How Many Presidents Has Mexico Had?
Claudia Sheinbaum, sworn in on 1 October 2024, is usually counted as the 66th president of Mexico — and the first woman to hold the office. The exact total is genuinely disputed, because Mexico's chaotic 1800s threw up presidents who governed for months or even days. What is not disputed is the modern rule: since 1934, every single president has served one fixed six-year term, and none has ever been re-elected.
Why nobody agrees on the total
Ask how many presidents the United States has had and you get one clean answer. Ask the same of Mexico and you get an argument. The reason is the 19th century: after independence in 1821, Mexico cycled through empires, civil wars, foreign invasions and rival governments, and many "presidents" held the office for a matter of weeks — some for days. Antonio López de Santa Anna alone took the presidency on around eleven separate occasions.
So the tally depends on judgement calls. Do you count interim caretakers? Rival claimants during the Reform War, when liberals and conservatives each appointed their own president? Leaders installed by a foreign army? Different historians answer differently, which is why Sheinbaum is described as the 66th on the most common reckoning, but other counts land a few either side.
The rule that fixed everything: one term, no return
Out of that chaos came an iron rule. The 1917 Constitution, born of the Mexican Revolution, banned presidential re-election outright — a deliberate answer to Porfirio Díaz, who had ruled for more than thirty years by simply re-electing himself. From 1934 the term was set at six years, the sexenio, and the ban was made absolute: no one who has held the office, even on a caretaker basis, may ever run again.
The effect is striking. Since Cárdenas in 1934, every Mexican president has served one six-year term and then left — sixteen people, sixteen clean handovers. Where the US debates two-term limits and Brazil allows one re-election, Mexico's answer is simpler and stricter: you get one sexenio, and that is all.
The modern presidents, in order (since 1934)
Listing all 65 disputed predecessors would be a 19th-century history lesson in itself. Here instead is the clean, uncontested modern run: the 16 presidents who have each served a single six-year sexenio since 1934, ending with the country's first woman president.
From one-party rule to the first woman president
For most of the 20th century the sexenio belonged to a single party. The PRI held the presidency without interruption from 1929 until 2000, when Vicente Fox of the PAN finally broke the streak. Power then alternated — PAN, back to the PRI, then in 2018 a landslide for Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his new Morena movement.
Morena's dominance set up the milestone. In June 2024 Claudia Sheinbaum — a physicist by training, with a doctorate in energy engineering, and a former mayor of Mexico City — won the presidency with nearly 60% of the vote. On 1 October 2024 the green-white-and-red presidential sash was placed across a woman's chest for the first time in Mexican history.
How much power is in the job?
The Mexican presidency was once nicknamed the "six-year dictatorship" for how much power it concentrated. Democracy diluted that — but the one rule that never bends is the limit: one term, no return.
Think you know them? Prove it
A quick quiz. The counting questions catch most people.
- Wikipedia — List of presidents of Mexico and List of heads of state of Mexico (the contested 19th-century counts; the 1934 six-year term)
- Britannica — List of presidents of Mexico; the 1917 Constitution and the ban on re-election
- Mexico News Daily (October 2025) — Sheinbaum described as Mexico's 66th president; first year in office
- Presidency of the Republic (gob.mx) — Claudia Sheinbaum, sworn in 1 October 2024
- Natural Earth public-domain country data (via world-atlas), used on the Leaders of the World map
Sixty-six presidents on the usual count, or sixteen if you start where the modern rule does — either way, Mexico is the rare country where the most interesting number is not how many there have been, but how firmly each one is shown the door.