Mexico recently held federal, state, and municipal elections that were historic in a number of ways. The country had never previously embarked on an election as large in scale, with more than 20,000 vacant public offices at all levels of government to be filled by an electorate of almost 100 million eligible voters. For the first time in Mexico’s history, a woman, Claudia Sheinbaum, was elected to lead the government of the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking nation. Finally, these events took place in the shadows of record-high, albeit stable, levels of drug-related violence.

Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab, in collaboration with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently invited a panel of scholars for a roundtable Q&A about the implications of Mexico’s elections and to analyze the political context in which they were held. Among the speakers was Stanford Law School (SLS) Professor Amrit Singh, founding executive director of the Rule of Law Impact Lab at SLS.  A human rights lawyer, Singh has conducted strategic litigation, research and advocacy on a broad range of rule of law and rights issues in the U.S. and globally.

 

Read the Roundtable Summary