This year’s US presidential election is once again a battle between two men. But in Latin America, as Mexico’s landmark election over the weekend showed, electing a woman as president has become all too common.
Claudia Sheinbaum won the Mexican election in a landslide victory over another female candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez, joining at least a dozen other candidates since the 1970s. They join the ranks of women who have served as presidents of Latin American countries since the 1990s.
The growing list includes former leaders of Latin America’s two largest countries, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, as well as Nicaragua’s Violetta Chamo Leaders of smaller countries such as Romania and Honduras’ current president Xiomara Castro.
The rise of women to such heights highlights how some of Latin America’s democracies, emerging from the ashes of dictatorships, have been unusually open to removing barriers to political representation.
Jennifer Piscopo, a professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, said female presidents in Latin America generally follow the pattern of being nominated by the incumbent party that already has high voter support.
Citing the examples of Brazil’s Rousseff, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and Costa Rica’s Laura Chinchilla, Ms Piscopo said these parties had “the best of both worlds”, first by doing well in elections Reputation gains electoral benefits.
Second, “they can also use women to signal novelty or change to voters,” Ms. Piscopo said.
In Mexico, the ruling Morena party has steadily expanded power across the country in recent years while integrating gender equality into politics as a pillar of its ambition to bring change to the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country.
Although Mexican women did not gain the right to vote until 1953, the country now stands out from other countries in the region with a series of policies and legislation specifically designed to pave the way for women to enter politics.
Those efforts intensified after landmark elections in 2000 ended decades of authoritarian rule. Quotas allowed more women to run for office, and then a 2019 constitutional amendment, backed by a far-reaching coalition of female activists, academics and politicians, set equality targets in the legislative, judicial and executive branches.
Just a few years later, Mexico not only had a woman elected as president, but also had women at the helm of both houses of Congress, with women taking half of the legislative seats in this election. Women also serve as chief justice of the Supreme Court and governor of central banks.
Efforts to achieve equality reverberate through local and state elections. There are also two women vying for victory in the gubernatorial races in Guanajuato and Morelos, mirroring the presidential race.
More women entering politics are reflected in landmark policy shifts, such as Mexico’s move to decriminalize abortion nationwide in 2023.
Still, recent history in Latin America offers a warning: women can easily fall from positions of power.
In Brazil, for example, a similar situation to this year’s Mexican elections occurred in 2010, when Ms. Sheinbaum was the protege of a popular male president, Luis Inacio Lula da Ms. Rousseff, former chief of staff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was elected and won the presidential election.
Ms Rousseff won re-election in 2014. The backlash led to her impeachment and dismissal from office in 2016 for manipulating the budget to conceal economic problems.
The ouster paves the way for Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency.
After being impeached, Rousseff ran for a Senate seat in 2018 but lost. After Lula returned to the presidency last year, he returned as president of the development bank founded by Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa.
“It’s not just about keeping the job,” said Mónica Tapia, founder of Aúna, an incubator for women’s political leadership in Mexico. “It’s also about having the power and autonomy to control the agenda and the legacy that women want to leave behind.”
Emiliano Rodriguez Mejia Contributed reporting.
