MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s leading presidential candidate repeatedly touted the social programs of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and walked a fine line between supporting the national oil company and promising a clean energy transition in the second debate Sunday night ahead of the June 2 election.
Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum of the president’s Morena party continues to hold a healthy lead over Xóchitl Gálvez of a coalition of opposition of parties and Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the small Citizen Movement party.
López Obrador significantly raised Mexico’s minimum wage and increased spending on social programs, most of which are popular direct cash transfer programs. Sheinbaum has benefitted from her mentor’s popularity throughout the campaign and promised to continue his programs.
She called the model of government that he started and she has committed to continuing “humanist, an honest model, protector of our patrimony, with better salaries, with better pensions, without raising taxes.”
Even Gálvez, Sheinbaum’s most serious competitor, stressed that she, too, would maintain the popular, but costly programs if elected. The former senator and tech entrepreneur reminded voters that she knew poverty growing up and was able advance in part because of a scholarship.
“I am a woman who comes from below, who knows poverty and knows how poverty hurts and the time that it steals from you,” Gálvez said.
Álvarez Máynez, a former congressman, promoted his own initiatives to reduce Mexicans’ work week from six to five days, provide paternity leave and increase vacation. He said that despite the social spending of the current administration, young children receive a fraction of what they should because “they don’t vote.”
On the environment and climate change, Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, pointed to her efforts as mayor, such as putting solar panels on the rooftops of Mexico City’s sprawling wholesale market and adding more electric buses and bike lanes.
As president, she said, she would work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help Mexico adapt to climate change. But she also defended López Obrador’s construction of a huge new oil refinery that she said would help Mexico reduce its gasoline imports. She warned that Gálvez would try to privatize the deeply indebted state oil company, known as Pemex.
Gálvez said the private sector would be critical in Mexico’s clean energy transition. She added that Mexico was losing foreign investment opportunities because foreign companies require access to clean electricity produced with renewables. She promised to make Pemex an efficient company, something successive administrations from various parties have failed to do.
Álvarez Máynez said that Mexico remains overly dependent on fossil fuels and that the country’s future is in wind and solar power. He promised to put solar panels on all schools and health centers.
Gálvez once again was the aggressor in the debate, trying repeatedly to paint Sheinbaum as untrustworthy. This time she took to holding up a variety of placards while Sheinbaum spoke calling her a liar. Sheinbaum, in turn, took to calling Gálvez “the corrupt one.”
All three candidates said major changes are needed to address Mexico’s fresh water supply, hit hard in much of the country by a prolonged drought. Their plans combined the need for reusing water, the majority of which goes to irrigation, and improving water system infrastructure.
FILE - Rep. Jorge Álvarez Máynez greets supporters after he was nominated by the Citizen's Movement party to run for president in the upcoming general elections, Jan. 10, 2024, in Mexico City. Mexico's second presidential debate on Sunday, April 28, a little more than a month before the elections, measured the economic, employment and poverty proposals of the ruling Claudia Sheinbaum and opponents Xóchitl Gálvez and Maynez. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File)
FILE - This combination of two file photos shows Xochitl Galvez, left, arriving to register her name as a presidential candidate on July 4, 2023, in Mexico City, and Claudia Sheinbaum, right, at an event that presented her as her party's presidential nominee on Sept. 6, 2023, in Mexico City. The two women, considered the frontrunners in Mexico's presidential election, discussed social spending and climate change in the race's second debate Sunday, April 28, 2024, which also included Jorge Álvarez Máynez. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File)
JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinians across the Middle East on Wednesday are marking the anniversary of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel with protests and other events across the region at a time of mounting concern over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what today is Israel before and during the war surrounding its creation in 1948.
More than twice that number have been displaced within Gaza since the start of the latest war, which was triggered by Hamas' Oct. 7 attack into Israel. U.N. agencies say 550,000 people, nearly a quarter of Gaza's 2.3 million people, have been newly displaced in just the last week, as Israeli forces have pushed into the southern city of Rafah, along the border with Egypt, and reinvaded parts of northern Gaza.
“We lived through the Nakba not just once, but several times," said Umm Shadi Sheikh Khalil, who was displaced from Gaza City and now lives in a tent in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah.
