Written off as a political dead duck by right wing pundits after each of his two earlier presidential defeats, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) proved his contention that the “third time is the charm” by scoring a stunning victory July 1 in Mexico’s elections. The center-left contender not only trounced his three opponents with 53% of the vote but captured 31 of 32 Mexican states in a landslide of epic proportions to become the president-elect.
What’s more, López Obrador’s Morena (National Regeneration Movement) party, along with its electoral allies from the small Labor Party (PT) and the right-wing Social Encounter Party (PES), won the Mexican Congress, claimed five state governorships and conquered city governments in many of Mexico’s most important cities, including Mexico City, Acapulco, Matamoros and Cancun, according to media reports.
The unprecedented political triumph gives the president-elect, who will take office Dec. 1, a solid political structure to implement a popular reform program if the different pieces stay together. The biggest casualty of the election was President Peña Nieto’s ruling PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which suffered defeats of historic magnitude at multiple levels of government.
Speaking to the nation late in the evening of his victory, AMLO laid out the general policies of his incoming administration, pledging to adhere to democratic norms, fight corruption, curb criminal impunity, maintain financial stability, favor popular sectors in the economic realm, and pursue friendly but dignified relations with the United States.
The former Mexico City mayor vowed that the Mexican state will not act as a “committee at the service of a minority and represent poor and rich alike; inhabitants of the city and country; migrants, believers and non-believers; human beings of all manner of thought and of all sexual preferences ...” Above all, López Obrador promised that his government would embrace the poor and “especially the indigenous people of Mexico.”
AMLO’s victory occurred amid Mexico’s most violent crime wave in years, ongoing corruption scandals involving politicians from the ruling PRI party, and stagnating or worsening economic prospects for large sectors of the population, particularly the demographically dominant Millennial generation.
Aguascalientes retail employee Laura Bazan said she voted for AMLO in part “because we’re living in a state of violence and insecurity that can’t be tolerated anymore ...”
Strikingly, López Obrador won the election not only in his traditional strongholds of south-central Mexico but across the nation where the PRI and/or conservative political forces have long held sway. Aguascalientes was one of the new places on the political map where AMLO’s victory flag was planted.
A small but growing city and state of about 1.3 million inhabitants, Aguascalientes embodies many of the contradictions, conflicts and challenges of contemporary Mexico. Right wing Catholicism and the sexually liberal San Marcos Fair, Mexico’s biggest spring bash, are two faces of the locale. Social conservatism and growing LGBTQ activism are flip sides of the political coin. Once a stop on the old Camino Real trade route between Mexico City and Santa Fe, Aguascalientes today is a spoke in the wheels of the global assembly line.
Nissan rolls out more vehicles here than anywhere else in Latin America. US auto parts maker Cooper Standard is likewise fond of doing business in Aguascalientes. Donald Trump aside, the Michigan-based company broke ground June 26 for a second Aguascalientes plant that corporate executives and state political leaders said would add another 100 jobs.
Despite booms in the local automotive and electronic industries, many locals complain of low wages. The temporary employment agency Manpower, for instance, recently advertised factory jobs for an auto parts supplier with a beginning salary of about $55 per week plus benefits. Increasingly, public transportation, urban infrastructure, education and housing all register shortcomings.
Political analyst Fernando Rivera, former elections official and Morena co-founder in Aguascalientes, attributed his party’s showing July 1 to “constant work, passing out the (party) newspaper and being in the social media.”
But Rivera also pointed to local dynamics in politics, saying “Apart from the people wanting a change, which they were shouting for, is the lack of results from local governments ... the analysis I have is that people are fed up with traditional parties. Nonetheless, the fatigue affects the PRI more than the (conservative) PAN.
López Obrador won Aguascalientes with about 38% of the vote, far lower than the national figure, but a political milestone in a state where the PRI and PAN (conservative Party of National Action) have long dominated. In fact, Morena emerged as the second biggest statewide political force after July 1, relegating the PRI to third place. Although the PAN and its coalition partners won the congressional seats up for grabs and maintained control of the state legislature, Morena won four seats outright in the state body.
Carlos Tristan, an Aguascalientes campaign coordinator for Morena, said a precedent was set on July 1. “The perception of the citizenry is going to be that the PAN and the PRI aren’t the only options.”
López Obrador has said he is determined to maintain good relations with the US. “We are not going to get into fights,” he told Mexico’s Televisa TV network the day after his election. “We are going to extend our hand honestly in the search of a friendly and respectful cooperation.”
López Obrador added that he would not interfere in the NAFTA negotiations until he takes control of the government on Dec. 1. Then, he hinted, he would seek a more ambitious deal including US aid for rural development in the name of discouraging migration.
López Obrador’s campaign and triumphant sweep attracted world attention, especially in Latin America, where the politically progressive drift of large swaths of the region between 1998 and 2015 was more recently reversed, illustrated by the ascension of right wing governments in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Honduras.
Former Colombian guerrilla and Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro, who lost to right-winger Ivan Duque in the country’s recent second round of presidential elections, called López Obrador the “hope” of Latin America and the torch-bearer for a progressive movement in the Americas that’s awaiting rebirth.
Bolivian President Evo Morales said AMLO’s victory was solid proof that the “neo-liberal economic models of the right and their walls don’t work in Latin America.” Morales viewed July 1 as a “beginning from Mexico, which we respect and salute, because it’s a power in Latin America.”
An ambitious politician, López Obrador proposes what he calls “the fourth transformation” of Mexico, advocating a new historic stage in which greater national sovereignty, democratic participation, economic equity and racial and gender equality are governing principles. For his program to progress, AMLO will have to not only convince lingering skeptics and opponents in Mexico but also navigate the minefields of an economic dependency on the United States that’s now overseen by the bellicose Trump administration in Washington. The eyes of Mexico and the world will be on Mexico’s 64-year president elect who never stopped struggling and shouted to the country the evening of July 1, “It can be done!”
Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who divides his time between Mexico and the US Southwest.
From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2018
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