Non-Vassal Elite Competence Exhibit 1: Claudia Sheinbaum

There is a saying that soft times produce soft leaders and that hard times produce strong leaders. In the West, the soft times for the oligarchs from the 1980s onwards have produced many incompetent leaders as I am detailing in my series on them. In this series of articles I detail how the hard times have produced very strong leaders in nations outside the West. The first example is Claudia Sheinbaum, the President of Mexico.

She was born in 1962 to Sephardic Jewish biologist and chemical engineering parents, who raised her in a secular household. Sheinbaum has undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics and a PhD in energy engineering. From 1995 to 2000 she was a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She had been active in politics since her student days and was a member of the student group that founded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). In 2000 she became the Secretary of the Environment of Mexico City, within the city administration of Lopez Obrador, a position she held until 2006. After which she returned to UNAM, and was a contributing author on the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report mitigation section (2007), and a lead author of the same section in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (2013). She has also authored over 100 scientific journal articles and two books.

In 2014, Sheinbaum joined Obrador in splitting away from the PRD to form a new party, Moreno. From 2014 to 2017 she was Mayor of Tlalpan, a borough of Mexico City. In 2018 she was elected to the position of the Head of Government of Mexico City, which she held until 2023; the city has a population of approximately 10 million. During her period in office, the city homicide rate was reduced from 17.9 to 8.6 per 100,000 population, far below the national rate and about the same as the US national murder rate; on par with Los Angeles and very significantly lower than Phoenix (12.3), Houston (15.1), Chicago (22.5), Philadelphia (23.9) and Washington D.C. (39.7). The homicide rate in the Mexican capital became about one quarter that of the US capital; perhaps Mexico City should be sending their police force into US cities to aid their local police forces? Sheinbaum also oversaw a significant expansion and modernization of the city’s public transport infrastructure, as well as managing the city’s response to the COVID 19 pandemic.

This year, Sheinbaum was elected as the President of Mexico with 60% of the vote! The attack of the bought and paid for Western mainstream media upon the democratically elected president was nearly immediate . The Atlantic Monthly chimed out “Women Can Be Autocrats Too, Mexico’s new president follows her predecessor’s authoritarian path” authored by the dependable US oligarch propagandist tool David Frum. In US mainstream media Newspeak, the word “authoritarian” means any foreign leader that is not a vassal to the US; irrespective of the nature of the government involved. “Democratic” or “Popular” tends to mean any leader who is a US vassal; irrespective of the nature of the government involved. In this Newspeak, Sheinbaum is authoritarian while the unelected Zelensky who has banned the opposition parties, media and even religious orders while depending on the support of a bunch of fascist thugs is defined as “democratic”. As is the Zionist apartheid state, whose genocidal and ethnic cleansing policies Sheinbaum opposes.

Sheinbaum is not just resistant to becoming a vassal, but is also extremely intelligent and experienced in political and governmental affairs while being very popular among the citizenry; the worst possible combination for the US oligarchy as the head of state of a bordering nation. Contrast the two interviews below with any Harris, Trump, Blinken (US Secretary of State), Sullivan (US National Security Advisor), JD Vance (Trump VP running mate) or Tim Waltz (Harris VP running mate) interviews.

The kind of first woman president that many Americans would be happy with, but someone they will never be allowed to have an accurate representation of by the US oligarchic state and media organs. Especially when US corporations see her as a threat who is focused on the welfare of the Mexican citizenry rather than corporate welfare. Her party also now governs 24 of the 32 Mexican states, and has a two thirds majority in both houses of the senate, putting her in a significantly stronger position than her predecessor Obrador.

The last bastion of oligarchical elite power within the state, the judiciary, is directly threatened by the judicial reform passed under Obrador which will have the 7,000 strong state and federal judiciary elected rather than selected by an elite-serving and corrupt establishment. Across Latin America, the judiciary has acted as a bulwark against any democracy that threatens the oligarchical vassal elite. The first election of the judiciary will take place in 2025, and the balance of the positions elected in 2027. We can expect an escalating level of Western media propaganda, overt pressure, and covert political interference attempting to forestall these changes. Full of hypocrisy and irony of course, as the judiciary is generally elected in the US; with the US Supreme Court judges having to be approved by Congress. Sheinbaum has six years to make a real impact, both in Mexico and regionally, and make sure that the democratization and social development of Mexico continues with her successor.

This article from The American Conservative is much more open about why the US oligarchy hates Sheinbaum and will do anything to take her down.

I hate to break the news to my bullish Texas friends reading this, but Claudia Sheinbaum spent three years at the California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory completing a PhD thesis in energy engineering. Her speech reflected an appreciation for market-oriented renewable investment, but contained a pledge to cap fossil fuel consumption at a daily 1.8 million barrels …

Her environmental proposals, coupled with judicial reform and broadly left-wing rhetoric …

Sheinbaum plans to continue AMLO’s failed "hugs not bullets" approach to narco-terrorism …

Sheinbaum’s only substantive mention of migration was her reference to the “heroes and heroines” living in the United States, sending “help” back to communities in Mexico

AMLO (Obrador) was hemmed in by the vassal Mexican oligarchy, but through his own colossal popularity, reforms and the democratization of the judiciary, has provided a base from which Sheinbaum can truly start to challenge that vassal oligarchy. That she will embrace the need for action on climate change and environmental destruction (as against the Democratic cos-playing in this area), implement the judicial reform, continue to oppose the utterly failed US anti-drug policies (designed at least as much to discipline the masses as actually reduce the drug trade), and also refuse to be beholden to US domestic considerations, is anathema to the US oligarchy. For the record, when AMLO came to power in 2018 the Mexican murder rate was 29 per 100,000, dropped to 25 in 2022, and fell again in 2023 by 6.7%. With the majority of the illegal weapons in Mexico smuggled in from the US, sometimes even aided by the US state, a focus on stopping this trade rather than the drugs trade may better help reduce the Mexican murder rate.

One hopes that she has support within the military, as once she takes out the courts as a vassalized institution, the US oligarchs may attempt to use their standby option of a military coup. In these days when the US oligarchs are openly supporting an ongoing genocide, I put nothing past them - especially in a nation so vital to US oligarchic core interests.