One year after a popular insurrection of people at the polls on July 1, 2018, that led to the victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in the Presidential elections in Mexico, he is trying to do his best to rebuild the nation. The challenge is enormous; even though the President is moved by a deep yearning for social justice, he is finding that fundamental change is much more than banishing structural corruption in the federal government, and that to build something new there has to be a dismantling of the old neoliberal and colonial state that sits on very solid foundations.
The past 12 months of AMLO’s presidency can be summarised into 10 keys that allow us to understand a Mexico in the process of transformation, even if it is not as deep or as fast as we would like:
1. Economy at the centre: The economy is the most important key. Guaranteeing the material living conditions of the population must be the main objective of any transformation process. Raising the minimum wage by 16.2% in his first month of governance was a good way to start. The bottom line is the redistribution, even if partial, of wealth via social redistributive programs. If social programs can quickly reach millions of people, as AMLO has proposed, along with progressive labour reform that increases the rights of the working class, Mexico can return to the path of growth and achieve the goal set by AMLO of achieving a 4% increase in GDP by the end of his 6-year term. This formula of achieving growth on the basis of an increase in domestic demand in the short term, and (re)industrialising the country in the medium-long term, has worked with considerable success in several other countries of the Latin American continent where progressive policies are being implemented; even though it frightens the right, this model actually follows Keynes, not Marx.
2. Austerity, by example: Before embarking on implementing an economic agenda to transform and genuinely develop the nation, to set an example with his own praxis, AMLO first took a firm decision of practising republican austerity. He has drastically reduced the thousands of staff employed for presidential security, reduced his own salary and those of other public employees getting very high salaries, sold off the presidential plane, and declared that he would continue to stay in his own home and transformed the lavish presidential residence and compound into a museum.
3. Fighting poverty and violence: These two are actually interconnected, and so the fight against each of them can only be waged together. Central to the implementation of the neoliberal model in Mexico was the ‘shock doctrine’. The consequent poverty created the conditions for the growing influence of criminal gangs and narco-trafficking, which in turn led to the most savage violence that has left Mexico strewn with mass graves. And the remains in these graves have always been those of Mexico’s indigenous communities, of poor brown-skinned people. Social programs should not only aim at allowing the poor and the indigenous communities drowned by neoliberalism to breathe, but should also lay the foundations for freeing the masses from this entrapment of poverty and violence in the medium to long term. That he is serious about healing the wounds of decades of neoliberalism was made clear in one of his first decisions that he took after becoming president – on December 3, he signed a decree to create a special commission to investigate the Ayotzinapa 43 case, in which 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were kidnapped by the local criminal gangs and killed on September 26, 2014. The appointment of Omar Gómez Trejo as the head of the Special Investigation and Litigation Unit set up to investigate this case is particularly promising, given his deep knowledge of the case and his experience in international human rights bodies. With this, AMLO has made clear that the government is serious about tackling organised crime.
4. Criminal economy: Closely accompanying the ‘shock doctrine’ is Mexico’s criminal economy, which includes but has become much bigger than the narco economy, and today represents more than 10% of Mexico’s GDP. The ‘war on drugs’ waged by the previous presidents was actually a sham; it did not touch the criminal economy, which continued to prosper, but on the other hand has left behind a tally of 250,000 dead and 40,000 people missing. Tackling this criminal economy is one of AMLO’s biggest challenges. Among the measures proposed by the president to tackle this are: taking the military off the streets and replacing them with better-trained, better-paid, more professional police; rewriting drug laws to regulate marijuana while pardoning nonviolent drug offenders; providing reparations and support for victims of the drug war; and, ramping up social programs, education, and job alternatives in violent, poor regions. At some point, he will also have to take on the challenge of re-establishing government contol over large parts of the country that have virtually been taken over by these criminal gangs.
5. National Guard: A key role in recovering territorial sovereignty is going to be played by the National Guard, a new police force proposed by AMLO. With widespread corruption in the local and state police forces, who often are in collusion with the criminal gangs running riot in the country, setting up a new security force that restores sovereignty and security over large parts of the national territory is fundamental. While seeking to enforce the law, the National Guard must act with a human rights perspective, not repressing social protests, not repressing the migrants who pass through Mexico—no human being is illegal, it is the mafias that transport and traffic migrants that are illegal. Whether he succeeds in setting up such a police force, how it will be deployed, how it will act, will be important issues that determine how successful López Obrador’s government has been at the end of its six-year term.
