Mexico: Manuel Obrador Begins a Difficult Presidency
The new Mexican president faces the daunting prospect of putting his promise of radical transformation into action and meeting the groundswell of expectations from citizens. But can he avoid the temptation of getting into a confrontation with Trump and ad
Left-wing politician and former Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Sunday emerged victorious in Mexico’s presidential election with a stunning 53 per cent of the vote. Obrador campaigned on the platform of a vigorous war against corruption and drug-related violence. He won more than double the votes of his nearest challenger, making his victory the widest in his country since the 1980s.
In his victory speech Monday, Obrador promised “profound change” in the country with some of the worst records of corruption, drug violence, and inequality in the Americas.
But facing up to the country’s powerful drug cartels would be a challenging task for the new president. The cartels are mostly fed by their very close, sometimes inseparable, ties to state institutions.
Almost 30, 000 people were killed last year in Mexico in mainly drug-related violence, making the year the most violent in over two decades. Obrador believes the violence is caused by the rampant corruption in Mexico, hence his decision to make the fight against corruption and violence the central message of his campaign.
The new president has an ambitious plan for his country and he will really have his work cut out to accomplish it. “He has talked about many economic policies that look inwards,” says senior fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a United States nonpartisan, non-profit foreign-policy think tank, Shannon K O’Neil. “He is going to be looking domestically.”
But he would need a lot of support from his country’s powerful neighbour, the United Canada and build a wall along the US-Mexico border, which has annoyed Mexico. The US president’s hard-line policy on migration, particularly the separation of migrant families at the US-Mexico border, has caused much annoyance in Mexico and brought widespread condemnation to America.
Obrador says he would make Trump see reason to rethink his hard-line stance. But observers believe he may not have the clout to do that – which seems to put the two men clearly on a collision course.
The two leaders were reported to have discussed immigration, trade and security in their first phone call on Monday.
On the domestic scene, Obrador has promised to tackle corruption, dismantle the power cartel built on drug, and curtail violence.
While successive governments in Mexico have fought the cartels with the full might of the military, Obrador believes such strategy would not solve the problem. He has suggested amnesty for drug cartel leaders if families of their victims’ agree. This has brought him criticism, as some see him as trying to give the drug kingpins a soft-landing.
Obrador is an all-time activist, a left wing social conservative and pragmatic politician. He is not from Mexico’s traditional elite. In politics, he has fought for indigenous rights and often clashed with the police in the 1990s.
His basic message is that he, as a political outsider, holds the key to fixing Mexico’s broken political, economic, and social system. It would be interesting to see how the new president will combine the intimidating tasks of confront the powerful domestic cartels and managing his relationship with Trump.