Gwynne Dyer

Almost all the foreign coverage of next Sunday’s Mexican election focusses on the drug wars and the murder rate: 30,000 killed last year, and looking to be even higher this year. But there are 127 million Mexicans, so it’s not really all that bad by Caribbean standards.

The Caribbean is a tough neighbourhood, but Mexico is actually one of its safer places. So why is everybody, including the Mexicans themselves, obsessed with the local murder rate? It’s because the killings are so brazen and spectacular — and that is largely due to the fact that so many of them are part of the incessant wars between the rival drug gangs.

We already know who is going to be the president of Mexico for the next six years. It’s ‘AMLO’, short for Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The last opinion poll, with only a week to go, put him at 37 per cent of the vote, and his nearest rival at only 20 per cent. He has little to say about the drug war, apart from vague talk about giving some criminals an amnesty. What he concentrates on is inequality.

Traditionally a far poorer place than the other big economies in Latin America, Brazil and Argentina, Mexico is now level-pegging with Brazil in per capita income, though still trailing Argentina. Indeed, if you calculate it in PPP (purchasing power parity), Mexico is now even with Argentina and well ahead of Brazil. The problem is that the income (in all three countries) is so unevenly shared.

At least a third of Mexico’s people live in poverty, and if anything, the inequality has become worse as the economy grew. Some of the slums around the big cities are such deprived and violent places that even ambulances will not go there at night. That is López Obrador’s priority: he will be Mexico’s first left-wing president.

His rivals paint him as a Chávez-style radical who will ruin the economy, but his record as mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005 suggests a much more pragmatic politician: ‘Mexico’s Bernie Sanders’, as some have called him. “No expropriations, no nationalizations”, he pledges — but he does promise to address income disparity as no previous Mexican government has done.

It’s remarkable that Mexico had to wait so long for the emergence of a successful left-wing politician. The 60-year stranglehold on power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — what it institutionalized was corruption — was broken in the 2000 election, but the winner was the National Action Party (PAN), a centre-right, business-friendly organization.

In 2006 PAN made the fatal mistake, at the behest of the United States, of launching the ‘war on drugs.’ In the place of PRI’s policy of co-existence — you sell the drugs in the U.S., give us a share of the profits, and we’ll leave you alone — it set out to smash the cartels.

It succeeded all too well. That’s when the murder rate took off, as the many fragments of the old cartels fought each other for market share.

As long as the demand is there in the U.S., the drug trade will thrive, but now there is also highly visible carnage in Mexico. Indeed, one of the reasons that PRI came back to power in 2012 was the horror Mexicans felt at the violence unleashed in their streets.

PRI did nothing to solve the problem, however, and it will be an also-ran in this election. López Obrador’s government will be a very different proposition. It may or may not declare a ceasefire in the local drug war, but it will certainly shake up the Mexican elites.

It will also annoy Washington greatly. López Obrador is promising that all 50 Mexican consulates in the United States will help to defend migrants caught up in the American legal system.

“Trump and his advisers speak of the Mexicans the way Hitler and the Nazis referred to the Jews, just before undertaking the infamous persecution and the abominable extermination,” López Obrador wrote just after the Great Distractor’s election.

It’s quite likely that within a year the U.S. intelligence services will be tasked with the job of finding ways to bring him down.