Republican presidential candidates are obsessed with Mexico. Ron DeSantis wants to invade it the moment he becomes president. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to use “military force to decimate the cartels, Osama bin Laden-style, Soleimani-style.” And of course, former President Donald Trump, the candidate who has made anti-Mexico hate speech a cornerstone of the modern-day GOP, has reportedly conjured up new battle plans against cartels that, according to one report, “are not sanctioned by Mexico’s government.”
The idea of invading Mexico to magically win a war on drugs that the U.S. has already lost is supported by 86% of Republican primary voters.
The idea of invading Mexico to magically win a war on drugs that the U.S. has already lost is supported by 86% of Republican primary voters. So it’s no wonder that candidates are vilifying Mexico to court the GOP’s xenophobic base.
The backward Mexico that exists in the GOP’s fevered imagination is not the country that exists. And, at least when it comes to respecting the rights of women and valuing them as leaders, Mexico is ahead of the United States.
For the first time ever, the country’s two major presidential candidates are women, which virtually guarantees that it will elect its first woman president in June 2024, months before the U.S., which has never elected a woman president, likely chooses another man.
Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, a loyal leftist ally of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, became the candidate this week for the ruling Morena party. She’ll face Sen. Xóchitl Gálvez, who was named the opposition coalition’s candidate Aug. 31. For a country that granted women the right to vote in 1953, 33 years after the United States did, the ascension of women to political leadership is remarkable.
As The Washington Post noted in a report after Sheinbaum’s nomination, “A woman is chief justice of Mexico’s Supreme Court. Women lead both houses of Congress. Women have made up 50% of the legislature since 2021, when Mexico became the largest nation to achieve gender parity.” As the Post notes, Mexico is clearly outpacing the United States when it comes to gender quality and political representation. “This is a feminist’s dream,” activist Maricruz Ocampo told the newspaper about Mexico’s 2024 elections.
In what counts as another win for women, this week, Mexico’s Supreme Court fully decriminalized abortion across Mexico. As I predicted last year after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked, the women’s rights movement in Mexico and other parts of Latin America has continued to gain momentum. The U.S., of course, went on to demolish the constitutional right to abortion that Roe v. Wade established.
The “feminist’s dream” of a 2024 Mexican election will make the erosion of women’s rights here even more glaring. Even though Gálvez’s conservative party does not support the decriminalization of abortion, she herself supports it, as does the more progressive Sheinbaum. It’s a stark contrast to the abortion debate in the U.S., where’s there’s typically no common ground between candidates of opposing parties.
Nikki Haley, the only woman running for the Republican nomination, has tried to distance herself from the anti-abortion absolutists in her party by offering consensus alternatives, but she’s still an abortion opponent, which puts her out of step in a country where polls show there’s broad support to make abortion legal nationwide. As Mexico moves forward on women’s rights, Republicans are jostling for the chance to move this country further backward. As Mexico moves forward on women’s rights, Republicans are jostling for the chance to move this country further backward. To hear Republicans tell it, Mexico is not a sovereign nation. It’s not a valuable trading partner, even though it’s been our country’s top trading partner in 2023. It’s not a country where the voices of women are being heard more than they ever have before. It’s nothing more than a narcostate that needs to be invaded. Our southern neighbor has been belittled, ridiculed, targeted and scapegoated for too long, and, assuming they want to win a general election, Republicans are playing a dangerous game by doing so. As Pew notes, about 60% of the entire U.S. Latino population, about 37.2 million people, are of Mexican descent. Here’s to less talk of invasions and more conversations about how Mexico is transforming itself into a champion of gender equality. Enough of the jabbering about how backward Mexico is when in some highly significant ways, it’s running so far ahead of us.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. 
