Meet the woman ready to be Mexico's first presidenta

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On a winding mountain lane the favourite to become Mexico's next president sits in the front passenger seat of a small car, waiting for a herd of cows to cross the road in front of her.

We are in Michoacan state, deep inside a region dominated by organised crime, but Claudia Sheinbaum is unflustered.

Nine years ago she was a scientist with a share of a Nobel prize, teaching at a university in Mexico City, researching climate change and energy challenges. Now, ahead of national elections next month, the 61-year-old mother of two (and grandmother of one) is poised to become one of the most powerful women in the world after being picked by the party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a charismatic left-wing populist known by his initials, AMLO, to succeed him as president of Mexico.

Polls show her more than 20 points ahead of Xóchitl Gálvez, another female candidate and her closest rival. It means that by this summer, a country notorious for its machismo will almost certainly be led by a woman for the first time.

Xóchitl Gálvez, Sheinbaum's closest rival, is a good 20 points behind

QUETZALLI NICTE-HA/REUTERS

Sheinbaum, a former governor of Mexico City, is taking nothing for granted. Over the past few months she has been campaigning on a punishing schedule that sends her from cheering crowd to cheering crowd at schools, village halls and libraries across the country, posing for selfies and receiving a bewildering array of gifts (at one she was given a huge wooden spoon, a large number of tamales, a carved wooden bull and a portrait of herself in black pen).

Last week we joined her on the campaign trail, travelling from a marble lecture hall at her alma mater in Mexico City to the coast of Guerrero, where tourists flock to drink micheladas and eat ceviche, up to the mountains of Michoacan.

On the afternoon of the third day, I travelled with la doctora, as she's known, in a tiny car on the road to the town of Chilchota, through avocado plantations and picture-perfect Spanish colonial-era towns that have been marred by violence as organised criminal gangs fight for control of the area. Sheinbaum lived here for three years as a doctoral student, researching ways to make the wood stoves used by local women more effective.

Sheinbaum, a protégée of the populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, greets supporters in Chilchota

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These are not roads that it's advisable to drive on by yourself, let alone in a small car with no security except a driver, tailing a convoy that races ahead at will. Especially when you're one of the country's leading politicians.

But Sheinbaum is not scared, she says. "If you are afraid for yourself, you'll be afraid of everything," she told me from the front as we took yet another corner slightly too fast. "If you start to have a lot of security … a lot of soldiers and people taking care of you, then you're isolated."

During our hour of conversation she was quick to laugh, extremely calm, and spoke slowly in impeccable English, a legacy of four years at the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted postdoctoral research. Her allies say she is a relentless operator, working long hours with little rest.

She had not planned for all this. Born in Mexico City to a secular Jewish family (her grandparents emigrated from Bulgaria and Lithuania) she was raised by parents who never told her that she couldn't do something just because she was a girl. Her mother, a scientist, was active in the 1968 student protests in Mexico City, where more than 300 people were massacred by the military. A few years later the young Sheinbaum marched against the Vietnam War.

If she wins, Sheinbaum will become the first woman and first researcher to lead the Latin American country of 128 million people

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Outside the family she still faced misogyny. When she was in high school, she told me, one of her teachers had offered to give her higher grades in return for other favours. On the public bus, she was exposed to "certain violence".

"Probably every girl in this country", she said, had experienced something similar.

Moving into adult life she did not dream of political leadership. "My goal was to be a researcher at a university," she said. "I saw my future like that."

And for a long time, into her fifties, that is what it looked like. In 2000 she became secretary of the environment for Mexico City under López Obrador, the governor at the time. Yet she was still an academic, researching and publishing papers on energy use. In the 2000s, she worked on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won the Nobel peace prize in 2007 along with Al Gore.

"I thought I was going to be a researcher and only help López Obrador to get the presidency," she told me.

In 2015 she became mayor of Tlalpan, the largest borough of Mexico City, and three years later took over leadership of the capital. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, she sat down at her laptop and designed the response, including the distribution of the vaccine programme. It gained widespread plaudits, while the national response under López Obrador's leadership was criticised for failing to take the risks of the pandemic seriously enough, resulting in needless deaths.

Sheinbaum was mayor of Mexico City from December 2018 until she quit to pursue the presidential candidacy

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She wasn't aiming higher at that point, she told me. "It was only about three years ago when I suddenly understood I could be president."

As governor she oversaw a reduction in the homicide rate, particularly among women, and pledged to reduce femicide further.

Feminist groups say she didn't go far enough. According to the National Citizen Observatory on Femicide, more than 1,500 women a year are killed in Mexico because of their gender. In the overwhelming majority of cases, their murderers get away with it. Critics also point to the large number of "disappeared" women In Mexico City and across the country who don't feature in the homicide statistics. Could Sheinbaum be doing more?

"We have to give more rights to women," she said. But to stop the violence "the most important thing"she believes, is to have an "equal cabinet" of men and women.