6. Dealing with Trump: Another of the challenges facing AMLO is negotiating with the whimsical White House tenant. AMLO knows that between now and November 2020, when elections in the USA are due, he is going to be subjected to all kinds of pressures, including political-economic blackmail, from Trump. At some point, he will have to confront Trump, and not give in. For the present, he has chosen a non-confrontationist path to gain time, and so has agreed to send the National Guard to the porous southern border, a decision that has provoked intense debate in Mexico and led to much criticism. One possible way in which AMLO can put counter pressure on the USA is by raising the issue of flow of illegal money and arms from the USA into Mexico: while drug trafficking and human trafficking go in a south-north direction, arms trafficking and money laundering do so in the opposite direction.
7. International Politics: While he has repeated a thousand times that the best foreign policy is a good domestic policy, the role Mexico will play in international politics will be another important key for analysing the AMLO presidency. That he will not shirk from taking a progressive stand is already obvious from the stands being taken by Mexico in the Venezuelan crisis. Mexico has proposed a new four-stage process to achieve peace in Venezuela, that has come to be known as the “Montevideo Mechanism”. It has also snubbed the so-called Lima Group that describes the re-election of President Nicolas Maduro as “illegitimate,” preferring instead to maintain good diplomatic relations with the Venezuelan government. Mexico is also hosting meeting of several of the main progressive leaders of Latin America in July this year in Puebla, indicating that it is gearing up to play a central role in the new wave of left and national-popular movement of the continent.
8. Forthcoming Elections in 2021: Legislative elections are scheduled to be held in Mexico in 2021, when voters will elect the 500 deputies to sit in the Chamber of Deputies. AMLO has announced that he will organise a recall referendum on his presidency on the same date as the federal elections, and if that is not possible, just before that. This will enable him to put himself at the centre of the federal elections too, helping his party, Morena, gain control over the legislature.
9. Politicisation of the masses: AMLO is seeking to involve the masses in political debates. He is touring the country regularly, organising face to face meeting with people, discussing with them his policies and inviting them to voice their opinions and criticisms and point out shortcomings. He responds to questions from journalists every morning. This has helped politicise the country, involve people in voicing opinion on how the government should prioritise its spending, make them debate government policies. This is one important way of deepening democracy. This has led to a sharp jump in his approval ratings to 70%, well above the 53% that voted for him on July 1, 2018.
10. Social and environmental conflicts: One of the biggest weaknesses of the so-called ‘fourth transformation’ taking place in the country is the numerous social and environmental conflicts that are taking place all across Mexico. This is the legacy of the neoliberal governments that have been in power in Mexico for the past several decades. That is why it is necessary that all the big star megaprojects of the AMLO government, from the Dos Bocas refinery to the Mayan Train—that will be passing through an important and fragile ecological corridor—must be implemented with full respect for environmental laws and agreements, together with free, prior and informed consultation with the indigenous peoples who inhabit those territories.
These 10 keys display a cartographic political and social map of the fourth transformation. They show the enormous and deep rooted changes taking place, and also point out some weaknesses and challenges that the new government has to confront as it attempts to advance the fourth transformation. The reason for pointing out the weaknesses is to further the intense debate taking place in Mexico over the changes being ushered in by Lopez Obrador.
It is true that AMLO is not Chavez. If anything, he resembles Lula during the time he was in office, who without excessively touching the interests of the elites, transformed Brazil by lifting 40 million people out of poverty. But AMLO has also promised that in the second half of the six-year period, structural constitutional reforms will be made to expand rights and guarantee social justice. It is to be seen if the new government can successfully implement a progressive fiscal reform to deepen the fourth transformation, getting the rich and those who earn high incomes to pay more taxes so that the enormous poverty and inequality gripping Mexico can be reduced.
[Courtesy: Resumen Latinoamericano, a California (USA) based weekly newsletter that publishes information in solidarity with Latin America and the third world.]
