"The North Needs to Learn from the South": Mexico Poised to Elect First Woman President

In Mexico, millions of voters are poised to elect the first woman president in the country’s history when they cast their ballots on Sunday. Voters will be choosing between front-runners Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, and Xóchitl Gálvez, a former senator; and a third candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, who is trailing further behind in the polls. The landmark moment has filled many with hope as Mexico has one of the highest rates of gender violence and femicides in Latin America. “This is the primary contradiction for Mexico. You’re going to elect a woman, but you still haven’t resolved the fact that women are being murdered at the rate of about 10 to 11 every single day,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, who interviewed both Sheinbaum and Gálvez. Hinojosa says the two front-runners are the result of “decadeslong work by feminists in Mexico, along with feminists all over Latin America, pushing for equality.”