Mexicans destined for another dictatorship?

When a country attacks another, neighboring countries should organize themselves into an alliance to stop the rogue. When, however, a country’s government attacks its own country, neighbors must not only pay attention, they must do something besides helplessly witnessing the death of their neighbor.

Mexico is our next-door neighbor. It has 126 million people within its borders with the U.S., Guatemala and Belize. Mexico’s enemies are not on its border. Mexico’s enemies are in the Presidency.

“Narcos” – AKA homegrown enemies which are active in most Mexican states; fans of “Narco” movies can identify states like Sinaloa as hotbeds of drug cartels and their leaders despite not finding them on a map. In some states, like Michoacan, cartels actually control wide swatches of land with villages and villagers living under cartel leaders who operate under total impunity.

These enemies of Mexico can be local heroes who treat the Mexican serf with gifts, bribes to police officers and government officials. They also do not fear the federal government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) who genuflects to the drug lords and ordered the release of a Sinaloa drug lord, the son of the infamous “El Chapo,” from custody because AMLO was “saving lives” of non-criminal people.

The cartels’ officers had ordered their “pistoleros” to attack local police and collateral damage “narcos” with “assault weapons” can do. AMLO personally greeted the cartel leader’s aging mother in front of cameras and many people.

AMLO’s behavior is important because he and his political party achichincles --“hacks” – that work as political appointees are the second corps of enemies of Mexico.

AMLO, who won the Presidency on his third try, is attacking his country’s successful election commission, the INE – National Electoral Institute, the very independent agency that staged the election of 2018 and announced the winner – AMLO – himself.

He says of the next presidential election 17 months from now, “How is the election going to be put at risk? It is them (the INE) who have put the election at risk; it has always been them…. Aren’t they the ones who allow the stuffing of ballot boxes. Are not the electoral authorities who steal the ballots? Are not the electoral authorities the ones who allow the buying of votes? Aren’t they the ones who gave registration to candidates for the presidency who did not meet the requirements because the president at the time asked them to? What they want is to continue attacking us.”

It must be remembered that 126 million Mexicans will experience the largest ever Election in 2024 that includes the Presidency, 31 state elections with 8 governorships, plus voting for the lower house of the congress, the Mexican Senate and 1,596 mayors.

AMLO’s plan (b) is to restrict his new “less corrupt,” more efficient and more properly financed electoral agency by closing INE offices from 300 to 264 and to slash the agency’s budget by 3.5 BILLION pesos, firing thousands of nationwide staff. Cutting the INE’s current oversight over candidates will disappear. AMLO even wants not-so-independent vote counters on government or his own party payrolls to count the votes in 2024.

If AMLO gets his “Plan B” through the Mexican Supreme Court we can name the winner of the Mexican Presidency to be AMLO’s personally-picked candidate just like we could under the old PRI, the very same party that nurtured AMLO from his first gofer job to Mexico’s elected leader.

If President Lopez Obrador gets his way, Mexico will die at the hands of his MORENA party that will never allow a free election, ever, like the ones that elected Vicente Fox (2000), Felipe Calderon (2006), Enrique Pena Nieto (2012) and Lopez Obrador himself (2018).