Mexico elects first woman president after 37 candidates were assassinated

Mexico is set to elect its first female and first Jewish president after the deadliest campaign in the country's history which saw 37 candidates for office assassinated. Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former Mexico City mayor, was confirmed the winner of the presidential election Tuesday.

She stated that her 2 competitors had called and conceded her victory, perh The Associated Press. Sheinbaum was the favored successor of the populist leftist outgoing president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

“I promise that I am not going to let you down,” Sheinbaum said as she greeted supporters in Mexico City. She later stated "As I have said on other occasions, I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters."

Her victory came amid the deadliest campaign in modern history, with a record number of assassinations of candidates, per Reuters. The murder of a candidate running for central Puebla state local office brought that number to 37 on Friday ahead of Sunday's official vote. Jorge Huerta Cabera was gunned down at a political rally, according to the state prosecutor's office.

Just before that, a mayoral candidate in Guerro, Alfredo Cabera, was shot dead at point-blank range while greeting supporters last Wednesday. The horrific incident was caught on camera. In April, a female mayoral candidate for the city of Celaya, Gisela Gaytan, was executed at a campaign event just hours after she had requested security protection.

"It's possible that violence is being used as a means to define the election in advance, particularly when certain interests are perceived to be at risk in the event that a particular political project triumphs," Armando Vargas, an Integralia researcher said on Friday. Violent crime was one of the top issues in the presidential election. A total of 828 non-lethal attacks on candidates were reported by the consultancy.

Local sources reported yet another murder of a female western Mexico mayor on Monday, just hours after Sheinbaum claimed victory of the presidency. "The [Michoacan state government] condemns the murder of the municipal president of Cotija, Yolanda Sánchez Figueroa. A security operation coordinated with federal agencies has been deployed to find those responsible for the incident," the regional interior ministry said in a post on X.