggle, which was set up on Reforma Avenue after the statue of Christopher Columbus was pulled down on a symbolic October 12, 2021. The take over of the empty pedestal and its re-signification as the Glorieta of women in struggle was promoted by a "collective of collectives" that brought together women of more varied organizational strata than those at the Okupa. They occupied the space, decolonizing the Glorieta with "Justice", as they baptized the sculpture of a woman with a raised fist.

Contrary to what happened with around a dozen previous Anti-monuments, which emerged as self-generative spaces for memory in central areas of the capital city, Sheinbaum refused to approve the Glorieta of women in struggle or the Glorieta to the disappeared (which was set up on May 8, 2022). 

Marcela, a woman who participated in the occupation of the Glorieta from the beginning but asked not to reveal her last name out of fear of reprisal, told Ojalá they sought dialogue with the city government since the occupation, but were ignored for around a year. It was then that they staged a sit-in to oppose the replacement of "Justicia" with a sculpture called the Young woman from Amajac, which Sheinbaum endorsed. 

The women of the Glorieta stood fast in resistance until one early morning, without warning or explanation, the sculpture of Amajac was installed in front of the pedestal, on the sidewalk facing a construction site where a massive new tower is being built. The women suspect that this construction is one of the key reasons for the fierce official rejection of the anti-monument. 

Those continuing to push for the Glorieta became aware that the neighborhood planning model in this area of the city was to be overseen by the company building the tower, which would exercise "social responsibility" and pay less taxes. This is unsurprising given Sheinbaum's closeness to the real estate lobby, which became publicly evident when she signed an agreement with AirBnB to attract so-called digital nomads to Mexico City while at the same time allowing arbitrary evictions that leave more than 3000 Mexican families homeless every year. 

Sheinbaum as head of government in Mexico City in October 2022. The civilian to her right is Omar García Harfuch. Photo: Twitter.

Discourse and reality

Carla Ríos is part of the Brigada Marabunta, a social organization with a long history in mediating conflicts during street demonstrations in Mexico City. She thinks there were two moments with regards to social protest during Sheinbaum’s tenure as mayor. "She publicly promoted a discourse that there would be no aggression or arrests, and she talked about the disappearance of the riot police, which was a good idea," said Ríos. "In direct dealings with her, there were certain possibilities, because she followed through with agreements that were reached through negotiation." 

Sheinbaum's government pivoted, according to Ríos, after the black bloc was repressed at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Officials from the Embassy shot at demonstrators with pistols triggered by carbonic gas or "gotcha" ammunition, which Mexican police do not have.

That took place June 5th, 2020, a year and a half into Sheinbaum’s administration. A group of young anarchists had called a demonstration against the murder of George Floyd in the United States and Giovanni López in Jalisco, both killed by police officers. The action took the form of a long march from downtown to the US Embassy in the Polanco neighborhood, one of the most exclusive and expensive in the city. 

Police assumed an attitude of persecution and confrontation, charging demonstrators and kicking a 15-year-old girl in the head, knocking her unconscious. 

"The Polanco episode would have challenged the power of whoever was in government. That day, as many times since, it has seemed that police are acting under their own logic and rules," said Ríos. 

Both the Okupa Cuba and the Glorieta of women in struggle took place after this event, as the city government became increasingly shut off towards activists. This closure can also be read vis a vis the departure of part of her team, in particular of under secretaries Rosa Icela Rodríguez and Arturo Medina; of the head of the Human Rights program Froylan Enciso; and of Alfonso Suárez del Real, who left the government in January 2022. 

Sheinbaum leaned into her relationship with her Secretary of Public Security Omar García Harfuch. Despite having participated in covering up for those responsible in the Ayotzinapa case, Harfuch is now Sheinbaum's favorite to occupy the position she left at the head of the Mexican megalopolis. He resigned earlier this week, saying he was doing to to support her campaign. 

The lack of dialogue that characterized the period in which her government gradually distanced itself from organized social bases marked a distance between Sheinbaum and some women and grassroots feminists which has yet to be repaired.

I asked the women I interviewed for this story about how they saw Sheinbaum’s position on feminism. Castillo and Marcela agreed that there is a class difference, pointing out how the candidate represents "white feminism," which ignores demands for social justice from below. For her part, Ríos said that regardless of her opinion of Sheinbaum, the fact that there will be a woman occupying the presidency as of next year is a victory for Mexican feminism. 

Although the path for Sheinbaum’s ascent to the country's top electoral post is open, her political journey has been marked by how she decided to use her power as head of Mexico City’s government in order to resolve social conflict.