San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Leftist favored by fed-up Mexican voters
LOS REYES ACAQUILPAN, Mexico — This nation’s voters are poised to jolt more than three decades of U.S.-favored economic and political policy when they go to the polls next Sunday to elect a new president and reboot a widely disparaged national Congress.
Opinion polls for months have been recording an ever-widening lead for leftist-nationalist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, 64, some recently giving him what may be an all but unbeatable half of the vote in a three-way race. The polls suggest his political coalition could win a congressional majority.
Hammering on vows to end the endemic corruption that he blames for Mexico’s stubborn inequality and violence, Lopez Obrador — widely known by his initials, AMLO — has hit a nerve in a nation bitterly weary of both feckless leaders and formidable crime.
“We are fed up. No one knows whom to believe in anymore,” said Dalia Urbina, 39, who was selling fish tacos across the street from an AMLO rally on Wednesday in this raw, teeming city on the eastern fringe of the capital. “You can’t believe everything he is promising. But the others have done nothing. Let’s see what happens.”
With the longest stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border and the biggest share of trade across it, Texas has a
lot riding on the vote. Border security, immigration, energy exports and the fate of the North American Free Trade Agreement may hang in the balance.
The Mexican campaign is taking place amid relentless criticism from President Donald Trump, who has threatened repeatedly to pull out of NAFTA. On Thursday, Trump accused Mexican leaders of “doing nothing” to stop Central American migrants heading for the U.S. border.
While no one is certain what Lopez Obrador’s actual policies would be — and he’s moderated his message this year — many analysts expect that as president he’d prove less amenable than his predecessors toward either free markets or Washington’s will.
The new president takes office Dec. 1 for a six-year term.
“He’s a guy who likes to fight,” says John Bailey, an expert on Mexican politics and professor emeritus at Georgetown University. “He gets an insult and he’ll push back.”
Should Lopez Obrador prevail, “I expect to see some volatility around the currency (peso), and more than a few anxious investors,” said Tony Garza, former President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Mexico who now divides his time between a San Antonio home and a Mex- ico City law practice.
Still, Garza says: “My guess is that things will start to settle around mid-2019. Barring a global economic slowdown, we’ll see reasonable economic growth in Mexico and trade with and through Texas will continue to expand.”
Despite its stakes for both cross-border commerce and security, the election will be decided far to the south in Mexico City and nearby states where many of the country’s 123 million people are concentrated.
The outcome largely will hinge on struggling working-class families like those living in Los Reyes Acaquilpan, where many say their most pressing concerns are public security, better wages and a decent education for their children. This year, many such communities appear to belong to Lopez Obrador, analysts say.
“I am going to dedicate this triumph to Mexico’s poor,” Lopez Obrador thundered from the stage erected on a dirt soccer field Wednesday afternoon. “We are going to respect everyone. But the poor come first.”
Volatile national politics
This marks Lopez Obrador’s third try for the presidency in a dozen years. It most likely will be his last, win or lose.
He lost his 2006 attempt by about a halfpercent in an official tally he and supporters dismiss as fraudulent. Running again six years ago as candidate of Mexico’s principal leftist party, he finished second behind President Enrique Peña Nieto, with about a third of the vote.
Lopez Obrador this time is the candidate of a coalition led by his leftist Morena movement, which he formed in 2014 after deserting his former party in disgust over its congressional support for market friendly energy, labor and education reforms pushed by Peña Nieto,
Polling a distant second with support in the mid-20s is Ricardo Anaya, 39, candidate of a coalition of the center right National Action Party, which held the presidency from 2000 to 2012 and the leftleaning Democratic Revolution Party, which was crippled when many of its militants followed AMLO out the door.
Trailing still further behind is the PRI’s Jose Antonio Meade, 49, an economist who has served in key cabinet posts for both Peña Nieto and previous National Action administrations. Though respected for his abilities and personal honesty, Meade has been hobbled by corruption allegations against both Peña Nieto and the PRI. He’s failed to excite voters even in his own party.
