MEXICO CITY (AP) — Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in Tuesday as Mexico’s first feminine president, using the keenness over her predecessor’s social applications but additionally going through challenges that embrace stubbornly excessive ranges of violence.

After a smiling Sheinbaum took the oath of workplace on the ground of Congress, legislators shouted “Presidenta! Presidenta!” utilizing the female type of president in Spanish for the primary time in over 200 years of Mexico’s historical past as an unbiased nation.

The 62-year-old scientist-turned-politician receives a rustic with a lot of fast issues, additionally together with a sluggish economic system, unfinished constructing applications, rising debt and the hurricane-battered resort metropolis of Acapulco.

In her inauguration speech, Sheinbaum mentioned that she got here to energy accompanied by all the ladies who’ve struggled in anonymity to make their method in Mexico, together with “those that dreamed of the chance that sooner or later irrespective of if we have been born as ladies or males we’d obtain our goals and needs with out our intercourse figuring out our future.”

She made a protracted listing of guarantees to restrict costs for gasoline and meals, broaden money hand-out applications for girls and youngsters, assist enterprise funding, housing and passenger rail development. However any point out of the drug cartels that management a lot of the nation was temporary and close to the top of the listing.

Sheinbaum supplied little change from former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ‘Hugs not Bullets’ technique of addressing root causes and never confronting the cartels, other than pledging extra intelligence work and investigation. “There can be no return to the irresponsible drug battle,” she mentioned.

Sheinbaum romped to victory in June with almost 60% of the vote, propelled largely by the sustained recognition of her political mentor, López Obrador. She has pledged to proceed all his insurance policies, even people who strengthened the facility of the navy and weakened the nation’s checks and balances.

After the inauguration, Sheinbaum appeared at a mass rally in Mexico Metropolis’s colonial-era important plaza to take part in a ceremony involving an all-women committee representing Mexico’s roughly 70 Indigenous teams.

Sheinbaum was blessed and brushed with herbs and incense by Ernestina Ortiz, a “non secular information,” who instructed Sheinbaum “You’re a voice for all of us who had no voice for a very long time.” An Indigenous elder then handed Sheinbaum a picket Indigenous “employees of authority,” like these carried by group leaders.

After the ceremony, Sheinbaum mentioned she would push for a complete ban on any public servant being re-elected to workplace — a tall promise, provided that her occasion has now handed a legislation making all judges stand for election. That will recommend Mexico might have a brand new crop of inexperienced judges each few years.

Lucía Ruíz, a 42-year-old mom of three, was one in every of hundreds making an attempt to succeed in the principle sq. to see the rally. She mentioned she hopes Sheinbaum will be capable of fight excessive charges of violence towards ladies within the nation.

“She goes to signify us,” mentioned Ruíz. “We’ve at all times been ruled by males, and so they suppose we’re incapable, however we’re not. We’re the pinnacle of our households.”

López Obrador took workplace six years in the past declaring “For the nice of all, first the poor,” and promising historic change from the neoliberal financial insurance policies of his predecessors. Sheinbaum promised continuity from his in style social insurance policies to controversial constitutional reforms to the judiciary and Nationwide Guard rammed by throughout his closing days in workplace.

Regardless of her pledge of continuity, Sheinbaum is a really totally different character: a cautious scientist and ideological college leftist, versus the outgoing president’s chummy, everyman enchantment.

“López Obrador was a tremendously charismatic president and plenty of instances that charisma allowed him to cowl up some political errors that Claudia Sheinbaum is not going to have that chance of doing,” mentioned Carlos Pérez Ricart, a political analyst at Mexico’s Middle for Financial Analysis and Instructing. “So, the place López Obrador was charismatic, Claudia Sheinbaum must be efficient.”

She is going to wield formidable energy as a result of López Obrador’s Morena occasion controls each homes of Congress. However the nation stays deeply polarized between the outgoing president’s fanatic followers and nearly one-third of the inhabitants who deeply resent him.

“If we would like a robust authorities, the checks and balances additionally must be sturdy,” mentioned opposition Sen. María Guadalupe Murguía, suggesting that an omnipotent military and unchecked ruling occasion may come again to hang-out Mexico. “Bear in mind,” she mentioned, “no person wins every little thing, and no person loses endlessly.”

Sheinbaum will not be inheriting a simple scenario.

Drug cartels have strengthened their maintain over a lot of Mexico, and her first journey as president can be to the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco, which was flooded final week by Hurricane John, which killed no less than 17 individuals alongside the coast across the resort. Acapulco was devastated in October 2023 by Hurricane Otis, and had not recovered from that blow when John hit.

Sheinbaum should additionally cope with raging violence within the cartel-dominated northern metropolis of Culiacan, the place factional preventing inside the Sinaloa cartel broke out after drug lords Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López have been apprehended in the US after they flew there in a small airplane on July 25.

López Obrador has lengthy sought to keep away from confronting Mexico’s drug cartels and has overtly appealed to the gangs to maintain the peace amongst themselves, however the limitations of that technique have develop into obviously obvious in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, the place gun battles have raged on town’s streets. Native authorities and even the military — which López Obrador has relied on for every little thing — have primarily admitted that the preventing will solely finish when the cartel bosses resolve to finish it.

However that’s solely the newest hotspot.

Drug-related violence is surging from Tijuana within the north to Chiapas within the south, displacing hundreds.

Whereas Sheinbaum inherits an enormous price range deficit, unfinished development tasks and a burgeoning invoice for her occasion’s money hand-out applications — all of which may ship monetary markets tumbling — maybe her greatest looming concern is the opportunity of a victory for Donald Trump within the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election.

Trump has already vowed to slap 100% tariffs on autos made in Mexico. Although that will seemingly violate the present U.S.-Mexico-Canada commerce settlement, there are different issues Trump may do to make life troublesome for Sheinbaum, together with his pledge of large deportations.

Relations with Mexico’s northern neighbor have been already tense after López Obrador mentioned he was placing relations with the U.S. embassy “on pause” after public criticism of the proposed judicial overhaul.

At her inauguration, Sheinbaum boosted the free commerce settlement with the US and Canada, saying “we all know that financial cooperation strengthens the three nations.”

There are areas the place Sheinbaum may attempt to take Mexico in a brand new course. For instance, she has a Ph.D. in vitality engineering and has spoken of the necessity to handle local weather change.

However on Tuesday, she mentioned she would cap oil manufacturing at 1.8 million barrels per day, which might be greater than what the troubled state-owned firm at the moment produces. “We’re going to promote vitality effectivity and the transition towards renewable sources of vitality,” she mentioned.

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Related Press writers María Verza, Megan Janetsky and Mark Stevenson in Mexico Metropolis contributed to this report.

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