The refugees and their descendants number some 6 million and live in built-up refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In Gaza, they are the majority of the population, with most families having relocated from what is now central and southern Israel.
Israel rejects what the Palestinians say is their right of return, because if it was fully implemented, it would likely result in a Palestinian majority within Israel's borders.
The refugee camps in Gaza have seen some of the heaviest fighting of the war. In other camps across the region, the fighting has revived painful memories from earlier rounds of violence in a decades-old conflict with no end in sight.
At a center for elderly residents of the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Amina Taher recalled the day her family’s house in the village of Deir al-Qassi, in today's northern Israel, collapsed over their heads after being shelled by Israeli forces in 1948. The house was next to a school that was being used as a base by Palestinian fighters, she said.
Taher, then 3 years old, was pulled from the rubble unharmed, but her 1-year-old sister was killed. Now she has seen the same scenes play out in news coverage of Gaza.
“When I would watch the news, I had a mental breakdown because then I remembered when the house fell on me,” she said. “What harm did these children do to get killed like this?”
Daoud Nasser, also now living in Shatila, was 6 years old when his family fled from the village of Balad al-Sheikh, near Haifa. His father tried to return to their village in the early years after 1948, when the border was relatively porous, but found a Jewish family living in their house, he said.
Nasser said he would attempt the same journey if the border were not so heavily guarded. “I would run. I’m ready to walk from here to there and sleep under the olive trees on my own land," he said.
The latest war began with Hamas' rampage across southern Israel, through some of the same areas where Palestinians fled from their villages 75 years earlier. Palestinian militants killed some 1.200 people that day, mostly civilians, and took another 250 hostage.
Israel responded with one of the heaviest military onslaughts in recent history, obliterating entire neighborhoods in Gaza and forcing some 80% of the population to flee their homes.
Gaza's Health Ministry says over 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants in its count. The U.N. says there is widespread hunger and that northern Gaza is in a “full-blown famine.”
Israel says its goal is to dismantle Hamas and return the estimated 100 hostages, and the remains of more than 30 others, still held by the group after it released most of the rest during a cease-fire last year.
Israeli troops pushed into Rafah last week. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has portrayed the city on Gaza's southern border with Egypt as Hamas' last stronghold, promising victory.
But the militants have regrouped elsewhere in Gaza, even in some of the hardest-hit areas, raising the prospect of a prolonged insurgency.
The fighting in Rafah has made the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing — Gaza's main cargo terminal — mostly inaccessible from the Palestinian side. Israel's capture of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt has forced it to shut down and sparked a crisis of relations with the Arab country. Aid groups says the loss of the two crossings has crippled efforts to provide humanitarian aid as needs mount.
In a statement on Tuesday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry accused Israel “distorting the facts” and condemned its “desperate attempts” to blame Egypt for the continued closure of the crossing. Egyptian officials have said the Rafah operation threatens the two countries’ decades-old peace treaty.
Shoukry was responding to remarks by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who said there was a “need to persuade Egypt to reopen the Rafah crossing to allow the continued delivery of international humanitarian aid to Gaza.”
Egypt has played a key role in months of mediation efforts aimed at brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and the release of hostages. The latest round of talks ended last week without a breakthrough.
Sewell reported from Beirut and Magdy from Cairo. Associated Press reporter Wafaa Shurafa reported from Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
Palestinians pray by the bodies of people killed during Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, next to the morgue in Deir al Balah, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians pray by the bodies of people killed during Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip next to the morgue in Deir al Balah, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians pray by the bodies of people killed during Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, next to the morgue in Deir al Balah, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians mourn their relatives killed during Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, next to the morgue in Deir al Balah, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians carry the body of a person killed during Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, next to the morgue in Deir al Balah, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians pray by the bodies of people killed during Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip next to the morgue in Deir al Balah, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians mourn their relatives killed during Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip in Deir al Balah, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli strike on a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians stand next to the site hit by an Israeli strike on a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli strike on a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians search debris after an Israeli strike on a school run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians hold the body of a dead baby rescued from the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians rescuers dig around the body of man in the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians rescuers dig around the body of man in the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT - Palestinians hold the body of a dead baby rescued from the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT - A Palestinian holds the body of a dead baby rescued from the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinians hold the body of a dead baby rescued from the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat, Gaza Strip, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
