Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Supporters wait for the arrival of former President Donald Trump at the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. Courthouse, June 13, 2023, in Miami. Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty on 37 charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice.

As former President Donald Trump was arraigned today on federal charges related to the retention of classified documents, one of his primary defenses has been that he is a target of unfair selective prosecution. He and his supporters say that Hillary Clinton, as well as President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence, also mishandled secret government information.

Why, they ask, weren’t any of the others prosecuted for such actions? Why has Mr. Trump been singled out?

“Most Republicans believe we live in a country where Hillary Clinton did similar things and nothing happened to her,” said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in a broadcast interview Sunday.

The cases might seem alike on the surface. But legal experts say they differ in crucial ways.

Mrs. Clinton accessed government emails, some of which contained classified references, on a private server while she was secretary of state during the Obama administration. Mr. Trump kept boxes of actual classified documents, stamped with their secrecy level and warnings against dissemination, in unsecured locations at his home in Florida after he left the White House.

President Biden and Mr. Pence also were found to have had classified materials at their homes or offices. But Mr. Trump’s behavior was allegedly much different than theirs.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Pence appear to have searched for classified materials, alerted the government when they found them, and then handed them over.

By contrast, after the government learned of the missing documents in his possession, instead of cooperating, Mr. Trump actively conspired to hide his trove of secrets, according to the Department of Justice indictment unveiled last Friday.

Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel/AP

Nadine Seiler holds a banner that reads "Trump indicted" outside the court where the former president was arraigned on June 13, 2023, in Miami.

He moved boxes out of a storage room, misled his own lawyers about document locations, hinted that his attorneys should hide or destroy items under subpoena, and flashed classified information in front of guests with no security clearance, according to the Justice Department.

“Trump hid them from the government and lied about it. I don’t know how much ... clearer the difference can be,” says Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who worked in the Public Integrity section of the Department of Justice. 

Mr. Trump appeared Tuesday afternoon at a federal courthouse in Miami, where he pleaded not guilty to all 37 counts. Afterward, he was expected to go to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he planned to deliver scheduled remarks and hold a fundraiser.

Hillary Clinton’s emails

In 2015 the intelligence community’s internal watchdog alerted the FBI to the fact that Mrs. Clinton, when serving as secretary of state, had used a private email server for government business. That meant potentially hundreds of emails containing classified information were present on Secretary Clinton’s unsecured personal network. 

Eventually, Clinton aides turned over some 30,000 work-related emails to federal investigators. They deleted another 30,000 deemed to be personal.

Intelligence agencies determined that 110 of the provided emails, in 52 chains, contained information that was classified at the time the emails were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information at the Top Secret level, then-FBI Director James Comey said in July 2016.

Mr. Comey rebuked Mrs. Clinton as “extremely careless” in her handling of classified data. But in the end, he recommended no criminal charges be brought in the case. There was no evidence she had willfully mishandled or intentionally disseminated secrets, Mr. Comey said, and “our judgment is no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

The Trump indictment

According to the indictment prepared by special counsel Jack Smith, when former President Trump left office in January 2021, he brought with him to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of classified documents.

He then had them moved about his Florida estate, from a bathroom, to a ballroom, and then a basement storage room. Some were brought to his office and bedroom. The indictment alleges that in two instances he showed them to uncleared witnesses, while admitting to them that he should not do that, and warning his guests to not get too close.

Marco Bello/Reuters

Memorabilia depicts former President Donald Trump outside the federal courthouse where he was arraigned on classified document charges, in Miami, June 13, 2023.

The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump knew about the classified information in his possession, and engaged in an elaborate shell game of box-moving to hide some files from government officials and his own attorney, instead of returning all of them when asked. The FBI eventually obtained a court-sanctioned subpoena to search Mar-a-Lago and found additional classified materials.

Prosecutors have charged Mr. Trump with 37 counts on seven different criminal charges. The key word in the indictment might be “willful.” Mr. Smith is in effect charging the former president with intentionally retaining government secrets, intentionally hiding what he had in his possession from investigators, and disseminating the information even though he knew that was legally problematic.

Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr said Sunday on Fox News that the indictment is “very damning” if “even half of it is true.”

Biden and Pence cases

Not every case in which someone mishandles classified documents – and not even every case where someone knowingly takes them home – gets prosecuted, says James P. Gillis, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at George Mason University.