Sheinbaum kicked off her campaign in front thousands of people in the Zócalo, one of the world's largest city squares

AUREA DEL ROSARIO/AP

Sheinbaum's credibility was dealt a blow in 2021 when Line 12 of Mexico City's metro system collapsed, killing 26 people. López Obrador said that "unfortunately, these things happen" but independent investigators found that there were flaws in the metro's construction that led to its collapse, and that auditors had warned for over a decade that it wasn't safe.

Today the city is in the grip of a severe water crisis.

Yet on the campaign trail last week, as Sheinbaum was mobbed by adoring fans at every possible juncture, these concerns seemed distant.

In the city of Uruapan, deep in Michoacan, and the ancestral home of the Purépecha indigenous people, crowds poured into the absurdly beautiful city centre, waving flags and posters bearing her smiling face. Women dressed in long sequinned skirts and embroidered aprons filed past rose-tinted Spanish colonial buildings to reach the rally.

By the time Sheinbaum came on stage, crowds were chanting: "It's an honour to be with Claudia today."

"A woman in the presidency is a symbol," Sheinbaum told me. "I see it in girls right now. They're probably the most enthusiastic about my candidacy. They cry, they say 'we want to be like you'. That's great because for many years there were no women in public spaces."

Although she has some personal support, Sheinbaum's popularity is overwhelmingly derived from the fact that she is the hand-picked successor of López Obrador, who presents himself as a champion of the poor and enemy of the venal elites.

Sheinbaum is known as López Obrador's "political daughter" and there are concerns he will be working behind the scenes after his single six-year term ends

LUIS RAMÍREZ/EPA

Her rigid posture, quiet, precise statements and obsession with scientific rigour are the very opposite of her bombastic mentor. She lives in a flat in Mexico City with her second husband, whom she married last year, and has two adult children: a stepson from her first marriage and a daughter, Mariana.

"I talk like a teacher," she laughed as we left the rally in Uruapan. She was dressed in a crisp beige linen dress, fine-limbed, her long brown hair in a ponytail. Her staff say she gives them homework.

With the power of the incumbent behind her, Sheinbaum's name and photograph — sometimes shown hand-in-hand with López Obrador — is plastered on walls and hung from banners. She barely notices them any more.

"I don't like it when they put them up on trees," she says, as we pass yet another dozen posters.

The opposition has been quick to say that darkness lies beneath López Obrador's populism. He has publicly pressured the Supreme Court, lambasted the press and questioned the independence of the country's election agency. Sheinbaum, who is known as his "political daughter", is, critics say, being used as his puppet. She denies this, but her pitch as a politician is that she is continuing — and implementing — his work. She sees this as transforming the country by attacking corruption and supporting the poor. I ask her for an example of something López Obrador did wrong that she would do better and she doesn't give me an answer.

"The question is whether she is going to actually be in charge or whether it'll be AMLO working behind the scenes," said a western diplomat working in the region.

Last month an opposition politician said that these might be Mexico's last democratic elections. Sheinbaum dismisses the allegations as absurd.

"We fought for democracy all our lives, and our movement was born fighting for democracy — electoral democracy," she told me.

If elected, she said, her priority would be to reduce poverty — a policy that will delight the party's base, many of whom rely on the government for the means to survive. But she will also have to address the overwhelming problem of organised crime in Mexico and the brutality the criminal groups mete out. More than 30,000 people have been killed and many more have "disappeared" every year for the past half-decade, many of them linked to the gangs.

In a central square in Uruapan, Ismael Ledezma Magana, 50, a post office worker who had taken time off from work to come to the rally, said that if Sheinbaum won, he hoped she would finally address the security issues that plague the area.

"Here you don't know who you're safer with, the police or the criminals," he said. "And you don't know if the police are really police, or if they're criminals."

Earlier presidents have tried to fight the narcos and the criminal groups, sparking wars which killed thousands. Yet the other option, to negotiate, can entrench the power of these mafia organisations. When I asked Sheinbaum which road she would take as president, she said that she wouldn't go to war but would work to strengthen Mexico's institutions of justice and create social justice.

Declaring a hardline crackdown on organised crime, she said, could lead to authoritarian systems like El Salvador's, where President Nayib Bukele has put 2 per cent of the adult population in jail in what he says is a war on gang crime. His actions have been widely denounced as a human rights crisis.

"When you have permission to kill, then you have an authoritarian system," she said, later adding: "No, you need to create justice … from social justice to a justice system that works."

Poverty and organised crime top Sheinbaum's agenda, but she has also pledged to prioritise water sustainability and renewable energy

MARIO ARMAS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

As for Mexico's neighbour to the north, she said, she had no concerns about dealing with the US leadership. If Donald Trump wins the presidential elections in November, she said, she would deal with him as she would a Democratic leader.

"In the end they have to agree with us as equals," she said, adding that she would not accept a mass deportation of migrants from America as pledged by Trump.

By the time we pulled into Chilchota, a crowd had already gathered. She got out of the car, beaming, and was engulfed in a wall of people, with more sprinting towards her over the fields.

"Presidenta!" they shouted. "Presidenta!"

Additional reporting: Natalia Meneses Alis