AMLO fits nicely in Mexican tapestry
Here’s what’s fascinating about AMLO’s (Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador) seismic victory in Mexico’s election Sunday: it entirely fits into the dominant patterns of our time. But it’s wholly, uniquely Mexican.
AMLO is a left populist, like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. He’s unmistakably leftist — he named a son Ché, he worked and lived for six years with Indigenous Maya in his home state, Tabasco. But his movement is a big tent, like any populism; it includes evangelicals and conservatives.
He started out politically with the absurdly named PRI — Institutional Revolutionary Party — that ruled for 90 years till 2000. It was finally defeated by a business party led by a former CocaCola executive: literal Coca-Colonization. He joined a social democratic party similar to the NDP and was twice robbed as its presidential candidate. He left after it moved to the dark side — neo-liberalism and free trade — à la Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. He founded MORENA — National Regeneration Movement — virtually yesterday, in 2014. It has similarities to Sanders’ offshoots in the U.S., Momentum in the U.K., even Macron’s En Marche!
It’s basically a coalition against neoliberal economic policies, which is the usual form such opposition takes. It’s how we initially fought free trade deals here in the late 1980s, when some of MORENA’s current leaders worked with Canadians and, they say, learned techniques of coalition building from them. It involves patient local organizing with no instant gratification. It’s how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came from nowhere in New York last week to bounce a Democratic lifer. It takes a simple approach to party building: nondoctrinaire and as unLeninist as you can get. No rhetoric about being a vanguard or deducing the correct analysis. That was so 20th century.
Their leftness rings in their slogan: Primero los pobres, The poor first. AMLO says he’ll fly coach. How’s that for populism that distinguishes itself from Trump’s, flying into rallies by private plane? (All populists say “the people” are being screwed. The issue is who you blame for that screwing: the powerful, or the powerless — like desperate Mexican migrants to the U.S.)
They’re nationalists. They say they’ll return Mexico to growing its own food, which makes sense to me, politically and culinarily. The effects of NAFTA have been barbaric: almost half the country in poverty and more than 200,000 murders under the last two presidents, via the “state-drug cartels complex.” This isn’t unrelated to our current gang issues in Toronto: breakdown is breakdown. There are other parallels, such as neo-liberal attempts to privatize education and escalating inequality represented by proliferating billionaires.
But they don’t plan to immediately ditch NAFTA, nor could we, even if we chose to. We’ve based so much on it; we have to struggle, for now, within it.
I recall walking around Mexico City in 1993, reading a book on Mexican history and thinking how vividly alive it still felt. Independence came in 1821, reform around 1860 and revolution in 1921. But it was an authoritarian, Bonapartist state throughout and in some ways till now. Imperialismo (not only yanqui) never ended. The U.S. grabbed 54 per cent of Mexican land from 1846-48. Then, with the U.S. preoccupied by civil war, France slithered in, installing as “emperor” a European princeling, Maximilian, who wound up shot by a Mexican firing squad. By then the civil war was over and the U.S. had decided it wanted “dollars more and dominion less,” which became the brilliant formula for a U.S empire that outlasted European versions everywhere.
The defeat of native peoples never fully happened. In 1994, on the day NAFTA came into force, there was an uprising in Chiapas state, home to the Maya and others, in protest. They even had a plan to run an Indigenous Chiapas woman for president this round, though it didn’t happen.
What’s striking is how this upheaval around AMLO fits so comfortably into the Mexican tapestry. One celebrant at AMLO’S victory said, “We all want to live and work in our own country, without being killed.” That’s pretty minimal, and might qualify as a basis for lasting change.