The prosecutor deciding whether to go forward with charges “tries to balance what is the real federal interest in the case against what is ... just a technical or unintentional violation of the statute,” Mr. Gillis says.

The Justice Department has already notified Mr. Pence that it will not pursue charges in his case, for instance. Aides conducting a search found about a dozen documents bearing classified markings at Mr. Pence’s home in January. Investigators discovered no evidence that the former vice president hid the classified papers from the government, or that he even knew they were there.

As for President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate the discovery of classified material dating from Mr. Biden’s time as vice president at his home in Delaware and an unsecured office in Washington.

Mr. Biden was slow to provide a full public accounting of the search of his domiciles for classified information. Some documents were found in his Wilmington, Delaware, garage, next to his Corvette.

But as yet there is no public evidence that Mr. Biden’s retention of documents was intentional or purposely concealed, and he appears to have returned all the materials upon discovery.

That remains the key difference in the Trump case. It is not just that the former president took or possessed secret documents after leaving the White House, say some experts; it was his actions after the discovery. Had he taken the advice of many of his lawyers and simply turned over all classified materials, it is possible, even likely, that the special counsel would have declined to indict him.

“He was given a get out of jail free card if he had just returned the docs,” tweeted Matt Glassman, a Georgetown Government Affairs Institute senior fellow, last weekend. “No normal citizen gets that kind of ‘oops’ but it makes sense for former high ranking officials, who may often have stray docs lying around.”

Editor’s note: A former version of this story misidentified James P. Gillis as teaching at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. He teaches at George Mason’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

In San Miguel de Colorado, a hamlet 12,000 feet up in the arid mountains of northern Argentina, live some of the poorest people in the country, in one of its driest corners.

Beneath their feet lies wealth – one of the world’s richest reserves of lithium, a mineral critical to greening the world economy – that international mining companies are rushing to exploit. But local residents, predominantly Indigenous people, fear for the future of their scant water, which is key to the industrial extraction process.

Lithium “is a resource ... for the whole world,” says Abdón Valdiviezo, a community leader in San Miguel, standing outside his adobe home in the province of Jujuy. “But there is no commitment to our future. If we lose our water, we’ll have to leave.”

For the planet, lithium represents hope. For the farmers and herders of this stark region, it risks meaning sacrifice; they are calling on the authorities to strike a balance between the immediate global demand for the mineral, and their long-term livelihoods.

They are racing against the clock to ensure that their voices are heard, that water reserves are protected, and that local people share in the underground wealth.

“Lithium is being branded as the resource to help halt the climate crisis,” says Erika Weinthal, an environmental policy expert at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But local communities, “many of whom are Indigenous,” she points out, “rarely benefit from the revenue.”

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Abdón Valdiviezo stands in the doorway of his home in San Miguel de Colorado in the province of Jujuy, Argentina, April 15, 2023.

Growing demand

As urgency to address the climate crisis grows, the lithium industry is expanding rapidly, especially in Argentina, where regulation is lax and royalties are low. Before 2015, there were two lithium mining projects operating here. Three dozen projects have been approved since then and are in varying phases of exploration and construction.

Román Guitián says his parents, grandparents, and relatives as far back as he knows all drank from the Los Patos river, which runs by his village in Salar del Hombre Muerto in the province of Catamarca, which neighbors Jujuy. This is the site of Argentina’s oldest lithium mine, opened in 1997, a supplier for companies like Tesla and BMW.

Since lithium production began, community members have bought bottled water out of precaution, allowing only their llamas, sheep, and goats to drink from the river for fear of contamination from the operations. Mr. Guitián worries they could lose the river entirely. A segment of the Trapiche river disappeared years ago after the same company set up a dam to collect fresh water for use in the mine, he says.

“It dried up and no one said anything,” says Mr. Guitián, the cacique, or leader, of his Indigenous community. He says six other companies are exploring in the region. 

Producing one ton of lithium generally takes 2 million liters of water (just over 528,000 gallons). Brine is pumped up from underground into massive ponds to evaporate so that the remaining lithium salts can be processed. Some companies use a method called direct lithium extraction to recycle a portion of the wastewater, but it’s not a widespread approach.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff/File

Solar evaporation ponds at the SQM Salar de Atacama facility on April 28, 2022, in the Atacama desert, in Chile. SQM extracts and produces lithium in brine form from the desert soil. The company has 20% Chinese ownership.

