Claudia Sheinbaum won a commanding victory in last month’s Mexican presidential election, winning almost 60 percent of the vote and securing legislative majorities for her left-wing Morena party. A former climate scientist and mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum dominated the polls after emerging as the successor to the popular outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Even as Sheinbaum prepares to take office, the city she ran between 2018 and 2023 is making global headlines as it suffers through an historic water crisis. Millions of low-income residents across the city rely on intermittent deliveries of contaminated groundwater, and even wealthier neighborhoods have seen their taps shut off as the city’s key reservoirs run dry. Not only that, but the city loses around 40 percent of its water supply to leaks in its underground pipes.
Sheinbaum tried to tackle these problems as mayor, pursuing projects to capture rainwater, restore depleted aquifers, and replace and upgrade aging pipes. But water experts and public officials who worked with Sheinbaum say she la... Read more
