Don’t expect Mexico’s new girlboss to take on the cartels

The international media has a new Mexican girlboss to fawn over. Claudia Sheinbaum is Mexico’s new presidenta, leading a landslide for AMLO’s populist leftist Morena Party now empowered to alter Mexico’s Constitution according to his wishes. Should Donald Trump return to the White House, I can only imagine the “yas kween” memes that will emerge from their confrontations over the remain in Mexico policy. And did you know she’s a socialist and a climate scientist, too? Coming soon to a TIMEime magazine cover, a Vogue fashion profile and a children’s board book near you.

Of course, those articles to come will spend more time on the glass ceiling than on all those pesky murders and missing people. AMLO will depart having presided over the bloodiest presidency in Mexican history, with over 185,000 homicides and over 110,000 missing people. (He has decried those desperate family members who search for missing people and mass graves as suffering from a “delirium of necrophilia.”) His “hugs not bullets” approach to the cartels resulted in more of both — more bullets in heads, and more families embracing in sorrow after.

That extended all the way through election day, with two people shot and killed at polling places. Despite AMLO’s assurances that this election would see candidates protected, thirty-eight were killed, many in broad daylight, again the most assassinations on record. The video of the shooting of opposition mayoral candidate Alfredo Cabrera as he shakes hands in the midst of a crowd in Guerrero shows the impunity with which these cartel killers work (warning, graphic).

None of this is surprising, considering that we know AMLO and his regime to be a wholly owned partner of the cartels, relying on them for campaign cash and favors in return for emphatic defense of their barbaric behavior. There’s no mystery to this behavior, and AMLO has been anything but subtle about it — even to the point of siding with the criminals against the DEA, which he accused of “spying” on the Sinaloa cartel after a slew of arrests of fentanyl smugglers, including El Chapo’s sons. And lest we forget his threat from a year ago:

There is talk in the United States, of intervening and confronting organized crime, drug traffickers, treating them as terrorists and that for this reason they will come to “help” us, to “support” us to confront organized crime… we do not accept any intervention… if they did, it will not be only the sailors and soldiers who will defend Mexico, all Mexicans will defend Mexico.

As AMLO’s apprentice, there should be no expectations that Sheinbaum will approach any of these matters differently. And that means in all likelihood that the United States’ relationship with the failing narco-state across our southern border will only get worse.