The Hot Honeymoon of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

By KENT PATERSON

Journalists assigned coverage of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) better be madrugaderos, or early birds. Virtually every day at 7 am the new president gives a daily press conference that also frequently features senior members of his administration.

Since AMLO assumed office Dec. 1, the topics have been heady, encompassing multiple foreign and domestic crises. At the same time he’s made good on campaign promises of increasing the minimum wage and doubling pensions for eight million-plus senior citizens.

In his drive to effect what he calls Mexico’s Fourth Transformation, the left-leaning president has grappled with Central American caravans headed to the United States; a Christmas Eve helicopter crash that killed new Puebla Governor Martha Alonso (who was barely 10 days into her term) along with her husband and prominent politician Rafael Moreno del Valle; controversies over a proposed National Guard and a new Mexico City airport; the planned Maya Train; and gasoline shortages, among others.  

Plenty of barbs fly AMLO’s way from both the right and the left. Sounding remarkably similar to rightist critics, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) dismisses AMLO as “crazy.” The Zapatistas slam the Maya Train, which is envisioned to whisk millions of tourists across the Yucatan Peninsula and Chiapas state, as an existential threat to Indigenous peoples. For his part, the president insists local communities will be partners in and beneficiaries of a government project that, if built, will be a centerpiece of Fourth Transformation development.

Luis Hernandez Navarro, La Jornada daily editor and a leading analyst of Mexican social movements, couches the Zapatista stance to historic divergences between the Mayan based organization and Lopez Obrador’s camp as well as the military pressure long deployed against pro-EZLN communities. “Confronted by the militarization of Chiapas during more than a quarter century, the EZLN rejects the National Guard and regards it as the next step in the militarization of the country,” Hernandez recently wrote.

If internal troubles weren’t enough, AMLO must cope with the ever hegemonic neighbor on his northern border. The ongoing humanitarian crisis of Central Americans and others passing through Mexico on their way to the US has the Mexican government in a pickle as the Trump administration fervently seeks to prevent asylum seekers from crossing the border.

Seeking to avert a clash with Washington, the Mexican government offers the refugees visas so they can remain legally in the country and even find work, while trying to entice the Trump administration into investing in Central American development.

But, as La Jornada’s Jorge Durand comments, the policy could be viewed by Central Americans traveling to the US as a “means of containment” that prevents them from reaching the Promised Land.

AMLO, however, is clearly not playing Washington’s game with Venezuela.

Citing principles of non-intervention in the affairs of other countries while offering to act as a mediator for a peaceful resolution in Venezuela, Mexico abstained from January’s OAS vote rejecting the inauguration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to a second term. 

Back on the home front, meanwhile, AMLO has unleashed a frontal assault on so called huachicoleros, bands of highly organized gasoline thieves who steal upwards of $3 billion worth of fuel from the state hydrocarbon company Pemex every year and resell it on a thriving black market, according to government sources.  

In January, thousands of military personnel and federal police were deployed to pipelines, distribution terminals and refineries to safeguard supplies. Pipelines subject to break-ins and requiring new security measures were ordered temporarily shut down.  

“This is an illegality, an immorality, an act of corruption we have to confront,” AMLO said in a statement. The president’s administration contends the gasoline black market was not only tolerated by his predecessor administrations for decades but implicated government officials as well.

Quoted in Reforma, Ricardo Monreal, Senate coordinator for Lopez Obrador’s Morena party, characterized the anti-huachicolero campaign as constituting a “second oil expropriation,” an allusion to President Lazaro Cardenas’ 1938 expropriation of foreign oil companies but this time targeting organized crime.

Yet, the government closure of illegally tapped pipelines in addition to outright sabotage by presumably counter-attacking huachicoleros was blamed for gasoline supply shortages in important regions of the country where drivers parked outside service stations in long lines, sometimes for days. The specter of a wider crisis occasioned by fuel shortages shrouded the economic landscape.

Despite severe disruptions to daily life, the public has so far stood with AMLO. A January telephone poll of 500 people reported on Aristeguinoticas.com showed 72% of respondents backing the huachicolero crackdown.  A popular photo circulating on social media depicts several former Mexican presidents with AMLO hovering over them saying “I have to do the work of all these fools.” 

A critical battleground in the Fourth Transformation has emerged in the foreign owned factories, or maquiladoras, along the northern border, where a test of the relationship among the State, corporations, labor and civil society is brewing.   

According to Mexican press reports, work stoppages and protests involving more than 40,000 workers in Ciudad Juarez, Matamoros and Agua Prieta and Cananea have erupted in the past few weeks over the reported slashing of bonuses typically offered to workers.  

The pay cuts came at the same time AMLO decreed a doubling of the minimum wage in the northern border zone to about nine dollars a day, even though the new administration is offering tax incentives to maquiladoras as part of its northern border economic development strategy.

Worker denunciations of union leaders, who have been traditionally a part of the former ruling PRI party’s governing apparatus, is another common thread linking the protests.

The maquiladora protests provide an opening for a genuinely independent labor movement, something workers have demanded for decades.

Ciudad Juarez labor lawyer Susana Prieto, who represented workers during the border city’s historic maquiladora worker movement of 2015-16, assesses the current juncture as a moment when workers and civil society must shuck passivity and actively stand up for their rights and dignity if social transformation is happen.

Although Prieto supports AMLO’s Fourth Transformation, she stresses the president is not a savior. “Superman doesn’t exist, or Batman, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is not that person; things don’t change from one day to the next,” the activist attorney said. “All of us citizens should participate, so the country is different. It’s important that we as citizens wake up.”

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who divides his time between Mexico and the US Southwest.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2019

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