Demand for lithium is expected to multiply over 40-fold in the next two decades as countries deliver on their climate targets. U.S. regulators have proposed new rules that would make two-thirds of car models electric by 2032.

The “lithium triangle” of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia holds close to 60% of the world’s known reserves. Bolivia has long taken a state-centric approach to its lithium industry, while Chile announced a plan to nationalize the sector last month. Argentina, desperate for foreign investment to ease its economic woes, has adopted the most market-friendly model, with government royalties on exports at 3%. Royalties can reach 40% in Chile.

“Where are the studies? How do the aquifers behave? Who is going to take responsibility?” asks Mr. Guitián. “They’ve never explained that to me.” 

He and other activists have organized protests for stronger protections but say local media rarely cover their concerns anymore as the region has moved forward in favor of lithium mining. But demonstrations have had an effect elsewhere in the world, leading to a pause in a lithium project in Chile and the shutdown of another in Serbia last year.

“A lot of unknowns”

On paper, Argentina’s environmental protections are “the best in Latin America,” says Gustavo Gómez, a federal prosecutor for three northern provinces. “The problem we have is that we don’t apply them,” he says. That leaves companies to largely regulate themselves.

Some say the nature of the green energy sector means those involved with lithium are more conscious of their local impact than in other industries. 

“The companies and the ways they develop the lithium projects have very strict regulation and efficiency parameters when it comes to environmental care, and especially water use,” says Ignacio Celorrio, president for Latin America of Lithium Americas Corp.

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Children play with salt at the Salinas Grandes salt flats in the province of Jujuy, Argentina, April 15, 2023.

Federal legislation gives Indigenous communities the right to be consulted about the extractive projects that affect their territory. Lithium companies have reached agreements with some local Indigenous communities. Others say they received environmental impact reports but were not consulted about the information presented, or they received nothing. 

“If you don’t have the consent of the communities related to the project, it’s very difficult to move forward,” says Mr. Celorrio. But, he adds, “there are many communities not directly connected to the projects,” making it difficult to speak with everyone.

Locals say the nature of water sources can mean that all communities in the vast arid region known as the Puna are affected regardless of their immediate proximity to operations. In the scramble for foreign investment, provincial governments regulating the lithium industry may not be considering the potential impact of so many new mines using the same water sources at once, say environmentalists.

“They’re pressured and in a hurry to approve the projects,” says Felicity Arengo, associate director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She says there are limits for freshwater extraction but no restrictions on brine or lithium itself. “The science lags behind how fast it’s going.”

Unusually large profits in lithium production are attracting new companies all the time, although prices have fallen this year after surging in 2022.

“In this boom, there literally is enough to go around,” says Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network in Bolivia. “There’s enough to benefit the Indigenous peoples, to take care of the environment, and to provide a safety net for the producing countries while providing lithium batteries and clean energy for consuming countries.”
 

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Carlos Chuchuy, a leader of the Indigenous Lumara community in the north of Argentina, collects leaves of the rica-rica plant during a visit to the Salinas Grandes salt flats in the province of Jujuy, Argentina, April 15, 2023.

More than a “resource”?

The lithium-rich Argentine provinces of Jujuy, Salta, and Catamarca have long struggled with scant private sector jobs. For some, the arrival of new mining companies comes with trade-offs worth accepting. 

“We all know that long-term, the mines are harmful to the people and for the water supply,” says Rodrigo Ayala, a taxi driver in San Salvador de Jujuy whose income has multiplied since the company he works for began catering to a lithium company. “But we need the money,” he says.

Most days of the week, members of the San Miguel de Colorado Indigenous community can be found at the Salinas Grandes salt flats, a popular tourist attraction and one of the sites in advanced exploration for lithium extraction. They gather in a hut for guides, taking refuge from the harsh sun and wind as they wait for tourists to arrive. A sign staked in the expanse of salt outside reads, “No to lithium. Yes to water and life on our territory.”

“The state sees our land as a resource. We see it as part of our being,” says Macadonio Carrillo.

Carlos Chuchuy, a leader from another Indigenous community 70 miles north, is visiting the flats in solidarity. His father worked his whole life in lead mines, and his son is studying mining engineering. Mr. Chuchuy is holding out hope that his son’s degree will lead him to a safer way to approach the region’s lithium. 

