On a recent Friday morning, President Claudia Sheinbaum stood inside Mexico’s presidential palace during her daily morning news conference and was asked by one of the reporters whether she had talked with President Trump about a visit to the White House.
“We’ve talked about how nice it would be to meet in person, but there’s nothing formal yet,” Sheinbaum replied. “When necessary, we speak directly; but there is dialogue.”
At a time when Trump seems to be picking fights with allies the world over, and threatening tremendous tariffs on friends and foes, Mexico has emerged relatively unscathed, thanks in large part to the cool head and deal-making skills of its president.
Her powers of negotiation have earned Sheinbaum the kind of praise the American president usually reserves for strongmen and dictators, with Trump calling her a “very wonderful woman,” while the foreign press has been equally fawning.
The Washington Post called Sheinbaum “the world’s leading Trump whisperer,” while the New York Times mused she might be “the anti-Trump.” Bloomberg pondered if the Mexican leader was “the most powerful woman in the world.”
At home, she has also earned high praise for her efforts to manage Mexico’s most important bilateral relationship, and her approval ratings have soared from 70% when she took office in October to more than 80% in March, according to local newspaper El Financiero.
But even as Sheinbaum has rightfully been lauded for her efforts in handling her pugnacious and volatile counterpart north of the border, there remain a number of domestic issues that could mar her record of wins.
While the Mexican leader avoided the worst of Trump’s blanket tariffs, she is still contending with a 25% levy on cars, steel and aluminum that are sold in the U.S., which will no doubt hobble the Mexican economy: Last month, the International Monetary Fund revised its January projection of a 1.3% growth for the Mexico’s GDP to a 0.3% contraction in 2025. Mexicans would feel that, and Sheinbaum’s popularity could suffer.
And though murders have dropped sharply since she took office, according to state figures, security remains a critical issue in Mexico: A government poll released last month found that more than 6 out of 10 Mexicans living in cities felt unsafe.
With cartels controlling about a third of Mexico’s territory, according to estimates from the U.S. military, it’s not difficult to see why. Shortly after Sheinbaum took office, violence erupted in the northern city of Culiacán, where gangs murdered hundreds of people, gunfire ripped through the air in broad daylight and explosions tore through the night.
Perhaps most troubling of all is the number of disappearances, a long-running horror that continues apace. During Sheinbaum’s presidency, more than 8,000 people have gone missing, or an average of 41 people a day.
Since 1962, more than 120,000 people have disappeared or gone missing, according to official figures. Although such disappearances were once associated with the state, especially Mexico’s secret police, in recent decades the tactic has become a tool of cartels to exert control through terror.
The scale of the crisis was brought to the nation’s attention in March when a group of activist searchers came upon an abandoned ranch in the western state of Jalisco. Inside was a scene of unimaginable horror, one that recalled Nazi concentration camps: crematorium ovens, charred human remains, bone fragments.
Perhaps most heart-wrenching of all, there were also scores of backpacks, torn photographs, piles of clothes, hundreds of pairs of shoes. The “Mexican Auschwitz,” as it has been dubbed, became a national scandal that raged for weeks.
But as happens all too often in Mexico, the scandal remained just that. While the media described it as an extermination center, Sheinbaum sidestepped the idea in a news conference by suggesting it was a recruitment camp. Fingers were pointed; the governing Morena party blocked a bill to initiate a special commission to investigate the case.
When the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances said last month that it would seek to bring the issue of forced disappearances in Mexico before the General Assembly under the argument that it was “systematic or widespread,” Sheinbaum accused them of being poorly informed.
If she cannot tackle the crisis of disappearances more directly, she is unlikely to hold on to that 80% approval rating.
Meanwhile, next month, Sheinbaum may face the greatest test of her presidency yet, with Mexico embarking on a first-ever election allowing voters to choose judges from the district level right up to the Supreme Court.
A final and deeply controversial reform pushed through by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, weeks before he left office, the election will see more than 3,000 candidates vying for 881 roles across the judiciary.
At best, the process promises to be chaotic, with the head of Mexico’s elections institute admitting that the agency isn’t prepared “in terms of the size of the task, how rushed it is, and the budget cuts it’s facing.”
At worst, the election could be marred by violence and its legitimacy called into question. Mexico’s last federal election was its most violent ever with 34 candidates murdered during the campaign. With organized crime infecting almost every corner of Mexican life, this election could also be bloody: Last month, the Senate majority leader admitted that some of the judicial candidates had links to criminal groups.
And even if the election runs smoothly, with candidates favored by the governing Morena party likely to come out on top, the ruling party would have control of the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. This would drag Mexico back toward the one-party rule that it endured throughout much of the 20th century. It would also raise expectations about how much Sheinbaum should be able to accomplish, with such party unity behind her.
During a speech in January, Sheinbaum defended the judicial election as an exercise in democracy and a means to root out corruption. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen, but with her global star on the rise, the world will be carefully watching.
Oscar Lopez is a Mexican author and journalist based in Mexico City working on a book about the origins of forced disappearance during Mexico’s Dirty War.
