The Zócalo is not a square so much as an archive. Empires have announced themselves there — viceroys, emperors, revolutionaries, presidents — and every generation of Mexicans has stood beneath its balconies to hear what the powerful intend. This Sunday it was Claudia Sheinbaum’s turn. Days before the opening of her third year in office, and on the eve of the 2027 midterm elections, Mexico’s president addressed thousands of supporters gathered in the great square, in a speech steeped in the historical references of the country’s long struggles for independence and sovereignty — and carrying an unmistakable allusion to the pressure now arriving from Washington under the banner of fighting what it calls “narcoterrorism.”
Mexicans do not want interference, interventionism or violation of our territoriality
The sentence was the heart of the speech. It was not addressed to the crowd; it was addressed past the crowd, northward, to a president in Washington determined to expand American influence beyond its borders. The massed thousands in the square were the witnesses summoned to make the message carry.
The Referendum That Comes in the Middle
Every president faces a kind of referendum in the midterm elections, but few govern under such overlapping threats as Sheinbaum. At home there is the security and violence crisis, and within her own party, Morena, a fierce struggle over the elective posts to be filled next year. Abroad there are the pressures and threats of the United States — which, the report notes, will also hold midterm elections this year, giving Washington its own reasons to reach for the language of confrontation.
Sheinbaum meets all this from a position of rare strength. Seven out of ten Mexicans support her administration, one of the highest presidential approval ratings in the country’s history. She is the first woman to hold Mexico’s executive office, and she has converted that popularity into a message of unity and national resistance aimed at the interventionist impulses of Donald Trump’s government. Morena’s majority in both chambers of Congress lets her take, and survive, delicate decisions.
The Governor She Removed
The most striking proof of that resolve came from within her own camp. Sheinbaum ordered the removal of Rubén Rocha, the former governor of Sinaloa and a member of Morena, along with his circle of aides, after prolonged political wear over narcotics-trafficking accusations filed against him by Washington in U.S. courts. A weaker leader protects the accused loyalist; Sheinbaum cut him loose, and the decision stands as her answer to those who wait for her to bend.
At home she rides a triumphalist current: a strengthening economy, falling poverty, a measure of stabilization in the security situation. Yet her gaze, according to the reporting, keeps drifting to the region’s rising far right — and with concern, to the alliances forming between foreign think tanks and Mexico’s weakened opposition parties.
There is an old geometry to this scene: the smaller country that must speak loudly because it cannot speak seldom, the larger neighbor that mistakes proximity for entitlement. Empires rarely remember the words spoken against them from squares like the Zócalo. The squares remember. In nine months the midterms will test whether the crowd’s answer matches the podium’s certainty — and Washington, counting its own votes, will be listening either way.