The New Yorker:

Can Claudia Sheinbaum manage the demands from D.C.—and her own country’s fragile democracy?

By Stephania Taladrid

Mexico’s most important venue for political theatre is the mañanera—the press conference that takes place each weekday morning in the Treasury Room, a vast Italianate hall in the Presidential palace. It took its current form in 2018, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—a pugnacious, swaggering populist known throughout Mexico as amlo. López Obrador framed his daily encounters with the media as an exercise in openness. Over time, they became a stage from which he could lambaste his enemies, advance his initiatives, and curate his public image. amlo’s mañaneras began at 7 a.m. and often stretched on for hours, with guest speakers, musical interludes, and endless Presidential monologues. Because he was perennially at war with the press, they were often his primary mode of communicating with the Mexican people.

López Obrador’s successor is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female President. She is as precise and controlled as amlo was blustery, but she has kept up the tradition of the mañanera. If anything, she talks with reporters even less, so her statements in the Treasury Room often provide the best indications of her administration’s priorities and plans.

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