Jacobin Magazine: AMLO’s First One Hundred Days

Whereas former presidents restricted press access to a combination of carefully scripted public events and fluffball interviews with friendly media, AMLO gives a morning press conference every day for upwards of two hours at a time. Far from saturating his image and subjecting him to debilitating attacks — the warnings of high-paid handlers the world over — the mañaneras, as they have come to be known, have set the agenda for both the nation’s politics and its front pages. In a sign of the times, the archive of past conferences is now available on Spotify.

AMLO’s results in the policy terrain have, inevitably, been more nuanced than his masterful public image maneuvers. As promised with disciplined insistence during the campaign, AMLO wasted no time in attacking the kleptocratic state inherited from Peña Nieto, lowering the bloated salaries of top bureaucracy, reforming the bidding process for government tenders, and launching a war on the multibillion-dollar industry of gasoline thievery that literally fuels the nation’s criminal economy. He’s also quickly rolled out a series of social programs, including a modest universal pension for over-68s and those with disabilities, a scholarship program to allow young people who are neither studying nor working (known in Mexico as “ninis“) to receive training and apprenticeships, a system of microcredits for areas of high marginalization, and a centralization of the nation’s scattershot health care system with the promise of phasing in some form of universal coverage over two years.[...]

Other aspects of AMLO’s relationship with the US, however, have been less forthright. Since taking power, he has accommodated — to a fault — Trump’s border policy, seeking to provide visas and jobs to Central Americans in an attempt to curb migration, allowing asylum seekers to be returned to Mexico while their cases are processed with only a mild statement of disagreement, and refusing to speak out against both the American president’s inhumane policy of family separation and his repeated insistence on building a border wall. AMLO is clearly banking on behind-the-scenes persuasion standing a better chance of success than a high-profile, asymmetric war of words. But, although Trump has been unusually measured when referring to his Mexican counterpart, it is unclear what else Mexico is gaining by opting for the soft sell. [...]

On February 14, in another awkward miscommunication, a presidential order announced the cessation of governmental subsidies to all social organizations, unions, civil, and citizen movements. At stake was $30 million pesos in direct government subsidies. In the neoliberal era, the leeching of core state functions to an unelected, unaccountable army of NGOS and “civil society organizations” has represented a deliberate strategy of undermining the state. In that context, AMLO’s decree was clearly in the right. “They created this idea of civil society, satanizing and stigmatizing the government. If the work is done by the government it won’t be efficient and they’ll rob it all, so better to give it to us [civil-society organizations],” he stated at a press conference.

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Vox: Jared Kushner is getting an award from Mexico, and Mexicans aren’t happy about it

The Order of the Aztec Eagle — or La Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, in Spanish — is the highest honor Mexico’s government bestows on foreigners. It is awarded to individuals who’ve done a great service for Mexico or for humanity. Previous recipients include and Roberta Jacobson, the former US ambassador to Mexico, Bill Gates, and Queen Elizabeth II. [...]

Enrique Peña Nieto is deeply unpopular in Mexico, and this award for Kushner isn’t likely to win over detractors who already felt Peña Nieto let himself — and by extension, Mexico — get bullied by Trump. Incoming leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who is taking office on December 1, has promised to take a much tougher stance against the US president, but bitterness persists about Peña Nieto’s stance toward Trump. [...]

But Duncan Wood, the director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, said Kushner might have helped stop Trump from tearing up NAFTA altogether — and helped salvage parts of the bilateral relationship that became extremely testy during Trump’s tenure. [...]

Kushner, along with other advisers, helped convince Trump to renegotiate a trade deal, rather than totally scrap NAFTA. In an April interview with the Washington Post, Kushner hinted as much, claiming that he explained to the president the “plusses and minuses” of unilaterally pulling out of NAFTA.  [...]

Which means there’s another reason Peña Nieto chose to honor Jared: to possibly secure future investment in his commitment to Mexico. “By giving this award,” Wood said, “you’re hoping to stay involved in the bilateral relationship.”

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Vox: “A collapse of the center”: why fringe movements are winning around the world

People from Europe to Latin America are increasingly concerned about their economic well-being and general safety, experts say. The problem is that it seems only fringe movements — especially those on the far-right — are the ones offering new solutions for how to meet those needs.[...]

