Millions of Mexicans cast their ballot on Sunday in a historic election to vote for the country’s first female president.
Claudia Sheinbaum, who is expected to win, faced Xóchit Gálvez in a contest mired by increasing cartel violence, corruption and extortion.
Following the murders of 38 political candidates since June 2023, the government deployed thousands of troops on Sunday to protect voters at election booths.
On Friday, the state prosecutor’s office revealed that Jorge Huerta Cabrera, a candidate running for local office in Mexico’s central Puebla state, was the latest politician to be shot dead. He was attending a political rally in the city of Izucar de Matamoros, where he was running as a candidate.
On election day, two people were reportedly killed at separate polling stations in Puebla. One voter was kidnapped by armed men at a polling station in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, according to the Chiapas Prosecutor’s Office.
Speaking to reporters as she left her home on Sunday to cast her vote, the ruling Morena party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, who is projected to win — said she felt “very happy.”
“It’s a historic day,” she said. “Everyone must get out to vote.”
The 61-year old former Mexico City mayor went into Sunday’s election with a 17 percentage point lead over her main opposition rival Xóchit Gálvez in opinion polls.
When casting her ballot, accompanied by her husband, Jesús María Tarriba, the presidential frontrunner revealed she didn’t vote for herself, but for 93-year-old founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Ifigenia Martinez. “Long live democracy!” Sheinbaum declared on X.
As the likely winner, Sheinbaum will also become the first president of Mexico to have Jewish ancestry.
Her opponent, opposition senator and tech entrepreneur Xóchit Gálvez said on Sunday she foresees a “huge participation” in the election.
“What I would like most is that no Mexican had to go abroad to look for opportunities,” she said.
The first preliminary results are expected later on Monday, AEST.
The election violence highlights the growing corruption in governance, according to Lisa Sanchez, the executive director of the advocacy organisation Mexico United Against Crime.
“Eighty-seven percent of all the candidates that were aggressed or killed were actually running opposed at the municipal, local level, which is something that is very worrisome and talks about the need of actually tackling and attending to the problem of criminal governance that we have in Mexico at the very local level,” Sanchez told Al Jazeera.
The positive news is that large numbers of women were involved in this year’s election, Sanchez said. In a country where roughly ten women are killed every day, voting in a female president may bring new hope for half the country’s population.
“This is a historic day…we’re going to elect our first woman president,” she continued.
“It’s also historical election because the majority of the voters are women. Fifty-one million women are part of the list of electors and were going to be actually attending this election to elect over 20,708 different positions at the local, state and federal level.”
Mexico’s National Electoral Institute reported that three hours after polls were officially opened, almost a fifth of voting places had remained shut for various reasons, including safety issues, and a lack of poll workers.