The way things stand, he says, “lithium is bread for today, hunger for tomorrow.” 

Editor's note: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of the name of the director of the Andean Information Network in Bolivia.

Broaching the subject of mental health was once taboo in certain communities. Not anymore. For Black men specifically, this couldn’t be more true. 

Billionaire hip-hop mogul Jay-Z espouses the importance of therapy in a Netflix interview with former talk show host David Letterman. Charlamagne Tha God, a host of the nationally syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club,” is a strong proponent of mental health awareness and destigmatizing it in Black communities. He often shares his personal battles with anxiety. 

When comedian Marlon Wayans served as the guest host for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” this spring, he implored guests and viewers to donate to a Philadelphia area nonprofit that specializes in introducing Black men to therapy.

Black Men Heal is a 5-year-old organization that has been increasingly part of the conversation about Black men and mental health, specifically in a time of upheaval in America. The group, which also curates programming for people of color, is the brainchild of founder Tasnim Sulaiman, a licensed therapist who ran her own private practice before she started Black Men Heal.

“I had clients – Black men – who all started coming to me with some of the same problems, and I started to see a pattern,” Ms. Sulaiman says.

During her private sessions with clients, recurring problems kept manifesting: unresolved childhood trauma, absentee fathers missing from their lives, and frustration from having to traverse a larger world full of societal ills. She helped many of her clients resolve marital, professional, and personal problems. But she was only one person, and every Black man in Philadelphia didn’t have the same income as the men who sat down across from her.

“I started to wonder how many other Black men were feeling like this but weren’t going to therapy. My clients were well-to-do men who could afford to pay $150 [per visit] or they had jobs with good insurance,” she says. 

Pro bono therapy

A picture of how she envisioned Black Men Heal came to her one day while out jogging, and she got to work. She had already started doing pro bono work for some financially strapped individuals, but she saw that the number of Black men in need was much higher. Her goal was to offer multiple free sessions and pair the men with culturally sensitive therapists, perhaps Black men, who could build rapport with them and establish trust. She had a daughter to raise and bills of her own as a newly divorced woman, so she couldn’t offer all of her services for free. But she could gather a community of like-minded people to address the issue, she thought.

RASHID MARCEL/COURTESY OF BLACK MEN HEAL

A Black Men Heal therapy participant gets a massage as part of a wellness event related to a 2022 Kings Corner Tour in Philadelphia.

“I knew other people who were therapists. I told them what I was trying to do but that I couldn’t pay them,” Ms. Sulaiman says. “Since I like to cook, I told them that I could cook for them,” she says during a Zoom call, pointing from her kitchen to the dining room table of her home. 

They bought into her idea and started to offer pro bono therapy. Black men also bought into the idea. Today Black Men Heal offers eight free sessions to new participants and seeks to destigmatize therapy and eliminate costs. If participants wish to continue therapy, they can if their insurance covers it or if they can afford it out of pocket. 

Black Men Heal has a 75% continuation rate among participants. It hosts virtual Sunday sessions called Kings Corner, where Black men from across the country gather on Zoom to talk about healing. In five years, Black Men Heal has served 3,567 men, between individual therapy and Kings Corner sessions, with 1,642 new individuals participating in 2022. Since starting in 2018, the organization has expanded its list of providers beyond Pennsylvania to Delaware, New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland, the District of Columbia, New York, Virginia, and Georgia. 

In the Philadelphia area, Black Men Heal has inspired local organizations and has been recognized for its community work. Film director Muhammad Bilal credited his time in counseling through Black Men Heal with helping him work through personal issues. He went further and created a 48-minute film, “Perdido,” about mental health. He premiered the film and participated in a panel discussion about it, led by Ms. Sulaiman, at a Community Mental Health Awareness Day in West Philadelphia in early May.

Chapter leaders at African American Greek Fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma, Pi Gamma Sigma Alumni Chapter, wanted to shine a light on the work that Ms. Sulaiman was doing. They named Black Men Heal the nonprofit business of the year in 2019 at their Bigger and Better Business ceremony. They also are debuting a new initiative this year, My Brother’s Keeper, where they want to send alumni fraternity members – no questions asked – to the organization for counseling for mental health wellness. 

“As Black men, or men in general, we keep quiet about stuff when we shouldn’t, and for her to tackle that, that was big. There’s a lot going on in the world today,” says William Streeter, who chaired the board that nominated Black Men Heal for the award. “She’s definitely making a difference and it’s slowly growing, because we’ve been watching for a while. We figured we could help support her by sending a few people her way.”

