Sheinbaum’s Predicament: Part Three - A House of Cards

Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio focuses his gaze on what the charges against Sinaloa Governor Ruben Rocha Moya mean for Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum, and how she has an impossible task balancing all interested parties in what is increasingly a political house of cards. 

Transcript

We’re now in the phase of the impossible justifications for Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum, or what is more commonly and humorously known as a period of mental gymnastics. Sheinbaum’s predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador set up the morning press conferences at the start of his sexenio, his six year term. He delivered them up impossibly early every weekday morning to demonstrate his work ethic, and long, to show how he was accessible to the people - that he served them - in a way that none of his elite, arrogant, disconnected predecessors had been. That was his view, but - truth be told - he was mostly right. AMLO always had an easy air about him, an everyman quality, the kind of air that politicians would kill for, but is impossible to learn or fake. Obama had it too, Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom, not so much. He is of the functionary mold of politicians, the technocrat. Public exposure largely hurts him because it demonstrates everything which he isn’t. Claudia Sheinbaum is more in that latter grouping than the former. She knows the importance of being accessible, and has little choice but to follow in the footsteps of the paradigm set up by her predecessor, but she is fundamentally a technocrat trapped in the political frame of the supposedly common citizen.

And often, when we see her struggle most, is when the tensions between these two opposing identities come to the fore, between Claudia Sheinbaum the scientist, the observer of facts and data, the binary Sheinbaum, and the other Sheinbaum, the evolved political figure who has learned political strategies, mostly from the unique political force that is AMLO. Except, of course, she isn’t AMLO, and where he could maintain the political construction of a house of cards on the patronage that is generated by force of character, she does not have that collateral. And she knows it. And yet the survival of his political project, and the one which she now finds herself representing, and which it’s fair to say she believes in too, despite its inconsistencies, is all on her shoulders. 

It’s been evident in these morning press conferences for weeks, these traps she’s been set, or set for herself, and is especially evident in how she is stuck between 4 constituencies: the Trump administration; organized crime; her own Morena political party; and the electorate - this last of which (not in her belief, necessarily, but in reality) is the least powerful of all the sectors. The charges set in early May 2026, against Rubén Rocha Moya, the Governor of Sinaloa, by a United States federal grand jury in New York for alleged ties to the Sinaloa Cartel, have thrown her right into the middle of this conflict. What’s more, despite her protestations, everyone knows it’s true, but she can’t admit them, or hand Rocha Moya over to the US, because that would be to give in to her party and the electorate on charges of ceding sovereignty, and she can’t defend him because it would prod the beast of the United States, as well as being a blatant lie which - in her binary persona, the real Sheinbaum - she is unable to utter. So we have the halfway house of Rocha Moya temporarily stepping down, a move designed to placate all sides, but convincing no-one. But what else was she to do? She is stuck saying that the allegations are unproven - the classic technocrat’s answer. Kicking the problem into the long grass. As she has done with every other inscrutable problem she has faced, the most obvious of which relates to Mexico’s disappeared. “We’ll release the figures next week,” she would say, week after week after week, until more than a year passed. 

On May 4th, Sheinbaum argued that if her administration and that of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had not successfully fought corruption, the government would not have the resources to fund major welfare programs. It’s a magician’s trick, and a poor one at that. The argument is that the money for social programmes is there because there are no hands in the tin, but corruption as it appertains to politicians and organized crime is not internal, it’s external. It’s not government money that’s taken, but outside money taken to fund political support. They are two entirely different structures. Added to which, we know where significant quantities of funding have come from for some of Mexico’s recent mega-projects, and it’s not the taxpayer. 

There’s only so long she can withstand this pressure on all sides, though, especially as there is no logical solution to easing that same pressure. Trump is going nowhere for another two and a half years, the cartels are part of Mexico’s current socio-economic-political reality, her party (large strands of which are endemically corrupt) has a massive majority, and Mexico’s working classes are generally happy getting their daily bread and circus. But appeasement is not to be confused with contentment. In trying to keep all those sectors happy, there is building distrust across all areas. And, worst of all, in this great, deeply fragile house of cards, the only one holding up the edifice is one Claudia Sheinbaum. I wonder who she talks to, really talks to, about her predicament. It must be a lonely, lonely place for her right about now.