Big Change Coming to Mexico

Despite employing more journalists to cover Mexico than almost any other country The New York Times has woefully under-reported the presidential election that will take place there on July 1.

That's what got me thinking that something important for regular people might be about to happen. The front-runner is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) of the National Regeneration Movement Party (MORENA); he is 20 points ahead of his closest competitor. Large corporate employers are holding captive audience meetings with their workers warning them not to vote for AMLO. Vote-rigging is unlikely with such a substantial lead, but assassination can't be ruled out, as Jacobin's Dan La Botz explains in "The Plot Against López Obrador."

The NYT's  Kirk Semple published a story yesterday on the presidential election, "Why Is Trump ‘Not Important’ in Mexico Election? All Candidates Are Against Him," which looked at the campaign through the prism of Mexican reaction to Trump. It was light on the candidates and their respective campaigns, but it did include this:

Rather, the issues that seem to be animating the electorate are immediate problems that directly affect Mexicans’ quality of life, including historically high rates of violence; poverty and inequality; and intractable corruption and impunity.

“No Mexican voter is going to expect any candidate to talk about Trump,” said José Merino, a political analyst who is advising the Mexico City mayoral candidate from Mr. López Obrador’s party, Morena, the Spanish-language acronym for the National Regeneration Movement.

Mexico's election, like the one this year in Italy, is about voter rebellion against the exhausted neoliberal consensus.

AMLO is shrewd in that, as Foreign Policy's Richard Miles pointed out this past February in "Is Mexico Ready for a Populist President?," he is not jousting directly against neoliberal orthodoxy; he is using the same code words "corruption" and "transparency" that Western governments often use to promote color revolutions in other countries:

Sensitive to criticism that he is a radical in waiting, he has highlighted policy proposals of austerity, low taxes, transparency, and nonintervention. The ruling party has done its best to depict him as sympathetic to, and longing for, authoritarian government, but there is little evidence that this strategy is working.

If elected, López Obrador is likely to change Mexican policy towards the United States in at least three areas: energy exploration, security cooperation, and support for democratic norms in the region. On energy, he said he would review existing contracts, and continues to view the opening of Mexico’s oil industry to foreign investment as treasonous. A López Obrador administration could slow down or halt bidding on new oil and gas finds in the Gulf of Mexico and refuse to approve new cross-border natural gas pipelines.

Similarly, he could freeze existing security cooperation with U.S. agencies to fight heroin production in Mexico and capture cartel leaders. “Problems of an economic and social nature cannot be solved with coercive measures,” he wrote last year. “It’s not military assistance, or intelligence work, or deliveries of helicopters and arms, that will solve the problems of insecurity and violence in our country.” 

Finally, López Obrador, who has never uttered an unkind word about the Castro brothers, Chávez, or Nicolás Maduro (but named a son after Che Guevara), would be likely to withdraw Mexican diplomats from the mediating role they have played in the region on Venezuela, and refuse to participate in international resolutions concerning Iran, North Korea, or Syria.

That last paragraph is one to savor.