AFTER eight months in office, President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first woman head of state and worthy successor to Amlo in leading the country’s 4T Transformation, enjoys unprecedented approval ratings of around 80 per cent.

Continuing welfare reforms, public infrastructure investment, economic stability and successful defence of national interests against intemperate and unpredictable threats from the US under Donald Trump have gained Sheinbaum a global reputation for effective leadership. 

The political opposition, thrashed in the June 2024 general elections, has failed to recover and seems to have learnt nothing from its failure. 

Its one remaining institutional bastion, the extremely corrupt judiciary, is coming to an end with the major constitutional reform promised in the ruling coalition’s election programme and confirmed by both Houses of Congress and the majority of state governments, and now implemented with unprecedented popular election of all judges, magistrates and Supreme Court justices on June 1. 

Despite criticism and alarm from the opposition and international media, and politicians, this profoundly democratic reform (conducted on non-party lines) brings truly democratic control to all main state institutions.

Having failed in its attempts to block or sabotage the judicial elections, the opposition’s strategy now appears to be the manipulation of ultra-left groups to engage in provocation and sabotage. The teachers’ union SNTE includes a radical left faction, CNTE, which was founded in 1978 to fight internal corruption and oppose state manipulation. 

But after Amlo’s 2018 election and the beginning of the 4T Transformation, CNTE refused to accept that profoundly new progressive policies were being implemented in education, as in government as a whole. It condemns the 4T process as “neoliberal” and treats both Amlo’s and Sheinbaum’s administrations as no different from the old corrupt PRI and PAN eras. 

Not only this, but it engages in provocative and violent actions to pursue its demands, occupying the Zocalo square, blocking roads, occupying airport terminals, and on one occasion surrounding the presidential palace and trying to enter to prevent the president’s morning press conference, while insulting and assaulting independent journalists filming them.

In the following days, masked CNTE activists assaulted the offices of the Interior and Welfare Ministries with metal bars and hammers, and their affiliates in Guerrero state assaulted the local Electoral Commission offices (they called for sabotage or at least abstention in the June 1 judicial elections, exactly what the right-wing opposition advocated). As many of them wore masks, there is room for doubt as to whether they are teachers or infiltrators, but CNTE leaders have not disowned them.

The government has avoided any kind of repression in response to these provocations, since this is clearly what the protesters want. Not surprisingly, polls indicate that 80 per cent of the population disapprove of this violence.

All of this occurs while hostile pressure from the US has been growing. Trump once again “offered” US armed assistance against the cartels, and as before, Sheinbaum stated clearly that Mexico was glad to co-operate in the fight against crime but would not accept any violation of its sovereignty. 

Also on May 19, the new US ambassador arrived, none other than Ronald Johnson, a former US army officer who had aided counter-insurgency efforts in El Salvador in the 1980s, served in the CIA and as ambassador to El Salvador 2019-21, when he was a close associate of despotic President Nayib Bukele.

As always, Sheinbaum observed diplomatic niceties and said she had a positive conversation with the new ambassador, but it could not go unnoticed that his first (unofficial) action was a meeting with extreme right Mexican politicians. US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have had to recognise that Mexico’s National Guard has been very effective in reducing narcotics smuggling across the border and that Mexico has taken drastic action against cartel criminals, deporting many to the US.

Indeed, Mexico’s public security strategy has been more effective than ever before under Security Secretary Omar Garcia Harfuch along with the Ministries of Defence, Navy, Interior, the National Guard and the Solicitor-General: in eight months homicides have been reduced by 25.4 per cent, more than 23,000 people have been arrested for serious crimes, 172 tons of illicit drugs have been seized and 990 clandestine laboratories closed down.

This has been achieved through intelligence and application of large-scale but restrained military force, not an indiscriminate “war on drugs” as under the old regime.

The cartels have suffered heavy financial losses, and this also accounts for violent assaults on the military and public officials, mostly unsuccessful but sometimes serious. Thus, on June 9, on the borders of Michoacan and Jalisco, an explosion killed eight members of the military, but 17 criminals were arrested, including 12 Colombians, nine of them ex-Colombian military and three with military training. Mexico is in touch with Colombian authorities about this.

Another very serious incident was the assassination on May 20 of Ximena Guzman, private secretary to metro mayor Clara Brugada, and Jose Munoz, security adviser to Brugada. As they were travelling to work early that morning, their car was attacked by two gunmen on a motorcycle in a fairly central area of the capital. They were unarmed and clearly were not seen as being in danger. Investigations are ongoing.

A few days later, in a bizarre incident, a concert by a progressive Basque singer was closed down by police and military in a central venue. There was no violence, but it seems the order to take this action came from the right-wing mayor of Cuauhtemoc borough in central Mexico City. There is no hard evidence, but this, following on the assassinations, suggests a co-ordinated drive to undermine Metro mayor Brugada’s progressive administration.

Most recently, we have the unrest in Los Angeles provoked by the arbitrary raids of US ICE officials on Mexican and other migrant workers, and Trump’s arbitrary, indeed fascist, decision to send in the California National Guard and even the marines against the wishes of the Californian governor. 

President Sheinbaum has made a very clear statement condemning violence and calling for a comprehensive and constructive approach to migration issues, and respect for the rights of Mexican citizens. And Mexican consuls have been very active, providing assistance. Never before has the need for unity in support of the progressive government of Mexico’s 4T Transformation been clearer. 

David Raby is a retired academic, writer and journalist on Latin America, and co-ordinator of UK Mexico Solidarity Forum. His book Mexico In Transformation: From Amlo to Claudia (Praxis Press, 2025) is available at redletterspp.com. He can be reached at david.raby@mexicosolidarity.org.uk and on X @DLRaby.