AMLO in Mexico!

The reformist left-center candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly referred to by his initials AMLO, won a striking victory in the Mexican national election Sunday. And a woman from his Moreno party because the first female leader of Mexican City, a position previously held by AMLO and the source of much of his favorable reputation. This election victory wasn't some kind of fluke. It was a real political success for AMLO and his policies.

AFP reports (Leftist 'AMLO' sweeps to Mexican presidency 07/02/2018):

It is the first time in Mexico's modern history a candidate has won more than half the vote in a competitive election, and a resounding rejection of the two parties that have governed the country for nearly a century. ...

Lopez Obrador, 64, sought to downplay fears of radicalism, after critics branded him a "tropical Messiah" who would install Venezuela-style policies that could wreck Latin America's second-largest economy.

"Our new national project seeks an authentic democracy. We are not looking to construct a dictatorship, either open or hidden," he told cheering supporters, promising to safeguard freedoms, respect the private sector and work to reconcile a divided nation.

The endless War on Drugs that the US has promoted for decades, is key reasons for the grievances of the Mexican electorate:

Lopez Obrador successfully tapped voters' anger over a seemingly never-ending series of corruption scandals and horrific violence that left a record 25,000 murders last year -- an orgy of bloodshed fueled by the country's powerful drug cartels.

His coalition -- led by the Morena party he launched in 2014 -- appeared to be on track for a strong showing in state and congressional races as well, winning six of the day's nine governor's races, according to exit polls.

That included Mexico City, where a woman was elected for the first time ever, the scientist and environmentalist Claudia Sheinbaum.

John Ackerman (El día después La Journada 02.07.2018) notes that AMLO summarizes his political project as, "No mentir, no robar y no traicionar." ("Don't lie, don't steal and don't betray." And he writes:

No podemos dejar solo a López Obrador. Si bien la crítica al poder gubernamental es siempre esencial, también tenemos que tener claro que los gobiernos de izquierda se enfrentan a enormes retos con respecto a su relación con los poderes llamados "fácticos" que operan fuera de la institucionalidad democrática, como los oligarcas, los narcotraficantes y los grandes medios de comunicación.

La sociedad mexicana ha dado una enorme muestra de valentía, de fuerza y de dignidad el domingo, primero de julio. Celebremos la victoria. Nos la merecemos después de tantas décadas de luchas constantes por la justicia y la democracia, en las cuales han ofrendado sus vidas miles de héroes ­anónimos.

[We cannot abandon López Obrador. Certainly, criticism of governmental power is always essential, but we also have to be clear that governments of the left confront enormous challenges in respect to their relationship with the powers called "real" who operate outside of democratic instutitionalism, like the oligarchs, narcotrafficers, and the big communications media.

Mexican society has displayed an enormous show of courage, strength, and dignity on Sunday, the first of July. Let's celebrate the victory. We deserve it after so many decades of constant struggles for justice and democracy in which thousands of anonymous heroes have offered their lives.]

WaPo goes after AMLO

US reporting about Latin American politics, even in Mexico, can be painfully bad. This editorial from the Very Serious Washington Post is an example, Mexico’s could-be president is a lot like Trump. That doesn’t mean they’d get along. 06/17/2018

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly referred to as AMLO from his initials, is a center-left candidate with a long record as a political reformer, an opponent of corruption, and five years as a successful head of Mexico City's government. Polls are showing him with a strong lead in Mexico's presidential race a week from this Sunday.

How the WaPo editorial board decided he has a "reactionary agenda" is hard to fathom. Especially since they also bizarrely claim he intends to implement "the catastrophic '21st-century socialism' of Venezuela." (Or, technically, strongly imply it as a live possibility.) What the Venezuela reference is supposed to mean other than "bad" and "scary" isn't clear and it makes no sense anyway.

And despite the title, AMLO has shown no tendencies for incoherent tweets, recklessly threatening war, or kidnapping small children from immigrants and sticking them in cages. The WaPo could just say they prefer a corrupt president for Mexico who will do whatever Washington and corporate lobbyists tell him to, without the strange fantasies about AMLO in this editorial.

