The Nation, June 4, 2021
AMLO Has Been a Disappointment to the World—For Mexico, He’s Been Far Worse
The Mexican president’s botched Covid response and his lean toward
militarization indicate that he takes his cues from the past, not the
future.
By Dawn Paley
For the past 25 years, Lucía Mixcoatl has sold cactus pads in the
sprawling Hidalgo Market in the Mexican city of Puebla. But since the
pandemic started, sales of the cactus pads—called nopales and considered
a staple of the Mexican diet—have dropped precipitously. “Before the
pandemic started, I could sell a thousand or more nopales every day; now
I’m lucky if I sell 500 or 600,” she told me through a black KN-95 mask.
Each piece sells for about 7 cents, meaning her already modest income,
which she uses to support four children as a single mother, has fallen
by half. Two of her four children have since dropped out of school, and
she’s struggling to pay for Internet for her other kids, who now take
classes online.
Mixcoatl is one of over 32 million people employed in Mexico’s informal
economy. As in other countries, small businesses in Mexico have been
disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. But government help in
Mexico has been sparse: A survey last summer found 61 percent of
businesses said they needed financial aid, but only 5.4 percent had
received government support. Several states in Mexico have stepped in to
offer economic assistance, but it has failed to reach many. In Puebla,
Mixcoatl wouldn’t qualify for a pandemic loan made available to formal
businesses—which must be paid back over five years at 14 percent
interest. “This is exactly the moment that the government should help
us, by giving us Internet, providing us more opportunities so our
children can stay in school,” said Mixcoatl, who is a member of Puebla’s
Popular Union of Street Vendors.
It wasn’t until December that the federal government announced
pandemic-specific cash assistance for citizens: a $570 payment to cover
funeral expenses should a family member die from Covid-19.
The economic pain felt by Mexico’s poor majority has been compounded by
the devastating toll of the virus. According to the latest data from
Johns Hopkins University, Mexico is tied with Peru for the world’s
highest case-fatality rate: Over nine of every 100 people known to be
infected with Covid have died. Disparities in the country’s health
system mean Covid patients checked into public hospitals are far more
likely to die than those who can afford private care. The country’s
cases spiked in the New Year; today Mexico’s total deaths trail only
those of the United States, Brazil, and India.
Throughout the economic and health crisis caused by the novel
coronavirus, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office two
and a half years ago, has remained optimistic. After the first
coronavirus cases were announced in Mexico in March of last year, he
suggested that carrying amulets and images of saints would protect
Mexicans from Covid-19. Last June, López Obrador said that, together
with social distancing, a proper diet, and good hygiene, “not lying, not
stealing, and not cheating” helped prevent infection.
The 67-year-old eventually contracted Covid in January, after months of
playing down the pandemic and appearing maskless at public events. After
his recovery, he claimed he no longer needed to wear a mask, as he was
no longer contagious.
Since the New Year, vaccination campaigns have begun rolling out across
the country. In December, doctors and nurses in the public sector were
the first to get vaccines; since February one of seven vaccines approved
for use by regulators has been made available to seniors and teachers.
As of this month, people over 40 can register to access a vaccine. At
the time of this story’s publication, just over 10 percent of Mexicans
are fully vaccinated.
In the face of the massive disruption stemming from the pandemic, since
taking office, the president has pushed forward with many existing plans
and projects: promoting “republican austerity” and an end to corruption,
vowing to modernize the state oil company, and pushing signature
infrastructure projects designed to increase the flow of goods and
tourists. As homicides rose, he created a new National Guard and backed
increased military participation in civilian affairs.
López Obrador, commonly known as AMLO, was elected in July 2018 with a
sweeping majority. A political veteran and former Mexico City mayor, it
was his third run for the nation’s highest office. His party, the
Movement for National Regeneration (Morena), took congress and the
senate, as well as winning five gubernatorial contests and control of
Mexico City. AMLO campaigned as a progressive candidate, vowing to work
for justice for victims of violence; end massacres, which had become
widespread during the previous two administrations; and “prioritize the
poor, for the good of all.”