While quibbling with one another over details, Anaya and Meade embrace the market friendly economic policies that have taken root in Mexico since the 1980s. That’s set Lopez Obrador apart.
But ideology aside, much of Lopez Obrador’s support has been bolstered by a widespread disgust with politicians and the world as it is. It’s a sentiment not unlike the mood that fueled the rise of Trump and populist game changers elsewhere.
Mexican politics “seems to be in a tailspin,” said Federico Estevez, a veteran political analyst in Mexico City. “Elite failures take their toll after a generation of poor results have piled up. That’s where the country is.”
Lopez Obrador has his fervent followers, certainly, as do his rivals.
But there is little sign of the intense energy that accompanied the near victory of a leftist candidate in fraud-stained 1988 elections that kicked off Mexico’s democratic transition. Nor are there the expectations born of the victory 18 years ago of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, which finally ended the PRI’s authoritarian 71-year grip on Mexican politics.
The faith among some in the PRI’s ability to govern — warts and all — that helped elect Peña Nieto win in 2012 has evaporated amid both corruption scandals involving the president and a number of PRI governors and the inability of his government to bring the country’s violent criminal gangs to heel.
Tackling cronyism
After first acquiring national fame in the early 1990s by leading protests against the PRI and alleged abuses by the oil industry in his home state of Tabasco, Lopez Obrador was elected mayor of Mexico City at the turn of the century.
Despite corruption scandals involving several close aides, he proved a popular and effective mayor — providing pensions for the elderly, renovating parts of the colonial center city and alleviating traffic with new roads that aided a growing middle class.
Efforts this year to brand Lopez Obrador as a radical “danger for Mexico” akin to socialist regimes blamed for Venezuela’s ongoing economic collapse — very effective in derailing his 2006 bid — have drawn widespread shrugs.
Though he rails against the stark poverty still stalking much of Mexico, on the stump Lopez Obrador lays the blame on corruption and cronyism rather than capitalism.
While criticizing many of the free market policies of recent decades, including NAFTA and the ongoing opening of energy production and distribution to private investment — Lopez Obrador repeatedly has declared that he wants to re-evaluate rather than scrap them outright.
Shaking a fist in the air and or locking hands professorially behind his back in Wednesday’s rally, AMLO ran down his long list of promises.
He’ll bring zero tolerance for corruption, sharp salary cuts for top bureaucrats, a job or education for every youth, pensions for the old, more factories producing things currently imported from the U.S., China and elsewhere.
Curtailing spending and stopping what he claims to be an annual pilfering of some $25 billion in public funds will pay for the social programs. The fortunes of the nearly half of Mexicans still locked in poverty will rise, he vowed. Those of the mighty few and their political enablers will be brought low.
“Its a simple formula,” Lopez Obrador assured the crowd, which answered with a chorus of claps, cheers and nodding heads.
“We are going to uproot corruption,” Lopez Obrador said. “We are going to separate economic power from political power.”
No bodyguards
He long has cultivated that homespun message by traveling almost exclusively on commercial airlines or in small caravans of vehicles as he’s crisscrossed Mexico since his first presidential bid. He claims to have visited every one of Mexico’s more than 2,400 counties.
Once elected, he’ll fly coach and sell off an ostentatious presidential plane, Lopez Obrador told the crowd. He’ll also continue living in his home in a middle-class neighborhood, converting the presidential compound of Los Pinos into a cultural center.
In a country engulfed in criminal violence — with at least some 150,000 people killed since the government’s sputtering U.S.-backed war on crime gang began in 2006 — Lopez Obrador refuses to travel with bodyguards. He vows not to accept them as president.
Arriving at Wednesday’s rally in Los Reyes Acaquilpan, he waded without escorts into a throng jamming the entrance to the soccer field. Smart phones shot into the air like sunflowers in a field as their owners strained to capture the moment.
Some pressed scrawled petitions into the candidate’s hands. Others yanked him close to kiss his cheek, shake his hand, slap his back. “Presidente! Presidente!” people chanted as music blared from speakers.
“We are going to act with simplicity, with humility,” he later told the crowd.