The New York Review of Books: The Threats, Real and Imagined, of Mexico’s Election

Although López Obrador has moved toward the center during the campaign, his Morena party has a left-wing base that resembles some of the movements and governments that Washington has opposed since they began to spread through Latin America in the early years of the twenty-first century. López Obrador was a popular mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005; he ran for president in 2006 and 2012 as the candidate of the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). When López Obrador formed Morena in 2014, he took a large part of the PRD’s support with him. [...]

Like Bernie Sanders in the 2016 US presidential election, López Obrador is running as an outsider, in this case against what he claims is a corrupt elite represented by all the mainstream parties that cannot provide either economic or physical security for the country’s citizens. He promises to “clean out corruption in government from top to bottom, like you clean the stairs.” And he proposes the reallocation of about 4 percent of Mexico’s GDP to infrastructure and social programs, including a universal pension—since a similar policy for Mexico City residents was one of his most popular and influential achievements when he was the city’s mayor. [...]

Many people believed that Mexico began a transition to democracy in 2000, when the PRI lost the presidency. But this has turned out to be something of a myth. The promise of that transition never materialized, and Mexico became an increasingly violent and still deeply corrupt narco-state. The failed neoliberal economic reforms that the PRI initiated, beginning in the 1980s, were consolidated with the NAFTA agreement, which helped to draw Mexico closer to the US, economically and politically. [...]

The twenty-three years since NAFTA have been an economic failure, by any historical or international comparison. The national poverty rate is higher today than it was in 1994, and real (inflation-adjusted) wages have barely risen. Over the period, Mexico ranked fifteenth of twenty Latin American countries in GDP growth per person. Nearly five million farmers lost their livelihoods, unable to compete with subsidized corn from the US. Although some found employment in the new agro-export industries, the displacement contributed to a surge of emigration to the US from 1994 to 2000.

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