RASHID MARCEL/COURTESY OF BLACK MEN HEAL

Black Men Heal founder Tasnim Sulaiman (right) speaks in 2022 during BMH’s Kings Corner Tour and men’s wellness event in Philadelphia.

“Like a breath of fresh air”

Participation in Black Men Heal grew tremendously during the pandemic. Ms. Sulaiman says the ability to offer counseling sessions virtually, which is how the sessions are done now, helped more men connect with the organization. 

LeBrian Brown was a pandemic convert to Black Men Heal, after a series of setbacks almost drove him to his breaking point. “We had just lost a baby,” he says. “My wife got laid off from work. It was during COVID. I was just depressed, man.” 

He was crushed after seeing George Floyd’s murder online and participated in multiple protests, he says. His family went from two incomes to surviving on the $40,000 he made working at a Philadelphia nonprofit that serviced unhoused people. 

“I just felt like I couldn’t continue on,” he adds.

His wife heard about Black Men Heal through a friend and suggested that he apply for a lottery they had to accept new patients. He and several of his friends wrote to the organization for free therapy and he heard back within days. 

“When I came into Black Men Heal, it was like a breath of fresh air,” Mr. Brown says. “The therapist took me all the way back to problems with my dad, and problems with my hometown [Trenton, New Jersey], and just problems with me not believing in myself, all the way to the point where I am now. And it just freed me from a lot of those demons,” Mr. Brown says.

His therapist gave him homework, having him write letters to people and address his trauma. He stopped therapy after his 12 free sessions because he said that he wanted to test to see if he was strong enough to incorporate what he’d learned into his daily life. 

Since therapy ended, he started his own consulting business that helps those who are formerly incarcerated integrate back into society. He secured a contract with the state of Pennsylvania to provide those services. His wife is pregnant again with their first child together. Once his new health insurance kicks in, he’s going back to therapy, he says.

“Black Men Heal gave me a lot of confidence,” he says, adding that his life “changed for the better.”

The TV cameras swept across the row of elite runners gathered at the start of the 2023 Comrades ultramarathon. Skin prickling with goosebumps in the 40-degree morning, they waved and flashed nervous smiles. 

Ahead of them, the race’s 55-mile course curled into the still pitch-black winter day. At their backs, 16,000 hobby runners sang and snapped selfies as speakers croaked pop songs over the crowd. 

Galaletsang Mekgoe could have been in the front row, if she wanted. The year before, she’d finished fifth in the Comrades, which is – by a considerable margin – the world’s largest race longer than a standard marathon. The 26-year-old firefighter from a rural South African village had picked off a field that included an American runner who was the most decorated female ultrarunner in the world. In the Comrades’ centurylong history, no Black woman had ever come so close to winning the race. 

Now, however, as the cameras dipped and panned over the elite field, Ms. Mekgoe was nowhere to be seen. “I don’t like to stand out,” she explained a few days earlier, running her tongue over the braces she’d gotten a few months before to make her feel more confident in photos. “I’m not that type.” And so on race morning, she tucked herself into the third row of runners, where she could be alone with the nerves blooming in her stomach. 

The starting gun popped, and she sprinted into the darkness after the leaders. 

She could handle that though. Ms. Mekgoe had never been afraid to chase.

Making history

The week before, on a misty Thursday morning, she jogged onto the main street in the tourist town of Dullstroom, where she’d spent the month before the Comrades at a high-altitude training camp with six of her running club teammates. Their pack of lanky runners wound up the road, past old white ladies walking fluffy dogs in sweaters and gift shops selling local gins and wedges of fancy cheese. When they reached the edge of town, where a ribbon of road stretched out towards the pine tree plantations in the distance, they tucked in their arms and started to sprint. 

Ms. Mekgoe, who is slight and lanky, was the only woman in the group, and within a few seconds, she’d fallen to the back of the pack. 

It was always like this. 

Ryan Lenora Brown

Galaletsang Mekgoe (center) trains with teammates from the Nedbank Running Club in Dullstroom, South Africa, ahead of the 2023 Comrades Marathon.

“It takes a lot of mental strength to run with the boys,” her teammate Edward “Slender” Mothibi, a former Comrades champion, observed. “It is not easy to be the one chasing all the time.” 

