Mexico’s next president puts on brave front

MEXICO’S Leftist president-elect has pledged to waive the right to close protection normally afforded to its leaders, despite the high level of crime.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador won a landslide in the country’s presidential election on Sunday with a promise to give what he calls “the mafia of power” its marching orders.

More than 130 local election candidates and other politicians have been murdered since September and drug violence has resulted in more than 200,000 deaths in just over a decade.

Mr López Obrador is promising to dissolve the institutions that currently provide presidential security, as well as the nation’s intelligence agency.

“I don’t want bodyguards, which means the citizens will take care of me and protect me,” he told reporters who asked him about his lack of security detail. “The people will protect me,” he added. “He who fights for justice has nothing to fear.”

He spoke during an impromptu press conference after he met Enrique Peña Nieto, the outgoing president, on Tuesday to discuss how to coordinate the handover during the five-month transition period.

Mr López Obrador, 64, a friend of Jeremy Corbyn, travelled there in a small car with the windows down.

Rather than being encased in a shell of police outriders, he was accompanied by motorcycles carrying television cameramen drawing close to his vehicle for pictures.

Mr López Obrador’s insistence that he can behave as if he were still an ordinary citizen, rather than the next president of a large country with a major security problem that he is promising to shake to its core, has been widely criticised by observers as both frivolous and irresponsible.