Claudia Sheinbaum

The inimitable president of Mexico taking on Trump and the drug cartels.

- By Andrew Anthony

It's often noted that Claudia Sheinbaum is the first woman and first Jewish president of Mexico. But that understates her novelty. She is also the first female and first Jewish leader to be elected in North America.

As groundbreaking, however, as her personal identity may be, it’s not something she spends much time promoting. According to Alex González Ormerod, founder of the Mexico Political Economist, “She is completely focused on the economy and inequality, rather than identity politics or culture wars.”

Which is probably just as well when it comes to dealing with her nation’s longstanding adversarial ally to the north.

“Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the US,” is the saying attributed to Porfirio Diaz, who ruled the country from 1884 to 1911 - and there’s seldom been a day since that those words haven't resonated.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated as president for the second time, nearly four months into Sheinbaum’s own presidency, he declared war on Mexico's drug cartels, designating a number of them terrorist organisations.

“What Trump is doing is fairly traditional US foreign policy,” says historian Edward Shawcross. “It’s essentially externalising a domestic problem [of narcotic consumption]. It makes it extraordinarily difficult for a Mexican president.”

Most assessments judge Sheinbaum adept at deflecting Trump's rhetorical assaults. If his aggressive stance, combined with threats of huge tariff hikes, has shaped her policy on the cartels, in truth it was already up and running before he returned to the White House. The thinktank México Evalúa found that in her first 100 days Sheinbaum’s forces carried out more than five times as many drug raids as her predecessor over a comparable period. Drug seizures rose from 33kg to 665,000kg and arrests from 31 to 7,720.