As an expat Brit for more than three decades, one thing had always irritated me. Why could I not vote in the U.K. elections? Why was this not a default right for all citizens? I kept asking.

Pablo Lemus Navarro, the winner of Jalisco’s gubernatorial election on June 2, was born in Guadalajara in July 1969 to a family dedicated to the sale and repair of musical instruments.

Last weekend, the two candidates contending to become Mexico’s first female president went toe-to-toe in the third and final televised debate, covering a topic that sits at the heart of this country’s troubled psyche: crime and violence.

In most of Mexico’s 32 states, voters have an easy choice in the June 2 presidential election.

Has an optimistic young man with lofty goals of changing Mexico’s political system dominated by elitist, corrupt parties finally opted out by throwing in his lot with Morena, a party which, in the eyes of some Mexicans, is little more than a renaissance of the nation’s failed populist past?

On Monday, March 18, Mexico takes the day off to honor the birthday (March 21, 1806) of the man widely considered the nation’s greatest ever president: Benito Juarez.