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.

read the article

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.”

read the article

The Huffington Post: Trump Keeps Lying About Having Started His Wall, And His Supporters Don’t Care

Donald Trump keeps claiming that construction on his promised “great wall” is well underway although not a single yard of it has been built, and his supporters are getting mad ― not at the president, but at those who point out his lie.[...]

“All politicians are liars. They’re all weasels,” said the 60-year-old from Panama City. “You know why he’s so good? Because he’s up there breaking all the furniture. If he wanted to shoot somebody on Broadway, I’d vote ‘not guilty.’”[...]

Trump promised hundreds of times during his campaign that he would force Mexico to pay for the wall’s construction. Yet nearly two years into his presidency, he has not even once broached the topic with that country. In fact, he acknowledged to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto just days after taking office that he understood Mexico would not pay for the wall but asked Peña Nieto not to say that publicly to avoid embarrassing Trump with his supporters.  [...]

With most of Trump’s thousands of falsehoods, it is unclear whether he knows he is saying something untrue. Trump has proven to be deeply ignorant on any number of issues important to the presidency, so in many cases, a given falsehood could be a matter of him lacking information about a topic but forming a strong opinion nonetheless.

But on the matter of the wall, Trump does seem to understand that Congress has not provided any funding for its construction. In fact, he threatened to veto a massive $1.3 trillion spending package in March because it did not pay for his wall. He wound up signing it anyway, and said he did so because of all the money it contained for the military.

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: The Narco-State to the North

The result was, as we could have predicted, an escalation in the violence. Conservative numbers now put the number of dead since 2006 or 2007, when this began, at more than 125,000 people. Something like 30,000 people have been forcibly disappeared. Their families don’t know where they are. The result is massive levels of violence and destruction in places where drug trafficking had been centered: in the north, in Sinaloa, in what we call the Tierra Caliente, where much of the marijuana and opium poppies are grown, in Veracruz, which is a port city on the eastern side of Mexico. [...]

The state is deeply implicated in this and the massacres that we have seen: the disappearance of these students at Ayotzinapa, the killing of twenty innocent civilians at Tlatlaya, another massacre in a town called Apatzingán. There have been multiple places where innocent civilians were killed at the hands of security forces in execution-style killings. We see the Mexican security forces implicated in this violence, in these killings and disappearances. [...]

These Central American migrants are themselves fleeing violence having to do with the destabilization of their societies, which goes back to the US-backed wars in Central America in the 1980s and more recently the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009. The role of the US in creating the conditions of violence in Central America and then militarizing the southern border has created incredible opportunities for the criminal organizations, particularly a ferocious group known as Los Zetas who emerged from the Mexican special forces and recruited Guatemalan Kaibiles, Guatemalan special forces, and are deadly killers. [...]

One of the biggest problems in Mexico is impunity. Something like over 95 percent of crimes aren’t investigated. People don’t call the police because often the police are corrupt and on the payroll of cartel members. When a family member disappears, for instance, it’s difficult to know who can help you because often the security forces are on the payroll of the people you suspect may have disappeared your loved one. [...]

That’s something that has been pointed out by observers across the political spectrum to Donald Trump. Mexico could stop agreeing to cooperate with the US. They could decide that they do not want to be the proxy militarization of the southern border, for instance. They could decide they no longer want to prosecute a militarized drug war. They could stop cooperating with the US in any number of ways, and that would have incredible consequences for the US, particularly the opposite of what it is that Donald Trump thinks that he is here to do.

read the article