But the 2008 financial crisis, an uptick in terrorist attacks on the continent, and millions of refugees moving into Europe fueled a backlash to increased globalization. Fringe political parties in Europe that already believed in curbing globalization took advantage of that growing sentiment.[...]

As Vox’s Jen Kirby reports, voters in Brazil have grown frustrated with the status quo due to a slew of political and economic crises. The current center-right president, Michel Temer, is deeply unpopular in the wake of a struggling economy and a massive corruption scandal that has engulfed ministers in his government.[...]

“The post-World War II international order was already fading,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me, “and these developments will only add to the unfortunate momentum.”

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Vox: Mexico’s new president has a radical plan to end the drug war

Trujillo is part of a massive community in Mexico: the families of the disappeared. Official statistics show that more than 37,000 people have gone missing in Mexico since 2007, though NGOs say the figure is likely much higher, as families are often too scared of retribution to report. [...]

Since the military took to the streets to fight the increasingly powerful and violent cartels producing and trafficking drugs north to consumers in the United States, tens of thousands of Mexicans have died. And a broken police and judicial system means perpetrators are almost never held accountable for a disappearance or murder. [...]

But the latest iteration of the drug war, which has coincided with Mexico’s most violent era in modern history, began in 2006, when the newly elected President Felipe Calderón declared war on cartels and sent 6,500 soldiers to the unstable Michoacán state. [...]

Calderón’s military deployment was later bolstered by the Mérida Initiative, an agreement with the United States to cooperate on the drug war. Since 2008, the US has given $2.7 billion to Mexico through the initiative “to help shape Mexico’s security policy,” while the Department of Defense gives millions more in its work with the Mexican military. [...]

It’s an ambitious goal, given how weak Mexico’s police forces are. By the government’s own analysis, Mexico has fewer than half the police officers it needs. Only 42 percent meet “basic competency” standards. Only 10 percent have been trained in criminal investigation. The average salary is barely $500 per month.

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The Guardian: Mexico's failing war on drugs: after 200,000 dead, Amlo pledges to end the violence

In few places can the ferocity and futility of Mexico’s war on drugs be felt more than Tecomán, a once tranquil coastal community. Last year its murder rate of a reported 172.51 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants resembled that of a war zone.

Experts blame Mexico’s militarized assault on the drug cartels – launched by former president Felipe Calderón in 2006 – for fragmenting them into smaller, warring factions and sparking a turf war that has turned Tecomán and neighboring municipalities along its strategic west coast into some of the country’s deadliest. [...]

Indira Vizcaíno, Amlo’s point-person in Colima state, where Tecomán is located, said security policy would no longer “just be a matter of fighting fire with fire”. “Crime rates aren’t going up because the people feel like being bad. Crime rates are going up because people need to eat.” [...]

Instead, Lessing said he believed Amlo should adopt a “violence minimisation” strategy designed to slash Mexico’s homicide rate by targeting cartels that insisted in perpetrating acts of deadly violence such as those ravaging Tecomán.

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Vox: López Obrador, a Trump-bashing leftist, just won Mexico’s presidency in a landslide

Given his nationalist position, it’s uncertain how he’ll affect the potential renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which President Donald Trump has been critical of recently. That basically means that if Trump ceases NAFTA, López Obrador may not fight to keep the agreement. [...]

Mexican voters clearly want to see López Obrador fix the systemic corruption and violence that plagues the country. But once he’s inaugurated on December 1, the challenge of actually instituting policies to reduce corruption will begin. [...]

“He doesn’t have a very precise plan,” Pablo Piccato, a professor at Columbia University who specializes in Mexican history, told me shortly before the election, “The president might be very honest, and by all indications López Obrador is a very austere and honest guy. But what happens underneath, at the level of the bureaucracy, the municipal governments, the state government — that’s going to be very difficult to control.” [...]

“The biggest problem I see are the expectations he has built,” Carlos Illades, a professor of social sciences at the Autonomous Metropolitan University and a historian of Mexico’s left, told the New York Times. “The problem is going to be what he is not able to do. There are people who are expecting a lot.”

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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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