AMLO’s win energized Mexican politics and led many to speculate that the
country was finally having its turn as part of the “pink tide” of
leftist leadership in Latin America. From his first day in office, López
Obrador has demonstrated his mastery in carrying out powerful symbolic
gestures. On inauguration day, he showed up to the National Palace in
his seven-year-old Volkswagen Jetta and immediately opened Los Pinos,
the presidential residence, to the public as a cultural center.
His administration has formally branded his six-year term as Mexico’s
“Fourth Transformation,” a reference to three seminal periods in Mexican
history: Mexican independence, the liberal reforms of the 19th century,
and the Mexican Revolution. As president, AMLO declared “the end of
neoliberal politics” and demanded apologies from Spain and the Vatican
for their role in the conquest and subjugation of Indigenous people. And
the National Development Plan, the guiding document of his presidential
term, declares “an end to the ‘war on drugs’” in no uncertain terms.
But two and a half years into his administration, the gap between the
president’s campaign promises and his actions is widening. AMLO has
pushed austerity in the public sector and refused to introduce new taxes
on the rich or to budge on his promise to avoid contracting new debt,
even in the midst of the health and economic crises caused by the
pandemic. By early 2021, Mexico had spent less than 1 percent of GDP on
pandemic relief (compare that to over 13 percent in the United States).
Cash payments for the most vulnerable have been among AMLO’s key actions
toward redistributing wealth: Regular checks are sent to seniors, people
with disabilities, students, fishers, and peasant farmers who can
qualify for a monthly payment in return for planting fruit trees.
Conditional cash payments to poor citizens aren’t new; they began under
president Ernesto Zedillo in 1997.
Today these payments have been rebranded under the umbrella of
“well-being” (bienestar), to match AMLO’s brand, and are estimated to
reach around 14 million people, just less than 1 out of every 10
citizens. The president has claimed that these same programs would
assist the most vulnerable during the pandemic, but they fail to cover
the majority of working-age adults, including the working poor. The only
support available for millions of Mexicans is through family networks
and mutual aid.
AMLO’s administration passed an employment law strengthening workers’
rights to independent unions, raised the minimum wage, and pushed some
corporations to pay taxes owed to the state. It also ratified the new
US-Mexico Free Trade Agreement, and it remains on generally good terms
with the country’s largest corporations and richest families. But the
signature of AMLO’s presidency thus far has been austerity across the
board, with one exception: the army.
“In all the decrees passed so far cutting staff in public administration
and lowering spending in line with austerity policies, there’s always a
clause in which the armed forces are excepted,” said Mariano
Sánchez-Talanquer, a Mexican political economist who is currently an
Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area
Studies. “While everything else shrinks, and the rest of the state lives
through fiscal scarcity, which is now made worse by the economic crisis,
the only sector of the state that has seen its budget—and therefore its
power—increased is the military.”
Sánchez-Talanquer likened the president’s stance on the military to a
“bait and switch,” in which AMLO promised to rein in the military but
instead deepened and expanded its role. Though those outside of the
president’s inner circle still don’t know exactly what informed his
change of heart, the army’s substantial power, strengthened after over a
decade of deployment across the country, cannot be overlooked.
At the outset of his tenure, López Obrador disregarded a diverse
coalition of over 300 civil society organizations that demanded the
National Guard be a civilian force, as stipulated in the Constitution.
Regardless, since 2019 a career soldier has led the National Guard,
troops now number over 100,000, the majority of them former soldiers.
Last May, AMLO signed an agreement regularizing the army’s active role
in policing until the end of his term. Contrary to AMLO’s promises to
end the drug war, the army remains active in enforcing prohibition. On
any given day in Mexico, there are an estimated 150,000 armed forces
deployed throughout the country, more than half of them devoted to
pacification. Soldiers detained more people between September 2019 and
September 2020 than in any year since the outset of the war on drugs,
and the armed forces continue to confiscate cocaine, marijuana, and
fentanyl.
Under AMLO, security forces have taken on an outsized role in the
country. Today, soldiers are building the new Mexico City airport and
laying tracks for a section of the Tren Maya, building thousands of new
banks, and assisting with social programs and vaccine distribution. The
Marines, an elite military force with close links to the United States,
now control Mexico’s ports; and the National Guard has been made
responsible, together with the army, for policing non-Mexican migrants
traveling north to the United States.