This is a goofy piece.

On the other hand, Nathaniel Parish Flannery's piece, Mexico's 2018 Election: Populism Vs. Prudence Forbes (!!), is notably more sober:

The 2018 election will have a big impact, not just for Mexico but also for multinational companies that operate in Mexico and north of the border in the US. Companies such as GE, IBM, Ford, Citi and Wal-Mart have invested heavily in Mexico over the last twenty plus years. Mexico’s economy has grown in fits and bursts during the NAFTA era but recent governments have done little to address the longstanding woes of a deeply divided society. In the 2018 election many parts of the country citizens tired with rampant corruption, brutal inequality, and decades of sluggish growth will have to decide between trying to persevere and preserve the nascent gains from the export-focused NAFTA era or shift to re-embrace a populist model that wants to at least partially reject the export-led development model and focus on boosting local industrial and agricultural output. During the NAFTA era presidents from Mexico’s centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and right-of-center National Action Party (PAN) have embraced a corrupt form of neoliberal capitalism that has focused on investing heavily in industry in export sectors in the north of the country but has done substantially less to foster real development initiatives in the country’s impoverished south. [my emphasis; internal links not included]

Flannery interviews Patrick Iber, a Latin American history scholar, who addresses the kind of propaganda in WaPo's silly editorial:

Ever since his first presidential campaign, there has been a sector of Mexican opinion that fears that AMLO would turn Mexico into a kind of Venezuela. This kind of insinuation contributed to the results of 2006—officially a very narrow loss for AMLO. Former president Vicente Fox has said that AMLO doesn’t respect Mexico’s democratic institutions, and the writer Enrique Krauze imagined in The New York Times that Lopez Obrador could "move toward annulling the division of powers and subordinating the Supreme Court and other autonomous institutions after restricting the freedom of the media and silencing any dissenting voices.” To me this seems extremely far-fetched.

There are all kinds of ways that AMLO communicates respect for democracy and the rule of law. One of his rivals, Ricardo Anaya, has suggested that he would arrest the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, if he were found guilty of corruption. AMLO has said it isn’t the president’s job to make such determinations. Other times, AMLO says he can’t commit to unilateral changes his supporters want, as they are the responsibility of Congress.

It is true that AMLO frequently makes reference to popular plebiscites, as have some of the other left-wing leaders in Latin America of recent vintage. But when pressed, he describes them as another democratic mechanism, not as a replacement for the authority of the legislature. Furthermore, the results of plebiscites would not necessarily lead to radical change. For example: abortion, same-sex marriage and adoption are legal in Mexico City. When asked if he would he would extend those rights to the rest of the country, he says he carry out a popular consultation because it’s a diverse country. The likely result of such a plebiscite would be to deny those rights on a country-wide basis, so this is probably a way of holding together his left-right MORENA-PES coalition. [my emphasis]

Iber has a differently kind of comparison for AMLO, "People always want to compare Latin American leaders to each other, but the political personality that AMLO most reminds me of is Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, he is promising moral renewal after a corrupt and unpopular administration."

Mexican politics and the Trump mass deportation program

The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática; PRD) is positioning itself by calling for “Solidaridad con México ante las agresiones del gobierno de los Estados Unidos” ("solidarity with Mexico before the aggressions of the government of the United States.") (Jesús Zambrano se integra a la Alianza Progresista y presenta resolutivo perredista contra políticas de Trump Proceso 12.03.2017)

But the PRD itself may be flaming out as a political force. Elected officials and party activists have been leaving the party. Their high point electorally was 2006, when their Presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador won 36% of the vote and nearly 30% in the election for deputies to the Congress. Their percentage has notably declined since then. (Jesús Cantú, El PRD, con cáncer terminal Proceso 09.03.2016)

The next Mexican national election is coming in July 2018, including the Presidency.

