Mexicans are awaiting the outcome of Sunday’s ballot in the 2024 election. The outcome is sure to be historic: Mexicans are weighing gender, democracy and populism, as they chart the country’s path forward in voting shadowed by cartel violence.
For the first time in the country’s history, two women lead the polls: Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, is trailed by Xóchitl Gálvez, an opposition senator and tech entrepreneur.
Violence tops the list of issues that matters most to voters, with cartels and other criminal groups using local elections as an opportunity to make power grabs. Also at play is the economy, the political legacy of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Mexico’s often tumultuous relationship with the United States.
In the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, temperatures were already at 100 degrees (37 Celsius) before noon and were expected to rise further. Voters were covering their heads with stalks of leaves and palm fronds as they stood in line. So far this year, 14 people have died in the state from heat stroke, and howler monkeys have fallen dead from the trees.
Because of poor organization, some voters in Veracruz faced lines up to three hours to vote. Castillo and Ramirez, both taxi drivers, were uncomplaining.
“The important thing here is to vote. We found these palm fronds here and they’re helping us,” Castillo said, “though we’d really like to have a real palapa.”
Even in the relatively temperate capital, Mexico City, about 7,350 feet (2,240 meters) above sea level, Hugo Nava, a 71-year-old university professor, said the heat was the worst he remembers in at least 30 years.
“I used to carry a sports coat or sweater around. No more,” says Nava, who showed up in shirt sleeves to wait in line to vote. “It’s bad.”
“The climate is having a big effect,” he said. “People are coming out early, because they don’t want to be here at noon.”
Jorge Álvarez Máynez is a longshot candidate in Mexico’s presidential race. He’s offered himself up as an alternative to those not content with the polarized candidates locked in a tug-of-war for Mexico’s top position.
While he’s sought to court the youth vote, he’s also become the subject of many internet memes throughout the race. A former federal lawmaker, he represents the smaller Citizen Movement party.
Mexico’s National Electoral Institute reports that as of 11 a.m. – three hours after polls were to open — only about 82% of voting places had successfully opened.
The reasons stemmed from violence-plagued areas where it was unsafe to have to people vote to local conflicts among residents and poll workers who didn’t show up.
It was especially difficult in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state, which has been torn by growing cartel violence over the past year.
Electoral authorities there said that they only managed to open 58% of polling places.
They said in many cases they were unable to open on time because there were not sufficient poll workers. In some cases they had to recruit voters from the lines.
Violence was behind some of the reticence. Local candidates have been killed in some Chiapas communities in recent days.
In Tamaulipas, at Mexico’s northern border with Texas, Magdalena Ruiz, 69, was frustrated by voting problems in the state capital Ciudad Victoria.
Ruiz had roused her grandson from bed early Sunday so that he could vote for the first time – he was not enthusiastic. But she convinced him it was his duty and got him to the polling place.
But it only got worse when they got there. Locals were fighting over the opening of the polling place and it was 11 a.m. before authorities were able to establish order and start the voting.
“I feel sad,” Ruiz said. “I hope my grandson doesn’t come away with a bad experience.”
Mexico still has a famously intense “machismo”, or culture of male chauvinism, that has created large economic and social disparities in society. In its most extreme form, the misogyny is expressed in high rates of femicides, and things like acid attacks against women.
Both frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum and opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez have promised to address high rates of gender-based violence and gender disparities if they win.
A historic number of women in the socially conservative country are taking up leadership and political roles.
That’s in part due to a decades-long push by authorities for greater representation in politics, including laws that require political parties to have half of their congressional candidates be women. Since 2018, Mexico’s Congress has had a 50-50 gender split, and the number of female governors has shot up.