AMLO has long promised to bring justice in the case of the 43 students
disappeared in Guerrero state in 2014. Last fall, when Gen. Salvador
Cienfuegos—who was secretary of defense when the students were
disappeared—was arrested on drug trafficking charges in Los Angeles, the
president initially stated that anyone involved with criminal activity
in the army would be investigated and punished. But his declaration of
accountability in the ranks quickly rang hollow: The United States
deported Cienfuegos back to Mexico in November, and just a few weeks
later Mexico’s attorney general cleared him of all charges.
Raymundo Ramos, president of the nongovernmental Human Rights Committee
of Nuevo Laredo, was initially hopeful the new administration would help
bring justice to the families of dozens of people disappeared by the
Marines in that city in 2018. Ramos and Jessica Molina, whose husband
was disappeared by Marines that year, twice met with Alejandro Encinas,
the sub-secretary of human rights, migration, and population, in the
first weeks of the new administration. But things have not gone as
promised. “We’re disappointed with the current government,” said Ramos
in a phone interview from Nuevo Laredo. “To me it seems that in the end
the army has prevented them from carrying out their commitments to
victims and the families of victims.”
In April, 30 Marines were arrested in connection to the 2018
disappearances in Nuevo Laredo. Ramos learned of the detentions through
journalists, and family members of the disappeared were not properly
informed of the arrests. “As long as the federal government continues to
blindly support the armed forces while distancing itself from the
victims, there won’t be meaningful improvement,” said Ramos.
Tragically, the disappearances have not stopped. The number of people
reported disappeared in the country since 2006 now stands at over
85,000. Over 37,800 people have been disappeared since AMLO took office,
of whom over 16,000 have yet to be found. According to the head of
Mexico’s National Search Commission, there are at least 120 collectives,
composed mostly of family members of the disappeared, dedicated to
searching for and raising awareness about disappearance. These groups,
often led by women, have become a new social force in the country,
challenging impunity, government complicity, and the corruption of the
justice system in an effort to find their loved ones.
“The truth is that instead of helping us, this government has
re-victimized us,” said Silvia Ortiz via WhatsApp. Ortiz is president of
Grupo Vida, a search collective in the northern city of Torreón, where
her daughter Silvia Stephanie Sanchez Viesca Ortiz was disappeared more
than 15 years ago. Recent changes to the Executive Commission for
Assistance to Victims (CEAV), which assists families who experienced a
disappearance involving state security forces or organized crime, have
disqualified many from monthly assistance. “They gave us 12 days to send
in all the paperwork to re-qualify for monthly aid,” said Ortíz. “Now
they’re saying that we have to make our purchases and bring in receipts,
and they’ll reimburse us—but how will this help those that don’t even
have enough to buy food?”
Around the country, women’s groups have continued to organize against
gender violence. The March 8, 2020, mobilizations for International
Women’s Day were among the largest and most widespread demonstrations in
recent years. López Obrador’s government instituted gender parity in the
cabinet, but the president has not embraced or encouraged the growing
women’s movement, which is pushing for access to legal and free abortion
and sweeping structural change to end state and domestic violence.
Instead, AMLO downplayed gender violence; stood behind his preferred
candidate for governor of Guerrero, who faced multiple accusations of
rape (he was disqualified from running based on a technicality, and his
daughter has continued his campaign); and warned women who protest of
being infiltrated and “manipulated by conservatives,” fascists, and
authoritarians.
Homicides have continued at a terrifying pace. In 2019 and 2020, there
were 71,072 murders in Mexico, marking two of the most violent years in
decades. One count based on news reports found that there had been 533
massacres (killings of at least three people) in Mexico during the first
nine months of 2020. Some of the massacres made international headlines:
the killing of nine members of the LeBarón family, including three
babies and three children, in the state of Sonora in late 2019, or the
January 2021 massacre of 19 people, the majority of them Guatemalan
migrants, near the US-Mexico border. But most massacres fail to become
international news, and make only the briefest appearance in the
national news cycle.
One such massacre took place in San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca, home to long
standing conflicts with regard to local governance and corporate
interests in communal lands. But in living memory there has never been
an assault as bloody as that which took place on June 21, 2020, when 15
Indigenous Ikoots people were killed, some of them burned to death.
