Enrique Krauze
Mexico’s Ruinous Messiah
“Even if they call me messianic, I am going to purify the country.” —Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Among the “elected despots” of our day who once they are democratically voted into office seek to do away with the separation of powers and judicial independence, to limit freedom of expression, and ultimately to subvert democracy itself, one is accustomed to seeing the names of Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoùan, Narendra Modi, Nicolás Maduro, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump. But the list rarely includes Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The world seems not to be aware that as president of Mexico he too is seeking to do all these things. Born in 1953 in the southeastern state of Tabasco, López Obrador—or AMLO, as he is known—was an active member of the country’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from 1976 until 1989, when he joined the left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), climbing its ranks to become its president from 1996 to 1999. In 2000 he was elected chief of government of Mexico City. In 2006 he lost the presidential election by a narrow margin—243,934 votes (62 percent)—to Felipe Calderón and immediately declared himself the “legitimate president” of Mexico. From then on, he was an implacable critic of Calderón’s aggressive and ineffective war on drugs. He lost again in 2012 to Enrique Peña Nieto, of whose corrupt administration he was no less critical. In July 2018, on his third attempt, AMLO was elected president with 53.19 percent of the vote. His approval ratings at the end of 2019, a year after he took office, reached 72 percent.
It was clear that for many Mexicans, AMLO represented a hope for rectitude and renewal. Part of the country had simply had enough of the PRI, which governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000 and again from 2012 to 2018, and the National Action Party (PAN), which governed from 2000 to 2012. But there has been another reason for his popularity: the religious aura he has cultivated. Until the Covid-19 pandemic forced him to stop in April, he traveled around the country in a manner that he has described as “apostolic” and that large parts of the population felt was genuine and compassionate. Peña Nieto used to play golf on weekends; AMLO went to villages, talking to people and taking selfies. The “good news” that he preached was not a mere change of government but the coming—with all of that word’s religious overtones— of a new age with the promise of equality, prosperity, and justice.
A comparison between AMLO and the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is revealing. Unlike Chávez, he has not aspired to be an international celebrity or even a Latin American one (since taking office, he hasn’t traveled outside the country and probably never will). He is indifferent to money, almost allergic to it, and nobody has known him to be personally involved in any illegal business dealings (or, for that matter, any legal ones). He is not especially nationalistic, unlike Chávez and most “elected despots,” and he is certainly not a racist like Trump, whom he handles with a deference and servility that are unprecedented in Mexican diplomacy. AMLO remains silent whenever Trump insults Mexico and Mexicans; he boasts about their friendship, and he yielded to Trump’s threats to unilaterally raise tariffs if Mexico didn’t comply with his punitive immigration policies.
But there are also disturbing similarities between AMLO and Chávez. Both are geniuses of communication who ended up controlling most of their countries’ mass media. Chávez used to appear every Sunday on his marathon
TV program, Hello, Mr. President. AMLO has surpassed him, appearing every weekday between 7 and 9 AM at the Palacio Nacional, at what he has called his mañaneras—morning sessions. The mañaneras are not exactly press conferences. They are civic masses, sermons that are disseminated widely on TV and across social media, making them the main source of information, if not the only one, for people who have no alternatives. On the rare occasions when these mañaneras are attended by journalists who ask probing questions, the president dodges them, discredits them, or refutes them with outright lies (thousands of them have been compiled), maintaining that he has “other information” (the Mexican version of “alternative facts”).
Since television and radio broadcasters are state concessions, most chose to avoid a direct confrontation with López Obrador. Only a few completely independent newspapers and magazines survive, along with critical voices on websites and on radio and TV programs with limited reach. Political humor, which has a great historical tradition in the carpas (a kind of traveling vaudeville show), now limits itself to cartoons and social media. There are no political satire shows on TV. A Mexican Stephen Colbert is unthinkable. Given his well-documented impatience with criticism, it seems unlikely that the president would handle daily satire well.
Like Chávez, AMLO deliberately encourages polarization and rancor. Chávez stirred up “the Bolivarian people” against those he called the escuálidos (scrawnies) and the pitiyanquis (despicable pro-Americans); AMLO divides Mexicans between “the good people” who acclaim him in town squares and the “conservatives” who resist “true change.” The Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid has called him a “poet of insults,” and he has no less then eighty derogatory nicknames for his opponents, among them Alcahuete (pimp), Aprendiz de carterista (pickpocket apprentice), Camaján (slob), Fifí (snooty), and Mafiosillo (petty mobster).
Another similarity between the two leaders is their use and abuse of history. Chávez felt that he was the twentyfirst-century reincarnation of Simón Bolívar. For AMLO, who in the 1980s wrote El poder en el trópico, a derivative and highly ideological book on the subject,1 Mexican history is an oracle, with two perspectives that converge in him: the “great man theory” and the script of peaceful social revolution. According to the first, Mexican history is a roll call of heroes whom he seeks to emulate and surpass. According to the second, history is a promise of social redemption that had been eroded and betrayed after three popular upheavals—the War of Independence (1810– 1821), the War of Reform (1857–1860), and the Mexican Revolution (1910– 1920)—and now must be fulfilled in a “Fourth Transformation”—under his leadership.2
If Chávez made occasional use of Christian symbology, for AMLO it is crucial, and in a country as religious as Mexico, it has turned out to be decisive. In an essay published shortly before the 2006 elections I characterized him as “the tropical messiah.”3 As a defender of the poor who were persecuted by the rich, he compared himself at the time (as he continues to do) with Jesus Christ, and people recognized
1El poder en el trópico (Mexico City: Planeta, 2015).
2
See my “El presidente historiador,” Letras libres, January 2, 2019. 3“Tropical Messiah,” The New Republic, June 19, 2006.