Mexico’s President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum on Thursday announced the appointment of the newest member of her cabinet, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, who will be the president’s chief of staff, adding to the 16 secretaries already named.
Cárdenas Batel was governor of the state of Michoacán between 2002 and 2008, and was previously special advisor to outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“I have no doubt that the next government will be consistent with Claudia Sheinbaum’s trajectory, with the causes that she has already championed and defended during her life, in university, in her scientific research, in her activism, her politics, in her commitment to inclusive and sustainable growth, in her government work in Mexico City,” Cárdenas Batel said during Thursday’s press conference.
Cárdenas Batel continues a familial political legacy — his grandfather was Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, Mexico’s president between 1934 and 1940, and his father, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, was a former head of government of Mexico City and a founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution.
On July 4, Sheinbaum named four other secretaries including, controversially, Omar García Harfuch as secretary of security and citizen protection.
“García Harfuch is emblematic of this sort of nexus between state security forces and organized crime that continues to brutalize Mexican society,” said Claire Dorfman, assistant director of the Mexico Documentation Project for the National Security Archive.
“He is the type of security official whose presence effectively prevents any substantial changes in public security policy that could be put forth by the Sheinbaum administration to counter the ongoing violence and impunity plaguing the country,” she added.
García Harfuch’s grandfather, Marcelino García Barragán, was defense secretary under President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and was instrumental in the Oct. 2, 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico City. His father, Javier García Paniagua, was the head of the Federal Security Directorate, a secret police agency accused of torture, illegal detentions and forced disappearances during what is known as Mexico’s Dirty Wars.
García Harfuch was the chief of police of Mexico City between 2019 and 2023 under Sheinbaum’s mayoral term and the 2024 Morena party candidate for head of government of Mexico City. Before that, he was the head of the state of Guerrero’s investigation division of the Federal Police, a region known for its heroin market and where the Iguala mass kidnapping took place.
On the night of Sept. 26, 2014, 43 male students from Iguala’s Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, which is historically known for its student activism, were forcibly kidnapped and disappeared. Independent reports implicate the Mexican Army and Federal Police in collusion with organized criminal groups in the incident. Only three students’ remains have been identified.
According to multiple reports made by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts for the case, the same federal police were involved and participated in the attacks against the students and its eventual cover-up, though García Harfuch’s exact post and whereabouts at the time are hard to pinpoint.
“Whether or not he was actually in Guerrero doesn’t matter,” Dorfman said. “Everything that led up to the attacks was from policies enacted during his tenure as Guerrero state Federal Police coordinator.
In another controversial pick, Mexico’s powerful teachers union, the National Educational Workers Coordination, criticized Sheinbaum’s selection of incoming Secretary of Public Education Mario Delgado, who is currently the president of the National Regeneration Movement, or Morena party, that Sheinbaum and López Obrador belong to.
In addition to his lack of experience in the educational field, the union decried Delgado for promoting former President Enrique Peña Nieto’s “Pact for Mexico” reforms that required performance evaluations for all teachers to take in order to keep their jobs, which the union saw as overly controlling.
“The appointment of Delgado Carrillo to the head of the Secretariat of Public Education is an affront to the democratic teachers who remember that he was one of the main promoters of the labor-education reform of Enrique Peña Nieto in 2013, when he was part of the ‘Pact for Mexico’,” the union said in a July 8 statement.
As part of some of Sheinbaum’s less controversial picks, Rosa Icela Rodríguez will be interior secretary, a position that follows her current stint as secretary of security and citizen protection in López Obrador’s cabinet.
In 2016 and 2017, she participated in incorporating the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into the Constitution of Mexico City.
Ariadna Montiel will serve as the secretary of welfare of Mexico, her current post under López Obrador.
“Not only is she an honest woman, with great convictions, but she is of a dedication that few people have. Few people know that during Hurricane Otis she practically lived in Acapulco for more than six months with the wellness team. I am very proud that she continues to hold this position,” Sheinbaum said on July 4.
Montiel was previously the director of Mexico City’s public transportation agency, the Passenger Transport Network, during Marcelo Ebrard’s mayoral term between 2006 and 2012. She introduced 30 compressed natural gas buses to the city, the first of their kind in modernizing the city’s public transportation from an environmental standpoint.
Sheinbaum said she will name three more cabinet members — the secretaries of tourism, culture and labor— on July 18. The secretaries of defense and navy will be chosen in September in the days leading up to her presidency, which begins on Oct. 1.