It was late afternoon on Father’s Day when a paramilitary group that
survivors link to local authorities used bats and stones to attack 31
people occupying a municipal building. The attackers brought out jugs of
gasoline and burned their victims alive. Maria del Rosario Guerra told
me the National Guard and state police accompanied the paramilitaries
into the community and stood by as her friends and comrades were
slaughtered. “The National Guard was there and they didn’t do anything,
they were just watching,” said Guerra in an interview in Oaxaca City.
The attack has gone unpunished, and dozens of Indigenous families remain
displaced from their ancestral lands. Alejandrino Abasolo Mora, another
survivor of the massacre, said security forces watched as the men and
women under attack cried for help. “We can’t go back to our lands,” said
Abasolo Mora in an interview in Oaxaca City in December. On the six
month anniversary of the massacre, the Ikoots survivors set up tents and
a makeshift water tank in Oaxaca City’s central square in an effort to
pressure the state government to act against the killers. They took
turns cooking simple meals of sardines and vegetables, sleeping in the
park, and showering in the homes of supporters. “We fled on June 21, all
16 of us who survived are displaced, not one of us has gone back, and
that’s why we’ve come here, six months later,” said Abasolo Mora. They
have since disbanded the camp, but remain displaced from their community.
Across the plaza from where the survivors from San Mateo had set up
their camp stands another, made up of Triqui Indigenous people who were
forced off their lands by paramilitary violence over a decade ago.
Though the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Mexico fell
to 8,864 in 2019 (from a high of over 23,000 in 2016), the number of
violent events that caused displacements has remained steady. A
disproportionate number of IDPs in Mexico are Indigenous people.
As violence and the pandemic rage across the country, AMLO’s government
has focused on infrastructure projects designed to speed the flow of
merchandise and facilitate tourism, and has pushed to build up refinery
capacity for the state oil company, Pemex. Once a cash cow for the
Mexican state, today Pemex is the world’s most indebted oil company. But
the president is determined to turn the tide. In this year’s budget, $16
billion was earmarked for Pemex.
AMLO’s plan for the oil and gas sector includes the building of a new
refinery in Tabasco state and the purchase of a share of a US refinery
outside of Houston, Texas. It also serves as an example of how his
politics sometimes appear to be informed by a desire to return to the
past, before free trade and privatization gutted Mexico’s national oil
company. Attempting to return to the oil-fueled prosperity of the past,
however, means turning a blind eye to the urgent need to reduce fossil
fuel extraction and emissions.
Early in his mandate the president scrapped a controversial, partly
built airport in the town of Texcoco, putting the army in charge of
building a new international airport for Mexico City, which is designed
to ease backlogs and delay for travelers coming in and out of one of the
world’s largest metropolises. Construction continued apace, even as air
traffic dropped by an estimated 50 percent due to the pandemic.
Improving local roads, building new highways, and modernizing ports and
airports is part of AMLO’s transportation push. Two major projects in
southern Mexico—a train in the Yucatán peninsula and a trade corridor
across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—have special standing as presidential
priorities.
The “Mayan train” is a 965-mile train loop that would carry tourists by
day and fossil fuels and other cargo by night between the beach resorts
of the Riviera Maya and the jungle city of Palenque, Chiapas.
Particularly controversial are the potential for real estate speculation
and the privatization of communally owned Mayan lands, as well as the
construction of 19 train stations expected to include new hotels, malls,
and other services for tourists in ecologically fragile areas.
AMLO’s government has worked to build a sense of shared decision-making
for the president’s priority projects. López Obrador touted a rushed
vote in 30 impacted communities as a green light from local communities
to proceed with construction, but the United Nations found that the
process did not comply with international standards guaranteeing free,
prior, and informed consent. “It wasn’t a prior consultation, it wasn’t
free or done in good faith, it wasn’t adequate, and the people weren’t
well informed,” Sara López, from the Regional Indigenous and Popular
Council of Xpujil, told me in an interview in Campeche last year.
The trade corridor between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest part of Mexico, first originated
with Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in the 16th century. The idea
has been periodically revived by the ruling class ever since. “None of
those governments… considered the linguistic and cultural diversity in
the region, or the diversity of flora and fauna, or the material and
immaterial wealth of this land,” said Victor Cata, a Zapotec language
activist and historian based in the city of Juchitán, Oaxaca.
