In June 2006, a month before the presidential elections, I wrote an essay about López Obrador titled The tropical messiah. It was, above all, a psychological portrait of a man with a social vocation but weighed down, at the same time, by a dark, irrational, vengeful ambition for power. I recorded his intemperate character, his obsession with himself, his complete disinterest in the outside world, his economic ignorance, his contempt for the law, his ideological dogmatism and his political authoritarianism: López Obrador had nothing to do with the liberal, constitutional, democratic tradition of Mexico , not even with the socialist one. Clearly, he was a tyrannical character. In the end, he pointed out the dangerous convergence of two of his delusions: equating himself with Jesus Christ and flaunting the overflowing “tropical” nature of power in Tabasco, his home state in southeastern Mexico. His triumph seemed imminent to me, and that is why I warned: “Mexico will lose irrecoverable years.”
The suffocation of democracy
AMLO lost the 2006 and 2012 elections, but finally triumphed in 2018. He has governed for six years. This is a very brief account (incomplete, of course) of its destructive fury:
He canceled Seguro Popular, which left 30 million Mexicans without public health services coverage. It cut resources to the Mexican Social Security Institute, as well as eighteen National Health Institutes and highly specialized hospitals, which led to a shortage of medicines and hospital supplies. His austerity policy left 500,000 people without surgeries and 15 million medical prescriptions unfilled (five times more than the previous government). The population without medical assistance increased from 20.1 million in 2018 to 50.4 million in 2022. 97% of care for cancer patients was suspended. In the six years of his government, more than 6 million children were left unimmunized due to vaccine shortages. His handling of the COVID pandemic resulted in 800,000 excess deaths, of which 300,000 are attributable to his decisions. He presided over the most violent six-year term in the history of Mexico, with almost 200,000 homicides. The period recorded the highest rate of femicides, disappearance of people, extortion, drug dealing, human trafficking, forced displacement, cargo transport robbery, hydrocarbon theft, rape and family violence. It allowed organized crime to become, in fact, a parallel state in large areas of the territory. He squandered more than 80 public funds and trusts, including those intended for recovery from disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and catastrophic illnesses. These resources were not enough: the public debt increased by 6.6 trillion pesos (the dollar is quoted at 20 pesos), making it the most indebted six-year period so far this century. He received a 2% deficit and brought it to 5.96% of GDP. The average growth in these six years was 1% of GDP, the lowest in the last five governments. Its infrastructure works were built with an extra cost of more than 485,000 million pesos and the most important ones are unviable: a ghost airport, a refinery that may one day produce gasoline (more expensive than imported gasoline) and a train that devastated the jungles of the Mexican southeast. All three were built by the Army, to which AMLO has granted a huge budget and unlimited power, entrusting it with outside tasks, such as supervising customs, in addition to making it the only national Police. It was also the worst six-year term in terms of corruption, impunity, transparency, institutional dismantling and destruction of all autonomous bodies for accountability. Its most recent demolition has been the division of powers and the republican order in place for 200 years. López Obrador has destroyed the Judiciary: thousands of judges will be fired and new ones will be elected by popular vote. But perhaps his most serious legacy is having sowed, day after day, hatred and polarization in Mexican society.
This tragedy has been called the “fourth transformation.” Having interviewed her does not give me the slightest satisfaction. With all my soul I would have liked to be wrong.
How do you explain AMLO’s popularity? On the one hand there is the practically total capture of information, the monopoly of the truth, the silence and (in the best of cases) the self-censorship of the mass media. On the other hand, the distribution of money through a network of “servants of the nation” who operate like the Cuban revolutionary committees. These are the central elements of the voluntary servitude that afflicts half of Mexicans. But official propaganda has hidden the nature and extent of the destruction; and the distribution of money is not a sustainable or solid solution to the problem of poverty, even less so if it is accompanied by political obedience. Sooner or later, now believers will awaken to reality, and the awakening will be painful. Perhaps then they will understand what the people of Cuba and Venezuela understand until now: the messianic leaderships bring with them the hope of the kingdom of God on earth, but the final result is always the same: hunger, desolation, prostration, exile. .
Claudia Sheinbaum will be the first woman to become the President of Mexico. It is a milestone, but unfortunately it has not given the slightest indication that it is not, itself, a prey to that voluntary servitude that will make Mexico lose not only irrecoverable years, but also the honorable, civilized and upright place that until recently occupied in the concert of democratic nations. (EITHER)