It looks like Mexico’s opposition has found its candidate for the 2024 presidential race: Bertha Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz. The opposition still has to go through a formal process to pick its candidate, but several of her would-be rivals have already dropped out. Her rivals perceive a race tilted in her favor.

Mexican President López Obrador, meanwhile, has proclaimed in his mañanera that the opposition primary contest just amounts to political theater and that, ultimately, the mastermind behind the opposition coalition, business magnate Claudio X. González, will have the final say.

Gálvez’s political resume? Short and uninspiring. She ran and lost the race for governor of her home state of Hidalgo in 2010 and served one term as borough mayor in México City. Gálvez currently sits as an indirectly elected senator from the party list of the right-wing National Action Party, the PAN.

Gálvez has evidently been picked as the opposition’s candidate in part because of her humble origins and self-claimed Indigenous identity as a child born into a working-class family with an Otomí father and a mestiza mother. Upon throwing her name in the race, her background quickly became the topic of discussion, suggesting that her status as a woman of Indigenous ancestry will be instrumentalized in the upcoming race and featured throughout.

But critics have already dug up an old interview where Gálvez talks about being white and having white skin. We’ve seen regular instances of people falsely claiming to be Indigenous over recent years. I’ve learned that when it comes to this issue, instead of asking what people claim to be, we ought to ask, “Who claims you?”

Despite her charity work with Indigenous peoples in the 2000s, Gálvez is not generally viewed as a champion of Indigenous peoples. Instead she is mostly known for her theatrics. She recently wore a dinosaur costume in the Senate, chained herself to a chair in an attempt to disrupt proceedings, and, most recently, showed up to the National Palace demanding to be let in and allowed to address the president’s mañanera.

Much of the Mexican punditry has tried to float the narrative that López Obrador’s party, Morena, somehow “fears” a Xóchitl Gálvez candidacy. Only those totally out of touch with the Mexican population would draw such a conclusion. Morena does not fear Gálvez at all.

One sign of just how much the López Obrador presidency has shifted the public debate: Gálvez began her candidacy with a video defending his social programs. Gálvez now even claims she got her start in politics with the Trotskyist Liga Obrera Marxista. But prominent Mexican Trotskyists like Edgar Sánchez deny she ever sat in their circles. Sánchez sees her claim as a “marketing stunt” aimed at winning support from Mexico’s working class.

Gálvez will ultimately enter the 2024 race as the representative of the right-wing Va por México coalition. Despite her promises to maintain AMLO’s popular social programs and to portray herself as leftist, Gálvez and PAN represent the ancien régime and the oligarchs desperate to return to power.

Mexican voters fell victim to slick political marketing in the 2012 presidential race that resulted in Enrique Peña Nieto’s election. After that disappointment, and with the contrasting experience of living during López Obrador’s period as president, they won’t be fooled this time around into voting for a conservative dressed in a huipil.

José Luis Granados Ceja, a Mexican freelance journalist, is currently studying human rights and popular democracy at the Autonomous
University of Mexico City. His writings on democratic struggles in Latin America appear regularly online at his Antimperialistia site.