When Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s new president-elect, takes office in October, she will become the leader of a country that has endured its most acute period of violence in recent memory. But she has little interest in addressing it.

Sheinbaum, who will be Mexico’s first female president, was elected Sunday in a landslide victory. The president-elect benefited greatly from the sky-high popularity of incumbent President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is term limited but endorsed Sheinbaum as his successor. She finished nearly 30 points ahead of her closest rival.

But while the popularity of Lopez Obrador, who has overseen a wildly approved economic agenda, may have gifted Sheinbaum the presidency, the president-elect has shown little interest in addressing Mexico’s rampant homicide problem. In fact, the former mayor of Mexico City and climate scientist has outlined an approach to addressing violence that seems like it was written by someone who is entirely aloof.

Lopez Obrador, despite his popularity, was president during Mexico’s deadliest period in modern history. More than 30,000 people were killed in 2023, which was a slight dip from a recent high of more than 35,000 homicides in 2020. As recently as 2015, Mexico had fewer than 20,000 homicides, an absurdly high number in its own right but significantly lower than the murder rate since Lopez Obrador took office in 2018.

But rather than take an aggressive posture toward the drug cartels that have perpetrated most of these killings, Sheinbaum has pledged to address the root causes of violence by continuing a Lopez Obrador policy dubbed “hugs, not bullets” that did little to address the homicide rate in the country.

Sheinbaum and Lopez Obrador have both subscribed to the notion that poverty is the only reason that people join criminal gangs and cartels. And while that may be a motivator for some, the fact is that drug cartels have existed for so long in Mexico that they are effectively cultural institutions.

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The promise of wealth and financial stability, then, only juices the ranks of violent cartels to a certain point. Furthermore, the existence and strength of the cartels is itself a driver of poverty because major victims of organized crime are legitimate small businesses that are forced to pay extortion fees in order to operate. Local young people who wish to make a living for themselves must then choose between being the extorted or the extorter.

But Sheinbaum has either no interest in confronting this reality or has thoroughly convinced herself that the cartels will simply go away if more people have jobs. Either way, the epidemic of violence that has plagued Mexico for decades will continue unabated, and thousands more will die during her presidency unless she breaks the cultural status the cartels currently enjoy. And that means first acknowledging that these gangs create the poverty she crusades against.