By now, though, she’d gotten used to it. Ms. Mekgoe had spent more than a year training with these men, who in 2022 claimed five of the top 10 spots at the Comrades. “There’s no other lady from our area who’s fast enough to run with Gala,” said her coach, Dave Adams, a retired mining engineer. She was in her mid-20s and already pulling down times that put her in a global elite among ultradistance runners. So yes, running with the guys was her best option. 

And anyway, they adored each other as much as they respected each other. “She’s our last-born sister,” said Tete Dijana, who had won the Comrades men’s race in 2022. It wasn’t just that they ran together. At night, Mr. Adams cooked them heaping plates of spaghetti bolognese and cottage pie, and they scrunched together on their guesthouse’s couches, laughing and joking about dyeing their hair a rainbow of colors before the big race.    

Most of them came from the same place, the rundown villages that cluster around South Africa’s magnificently wealthy platinum mines. They’d been raised by mothers who scraped a living as domestic workers and fathers who worked punishing hours in the mines before coming home to their tiny, crowded houses. They were hungry, in a way that was hard to explain to outsiders, for a life bigger than what had been scripted for them.

“Definitely, I am here to make history,” Ms. Mekgoe said. 

A hundred years ago, in May 1923, six dozen runners lined up on the same start line as Ms. Mekgoe and her teammates, in front of the same soaring red brick city hall in Pietermaritzburg. They were there to participate in a harebrained race between that city and coastal Durban, which had been started two years earlier by a World War I veteran wanting to honor his fallen comrades. 

The race was only open to white men. But that morning, to the great delight of the local press, a “plucky lady runner” sidled up to the start line, dressed in “a businesslike green gymnasium costume” and canvas sneakers.

The gun fired, and Frances Hayward took off with the rest of the pack. Eleven hours and 35 minutes later, the 31-year-old typist jogged across the finish line in Durban, more than 50 miles away. “They were very nice to me,” she said simply of her reception from the crowd, before heading out to an evening at the theater. 

Rogan Ward/Reuters

People cheer as runners competing in the Comrades Marathon pass through Ashburton, South Africa, June 11, 2023.

But for decades, women and runners of color remained a race novelty – and for organizers, a frustrating one. “To my way of thinking, the Comrades Marathon is a serious athletic event, and when one has women and non-whites participating, it becomes a bit of a circus,” explained a ruffled race official in 1971. 

In 1975, the race organizers finally agreed to officially open it to women and runners of color, setting off an enormous boom in the race’s popularity. But 20 years later, when Ms. Mekgoe was born in a village near the city of Rustenberg, only one Black woman had ever cracked the race’s top 10. 

“The issue has always been resources,” says Olive Anthony, who in 1980 became the first woman of color ever to complete the race. “It’s really as simple as that.” 

Old injury

About an hour and a half after the start on race morning in 2023, the sun was still rising in pastel smudges of pink and blue when Ms. Mekgoe felt it, an old, familiar pain prickling in her leg. She tried to ignore it as the race wound past pungent chicken farms and tiny farming towns.

She thought of how the race had unfolded the year before. She had taken unpaid leave from her job as a firefighter in a nature reserve to join the training camp in Dullstroom. She hadn’t told her family, who depended on her salary, where she was until a few days before she was at the starting line of the race. When she felt tired on the course that day, “I thought of them because I am the breadwinner,” she says. “I was fighting for top 10 to pay back the risk I took.” 

In that race, she’d also started slow, steadily gaining positions as the hours dragged on. Along much of the course, a crowd pressed in on all sides, and she heard their shrieks of delight as she passed. “A Black lady!” they shouted in Zulu. “Go fight for us!”

Late in the race, she spied a willowy figure ahead of her. It was Camille Herron, an American ultrarunner with a long list of world records to her name, who is widely considered the best in the world. But out there on the Comrades course, she looked exhausted. Ms. Mekgoe kicked past her. “You never know who God has written in the big book to win the race that day,” she said of that moment. 

Later, she’d returned home from the race to a parade held in her honor, where she and her teammates stood on the back of a pickup truck as fans ululated and grabbed for their hands, screaming their names. 

Then, she had been a surprise, a prodigy. But this year, everyone was expecting something of her. There had been days at her training camp when she put away her phone so she wouldn’t see the messages from people back home. Now that she had made a name for herself, people imagined she had money to spare. It was too much sometimes. 