Cata said he remains hopeful that this government’s approach to the
region will be different. “We hope that things are done right this time.
It’s only the second year, and as citizens we hope things are done
properly. In the meantime, we will be doing our work and seeking
alternatives in our Zapotec culture and language,” he told me in a phone
interview in February.
Construction of the Tren Maya is expected to create 80,000 jobs. Over
the longer term, UN Habitat has estimated three quarters of a million
jobs will be created in the peninsula, and the government has promised
that the industrial parks and transit corridor across the isthmus will
generate 400,000 direct and indirect jobs. Both of these mega-projects
align with Washington’s desire to encourage increased investment and
economic development in southern Mexico so as to stave off migration.
The focus on infrastructure projects like the new airport, the Mayan
Train and the trans-isthmic corridor reflect what to some is an outdated
and even colonial mode of politics. “What I understand Andrés Manuel
López Obrador is doing is attempting to renew the state, and the idea of
the nation,” said Ezér May May, a Mayan historian from the town of
Kimbalá, Yucatán. He likens the federal government’s push to build the
Mayan Train and carry out new territorial planning to a kind of
“internal colonialism,” in which Mexico City bureaucrats impose their
version of progress on Mayan communities in the country’s south.
When Donald Trump was US president, he and his supporters accused Mexico
of failing to control the flow of migrants, primarily from Central
America, toward the US border. The so-called Migrant Protection
Protocols (MPP) were introduced in the second month of AMLO’s
presidency, leading tens of thousands of non-Mexican migrants to wait
south of the US border, often in informal camps near the border. Though
the Mexican government promised to provide “appropriate humanitarian
protections,” journalists and human rights workers likened the
conditions for migrants awaiting US asylum hearings in Mexico to
“concentration camps.” Since late February, 10,000 migrants living in
Mexican border camps have entered the United States to begin asylum
proceedings. On June 1, the US Department of Homeland Security announced
the termination of the MPP.
Scholar Amarela Varela, who has studied migration in Mexico for 20
years, says AMLO’s government has been “a disaster” when it comes to the
rights of migrants in Mexico. “There’s no interest in creating state or
public policies about asylum and refugees, and no one in the government
of the Fourth Transformation is talking about the thousands of families
who are…trapped, living without papers, and no one is talking about
policies to help them integrate,” said Varela in an interview before the
MPP was terminated.
In the summer of 2019, Trump threatened to increase tariffs on Mexican
goods arriving in the United States unless the country stopped the flow
of migrants to the north, which is when Mexico deployed the National
Guard to police migration. At that time, Mexico City and Washington also
reaffirmed their commitment to “promoting development and economic
growth in southern Mexico.” Previously a staunch critic of the North
American Free Trade Agreement, AMLO has since taken a much more
pragmatic position, seeking friendly relations with Washington—even
under Trump—and Mexico’s elite.
Mid-term elections, set for June 6, will serve as a barometer of public
sentiment toward AMLO’s government. Campaigns have taken place amid the
pandemic and in a climate of electoral violence. Since this year’s
electoral process began in September 2020, 89 politicians have been
murdered. Thirty-five of them were candidates competing to win in
Sunday’s vote.
As things stand, record remittances from Mexicans working abroad have
proven to be an important lifeline to poorer Mexicans, who are fending
for themselves through the pandemic. “You have a government that isn’t
reacting to the circumstances, that doesn’t have the capacity or the
reflexes to adjust its priorities to the situation and the emergency
that the population is experiencing,” said Sánchez-Talanquer. “It’s as
if it were a zombie, carrying on with certain goals [officials] set out,
as if nothing else was happening around it.”
For people like Mixcoatl and others active in the informal economy,
their hope remains that the government will step in with assistance.
“The government isn’t helping us the way it should be,” said Juan Carlos
Morales, who sells clothing at the Hidalgo Market in Puebla. Unlike
market sellers, he said, government officials receive a salary whether
they work or not. “If we sell something, we can eat meat; if we don’t
sell anything, we eat beans, or a tortilla with salt on it.”
Dawn Paley is a journalist and author of Drug War Capitalism (AK Press,
2014) and Guerra Neoliberal: Desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de
México (Libertad Bajo Palabra, 2020).
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