AMLO gets his chance to drag Mexico out of feudalism

OTTAWA—For anyone accustomed to the relative prosperity and order of Canada, spending a lot of time in Latin America inevitably produces a catalogue of shocks. But, for me, few were as grim as visiting a garbage dump on the outskirts of Mexico City, where hundreds of people lived and worked as scavengers among the mountains of waste. The pepenadores, as the trash pickers were called, spent their days in the sweltering heat and stinking garbage to earn maybe $5 or $6 a day. It was one of the many contradictions of Mexico, a country of beautiful culture and civilized manners where half the population of 130 million lives in poverty, the rich get away with tax evasion, the public security system is endemically corrupt, and the drug cartels serving the U.S. narcotics habit are producing record violence, with deaths running at nearly 30,000 a year. After shedding about 70 years of one-party rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in 2000, Mexicans have been searching for political leaders capable of dealing with these deeply ingrained problems. For most of this period, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the charismatic leftist former mayor of Mexico City, has been hammering away at these issues as he travelled the country trying to muster a democratic revolt and throw out the establishment. AMLO, as he is known, lost in a razor-thin result in the 2006 presidential election in which he was depicted, with considerable success, as a dangerous radical. The capital was tied up afterwards by massive street protests in which his supporters claimed the voting was rigged. In 2012, he was defeated in the presidential race again. But by this year his populist appeal to average Mexicans embodied the anti-elitist desire for change sweeping a country dismayed by the lack of progress on economic equality, public safety, and official kleptomania. López Obrador, a political brawler who has at times shown a willingness to get tough with Donald Trump, also seems to have benefited from Mexicans’ disgust over the way they have been treated by the United States president. The election of López Obrador’s Morena party was a striking rejection of the two establishment parties, the centrist PRI, and the centre-right PAN, and marked the end of the global-oriented, neoliberal agenda that has dominated policy-making for years. Having won a landslide, the president-elect has the potential to transform Mexico after years of stagnation and missed opportunities. Much of López Obrador’s success will be measured by his ability to fulfill his commitment to improved socio-economic balance. He has promised to address taxation levels and bring in a wide range of social programs, including added support for agriculture, increased pensions for seniors, and educational and training grants for Mexico’s youth. To pay for these programs, the president-elect hopes to free up tens of billions of dollars a year by clamping down on corruption. Giving youth better options through education and job-creation is one of the tactics López Obrador has talked about in his somewhat unspecific proposals regarding the country’s narcotics catastrophe. He has signalled his government at the very least favours a different approach to dealing with the drug cartels than the military-led war on these gangs pursued by his predecessors, which has been a spectacular failure. A new strategy could mean bringing most of the army back into the barracks and a possible amnesty for low-level, non-violent criminals. But his exact plans seem up in the air. Also, the new Mexican leader appears ready to try to work with Trump, although this could disintegrate at any moment, as Canadians well understand. In any case, López Obrador has vowed to support Mexico’s current attempt to renegotiate NAFTA along with the U.S. and Canada, and he will probably be a good partner for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Ottawa tries to get the three-nation talks back onto a positive track. The election of a government in Mexico with a commitment to working toward a less polarized, unequal society represents an important step forward. But no one should think that fostering economic improvements on a wider basis will be easy, particularly when investors are skittish and the Trump administration is intent of reducing the value that Mexicans derive from NAFTA. Nor are there any obvious or easy answers to the drug violence and subjugation of public security that have threatened to turn Mexico into a failed state. So the challenges are immense. But the opportunity is there for López Obrador to use Mexicans’ long-simmering desire for change to set in motion reforms that could over time bring the country successfully into the 21st century. Les Whittington is an Ottawa journalist and a regular contributor to The Hill Times. The Hill Times