This year’s presidential election in the United States is, once again, a contest between two men. But in Latin America, as Mexico’s historic elections over the weekend demonstrated, electing a woman president has become remarkably routine.
Claudia Sheinbaum, who won Mexico’s election in a landslide against another candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez, joins at least a dozen other women who have served as presidents of Latin American countries since the 1970s.
This growing list includes former leaders of two of Latin America’s largest countries, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, and those of smaller nations such as Violeta Chamorro of Nicaragua and Xiomara Castro, the current president of Honduras.
The rise of women to such heights highlights how some democracies in Latin America that rose from the ashes of authoritarian governments have proven exceptionally open to breaking down barriers to political representation.
Jennifer Piscopo, a professor of gender and politics at Royal Holloway, a college at the University of London, said that women who had become presidents in Latin America generally followed a pattern of being nominated by parties in power that already enjoyed high levels of voter support.
Citing the examples of Rousseff in Brazil, Michele Bachelet in Chile and Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica, Piscopo said those parties “enjoy the best of both worlds,” first by reaping electoral benefits from their strong reputations before an election.
And secondly, “they can also use women to signal news or changes to the electorate,” Piscopo said.
In Mexico, the ruling party, Morena, has steadily expanded its power across the country in recent years, while enshrining gender parity in politics as a pillar of its ambitions to bring change to the largest Spanish-speaking country. of the world.
While women in Mexico did not gain the right to vote until 1953, the country is now distinguished from others in the region by a variety of policies and laws aimed specifically at paving the way for women in politics.
The efforts gained momentum after a historic election in 2000 ended decades of authoritarian rule. Quotas allowed more women to run for public office, then a 2019 constitutional amendment, supported by a wide-ranging coalition of women activists, academics and politicians, set goals for parity in the legislative, judicial and executive branches.
Just a few years later, Mexico not only has an elected president, but also women leading both chambers of Congress, where women held half of the legislative seats before this election. Women also serve as presidents of the Supreme Court and governors of the Central Bank.
Efforts to achieve equality impacted local and state elections. Reflecting the presidential race, in the gubernatorial races in the states of Guanajuato and Morelos there were also two women competing to win.
The entry of more women into politics is reflected in historic political changes, such as the decriminalization of abortion nationwide in 2023. Mexico joined countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Guyana and Uruguay that have taken steps to expand the right to abortion .
Still, recent Latin American history also contains warnings about the ease with which women can fall from rarefied positions of power.
In Brazil, for example, a situation similar to this year’s elections in Mexico, where Sheinbaum was the protégé of a widely popular male president, developed in 2010 when Rousseff, former chief of staff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won the presidential elections.
Rousseff won re-election in 2014. But in the wake of massive corruption scandals involving her leftist party and a weakening economy, she faced an open revolt among lawmakers. The backlash resulted in her impeachment on charges of manipulating the budget to hide economic problems and her removal from office in 2016.
The overthrow paved the way for the rise to the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right figure who made verbal attacks against women a staple of his rule.
After her impeachment, Rousseff ran for a Senate seat in 2018 and lost. After Lula returned to the presidency in 2023, she also re-emerged as president of a development bank founded by Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa.
“It’s not just about holding office,” said Mónica Tapia, founder of Auna, a Mexican political leadership incubator for women, “it’s also about having the power and autonomy to control the agenda and the legacy that women want.” leave”.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City.