López Obrador himself (also known by his initials AMLO) is coming to New York this week to support Mexicans living in the US against Trump's mass deportation. He also plans to visit Washington, Laredo and San Francisco. These days, I guess the State Department has to learn about a major opposition politician from Mexico visiting the United States from the news like the rest of us.

Since Trump's election, AMLO has also visited Chicago, El Paso, Los Ángeles and Phoenix. (David Brooks [not Bobo!], AMLO llegará a NY para promover defensa de inmigrantes La Journada 09.03.2017)

Daniel González and Rafael Carranza, Mexican populist Andrés Manual López Obrador calls Trump border wall 'criminal act' in Phoenix visit Arizona Republic 03/06/2017:

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican presidential hopeful, brought his populist message to Phoenix on Tuesday, denouncing President Donald Trump's "criminal" border wall and immigration policies.

"The U.S. economy can not be sustained without the labor of immigrants, and he knows it," López Obrador said in a rousing speech in a Phoenix ballroom packed with hundreds of cheering supporters, mostly immigrants from Mexico.

"The wall is not going to stop the flow of workers. It's just going to make it more dangerous," he said. "That is why I believe it is a criminal act."

The leftist Mexican politician and former mayor of Mexico City also attacked corrupt governments in Mexico that he said force Mexicans to seek better economic opportunities in the U.S.

AMLO has a new electoral vehicle after breaking with the PRD. "López Obrador, founder of the left-wing National Regeneration Movement, or MORENA, in Mexico, has not officially announced his candidacy for the 2018 Mexican presidential race. But he is campaigning like a candidate, having already held rallies in several U.S. cities with large Mexican immigrant communities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and El Paso, where he spoke Monday."

Campaigning against Trump is a promising posture for the 2018 election:

"What the Trump administration is doing is really inflaming nationalist attitudes in Mexico," said Francisco Lara-Valencia, a professor at Arizona State University's School of Transborder Studies. ...

"He is coming here because he recognizes that (Mexican migrants) are a source of economic stability" through the billions of dollars in remittances they send home to relatives each year, Lara-Valencia said.

López Obrador also understands that Mexican migrants in the U.S. have the power to influence how friends and family members back home may vote in the Mexican presidential election, he said.

Ramirez said López Obredor has a better chance of delivering his message directly to migrants in the U.S. because the media in Mexico favors the Mexican establishment and unfairly paints López Obrador as a radical socialist. ...

During his speech in Phoenix, López Obrador said he is touring U.S. cities to offer his "unconditional support for our immigrant community" and to confront "the campaign of hate, and the campaign against Mexicans who come to look for a better life and an honorable life" not available to them in Mexico.

Univision interviewed AMLO in February, López Obrador: “México no ha entendido cuál es la estrategia de Donald Trump” 02/08/2017:

Daniel Borunda reported on his El Paso visit (Mexico's Obrador talks of Trump in El Paso visit El Paso Times 03/06/2017

The fiery leftist candidate is a fixture in Mexico politics and has run twice before for the presidency. The third time is the charm, he said on stage to loud cheers.

"We are going to end the principal problem of Mexico, which is corruption," López Obrador said.

He said Mexico's problems stem from government policies that harmed farmers, fostered low wages and forced people to leave their homes and migrate.

He pledged to cut taxes, lower gas prices and increase development with the building of roads, schools, hospitals and other public works.

He would create a free zone along the U.S.-Mexico border to spur investment, lower prices and raise wages. He pointed out that Mexican factory workers earn pennies compared to workers doing the same job in the United States.

Immigrants aren't the only victims, López Obrador said adding that drug violence in Juárez was the result of "absurd security strategies" and government policies.

"In recent years, we saw how a police problem escalated until it converted into a war that cost thousands of lives and resolved nothing. The price was tragic," he said.

On AMLO leaving the PRD, see Mexico's Lopez Obrador leaves coalition to form new movement BBC News 09/10/2012. MORENO was set up as a political party in 2014.