And now, 15 miles into today’s race, her leg was really starting to hurt. It was an old injury, flaring up on the biggest stage of her life.

Courtesy of Jared Hinde

Camille Herron (left) and Galaletsang Mekgoe (right) talk at the finish line of the 2022 Comrades Marathon, where Ms. Mekgoe finished fifth and Ms. Herron sixth.

Running with your soul 

Five hours and 14 minutes after the starting gun fired, Ms. Mekgoe’s teammate, Mr. Dijana, sprinted across the finish line at Kingsmead Cricket Stadium in Durban, a huge smile cracking across his face. He’d shattered the old race record by four minutes. 

Over the next 15 minutes, three more of her teammates – Mr. Mothibi, Johannes Makgetla, and Joseph Manyedi – crossed the line. As soon as Mr. Manyedi crossed in 10th place, they’d knotted themselves into a tight group hug. Mr. Dijana was crying. 

A few minutes later, the women’s winner, a South African named Gerda Steyn, crossed the line with blonde braids flying. She, too, had shattered the record. 

Still out on the course, Ms. Mekgoe was watching her own dream slip away.

Since the halfway mark, the pain had been shooting up her leg with every step, growing progressively worse. “[To end up] on the podium, it takes a lot, a lot of sacrifices,” she had stammered out in the elite athletes’ press conference two days earlier, as she sat sandwiched on the stage between eight white women. Now, those sacrifices seemed to have gotten her nowhere. She fantasized about quitting.  

In the same press conference, one of the elite male runners, Bongmusa Mthembu had described what it was like to be deep into the Comrades, at the moment when you become convinced you have nothing left. “At some point your body is finished,” he said. “You’re going to run with your mind, you’re going to run with your soul.”

Here, now, she was doing that. Every step hurt, but Ms. Mekgoe kept going. Even as she watched the 10th-place runner pull away from her, and with it her hopes of a cash prize. Even as she entered the stadium to muted cheers. 

The finish line was empty when she crossed. Her coach, Mr. Adams, had fallen sick and wasn’t at the race. The men were doing their doping testing. And her club manager had already packed up and headed off to celebrate the winners. She limped towards the finishers area, holding back tears. “My leg,” she whispered to a medic, slumping into a plastic chair. 

The next morning, she put on her club’s green tracksuit and headed to the prize-giving ceremony. She had still won a prize – for being part of the top-finishing women’s team. And when her training mates went on stage to collect their awards, she stood up and cheered louder than anyone. 

“It wasn’t this year,” she said. “But my time is still coming.” 

AP

The presumptive presidential candidate of the ruling Morena party, Mexico Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum (center) raises her arms during a June 11 news conference. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's MORENA party announced the rules to be followed by its candidates for the presidential elections of 2024.

The mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, resigned this week in order to run for president. She is already the leading contender, which, if she wins next year, means Mexico would beat the United States in having its first female president. Yet as a trained physicist who says she looks for “root causes” in both science and politics, Ms. Sheinbaum might want to ask this: Why have the overall biases against women in Mexico – among both men and women – increased?

The latest United Nations data shows Mexico is in company with Russia, Chile, South Korea, and Kyrgyzstan in showing the largest decline in attitudes toward gender equality. Violence against women remains high. In particular, bias against Mexican women in politics jumped from 46.61% in 2010–2014 to 58.01% in 2017–2022.

Yet other facts reveal progress for Mexican women. Not only is Ms. Sheinbaum ahead in the polls to become head of Latin America’s second-largest economy, but also nearly a third of governorships in Mexico are held by women – more than in the U.S. (Ms. Sheinbaum became Mexico City’s first female mayor in 2018.)

She cites a survey by the national statistics agency showing that more than two-thirds of Mexicans back a woman becoming president. Last January, the Supreme Court elected its first female chief justice. These triumphs belie the image of a machista (sexist) culture. Just as Mexico shook off one-party rule a generation ago and renewed its democracy, it is now one of the most advanced countries in the participation of women in politics.

In the last 10 years, says Ms. Sheinbaum, being a female politician was a handicap. “Right now it is something positive,” she told The Associated Press. Her record as mayor includes making the city safer for women. Murder rates in general are down in the capital. “It’s time for women,” says a scientist who knows how to look for root causes that can impel progress.