The Populist; The President; The Legacy

I.

Early Tuesday morning, a few hours before Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, was to pass the sash of the Mexican presidency to his anointed successor Claudia Sheinbaum, he posted a video to his 11 million followers on Twitter. “The people of Mexico are very loving, the best in the world,” he wrote. In Spanish, however, the word for people, el pueblo, is a more powerful term, a singular noun that can mean both a village/town or a nation.

The video was an AMLO greatest-hits compilation with a melancholy ballad. It went back to when he was a young man walking through a swamp with no shoes, working with indigenous people in his native Tabasco, and followed through his six years as president, hugging fishermen, miners, women in flowery traditional dresses. In his voice-over, he says the word “pueblo” repeatedly.

“I was born in a pueblo. And in the pueblos still today, there are no distinctions, no differences,” he says at the beginning, alluding to the communality of villages. “Who is our best ally? …El pueblo,” he says in a crescendo at the end referring to the grass-root nation. “Who do we trust? Pueblo, pueblo, pueblo.”

Politically, there is no denying that the 70-year-old AMLO left on a high. He finished with an approval rating north of 70 percent, according to various polls, better than most world leaders or other Mexican presidents ever achieve. The party he founded, Morena (a name that means National Regeneration Movement, while also referring to “brown-skinned woman,”), gained a commanding majority in Congress and two-thirds of governors. His candidate Sheinbaum beat her opponent by two-votes-to-one ensuring the presidency passed to his mentee.

Yet his legacy is more debatable. He almost tripled the minimum wage and boosted social programs, handing out pensions, scholarships and fertilizer, which was a big part of his popularity. Yet the economy overall was sluggish and inflation punishing. He managed to build a new airport, train lines and oil refinery, but they went billions over budget. The murder rate slightly dropped yet it was still the bloodiest period in Mexico’s recent history and cartels moved record amounts of fentanyl and expanded extortion rackets.

AMLO claimed his presidency was the “fourth transformation” (the 4T) of Mexico, following the war of independence, the reforms under Benito Juárez and the Revolution. Sheinbaum promises to take this 4T to the next level.

The most significant reforms were achieved in AMLO’s final month when he put together a super-majority in Congress to change the Constitution. He signed an act to revolutionize the justice system, replacing thousands of appointed judges by candidates chosen in elections. And he put his new militarized police force, the National Guard, under the control of the army with a legal mandate to fight crime in the long term.

His critics, including prominent Mexican intellectuals, say the “transformation” shattered the young and fragile democracy and it’s tumbling back to dictatorship. AMLO retorted that he was smashing the rotten oligarchy that ruled Mexico for too long. He claimed to be taking power from the corrupt, the conservatives, the neoliberals, the mafia of power, and giving it to – El Pueblo.

II.

In 2018, the year that AMLO won the presidency on his third attempt, I traveled to the pueblo he hailed from, Tepetitán, Macuspana, in the swampy southeast of Mexico, where his parents once owned a general store. I found aging guys who used to play baseball with AMLO; they called him El Molido, or the Grinder, and remember how he used to clobber the ball far into the bushes.

Tepetitán was more flourishing when AMLO grew up there in the 1950s, enjoying a post-war boom powered by Mexico’s oil money. Like many Mexican pueblos it was later hit by globalization and emigration and left with empty streets and decaying buildings.

I went to AMLO’s campaign events, which he often did in pueblos rather than big cities. AMLO loved to visit small towns and villages and claimed to have trodden in every single municipality in Mexico.

Speaking in provincial plazas, AMLO talked about how communities had been hammered by “neoliberalism,” which he used to not only refer to a form of economics but a whole set of values of individualism and materialism. This was the source of the despair, the pain, the violence.

AMLO’s discourse appealed to many people across age, social class and regions. But at the heart of it was a yearning for this lost Mexico, the flourishing pueblos of the 1950s, the plazas with mariachis and men in sombreros swigging tequila idealized in Mexico’s golden era of cinema.

In this sense, AMLO’s vision was not wholly different from that of Donald Trump, which looked to a golden age of America in the 1950s. The idealized U.S.A. is also seen in the small town glamorized in American movies.

AMLO and Trump have been compared often and they got on surprisingly well, despite Trump launching his campaign with rhetoric that derided Mexicans. They are both charismatic opinionated politicians who can carry a crowd and rail against a corrupt elite. For Trump, it’s “the Washington swamp” and for AMLO, the “mafia of power.”

Yet the comparison is limited and their countries very different. AMLO won over a sizeable majority of the Mexican pueblo while Trump never won more than half of his. And AMLO called himself a leftist and made his slogan, “primero los pobres,” or “the poor first.”

The leftist label of AMLO, alongside his social conservatism and nationalism, threw people off in the Anglosphere. Progressives focused on identity politics didn’t care for him. The financial press certainly didn’t like him. Only a relatively small subset of leftists who sympathize with Latin American nationalists took his corner.

Political labels are confusing in the twenty-first century and probably not worth dwelling on too much. But I would say that AMLO was a leftist-nationalist-populist. I don’t think his social conservatism disqualified his genuine attempts to raise the living standards of the worst off. Yet, I’m sure he was nowhere close to a communist in the Bolshevik sense of putting the entire economy under state control.

I recognize AMLO as a populist by following the literature to see populism not as an ideology but a political logic, which sets the people (el pueblo) against an elite (the mafia of power). Unlike many writers on this issue though I don’t see populism as a necessarily bad thing as it addresses genuine concerns. Nevertheless, when populists claim that only they represent the people and those who disagree with them are enemies of the patria, it can certainly veer into dangerous terrain.

III.

Over the six years of AMLO’s presidency, the rough-house world of Mexican political Twitter had two main camps. You could call his supporters Am-lovers (and there are even t-shirts of that) or, to be more derogatory, “chairos,” a word that originates from a tool to sharpen knives. AMLO would sometimes call his enemies “fifis,” which means people who are posh, rich, arrogant. So, it was chairos versus fifis; or for simplicity let’s call it Am-lovers versus Am-haters.

Both camps could be fervent and uncompromising. Am-lovers were unforgiving of people who weren’t totally supportive of their “beloved leader.” But some Am-haters could argue with the latest AMLO statement even if he said the sky was blue.

Foreign journalists, especially gringos, were seen as Am-haters, and accused of colonialism and interventionism for criticizing the president. However, there were a few rare exceptions of foreign Am-lovers, who would be derided as “gringo chairos.” I tried to stand in the middle (and have stories to prove that), which means I got incoming from both sides (and have abuse to prove that too).

Twitter seemed to have a pretty even split of Am-haters and Am-lovers, but it’s a relatively “elite” platform for the more educated, urban, laptop class. AMLO’s declarations inundated Twitter, sparking responses from both sides, but he really thrived on YouTube, which the majority of Mexicans watch.

AMLO harnessed YouTube to broadcast his morning press conferences (mañaneras), of which he gave a whopping 1,438 in six years. Amazingly, he became the most popular streamer in all Latin America in 2023 with 49 million views. On Monday, his last full day in power, he gave his final mañanera and during a video of his achievements, he looked emotional to the point of tears, which became a meme on Twitter.

AMLO created a lot of memes because he could be genuinely funny while driving Am-haters berserk (this also echoes Trump). He threw out comic, untranslatable phrases such as, “Me canso ganso,” “Cállate chachalaca,” and the classic, “Fuchi, caca.” When the U.S. Congress held a hearing about UFO’s, AMLO played the jokey song “Los Marcianos Llegaron Ya,” with the words, “The Martians have arrived, and they are dancing.”

Am-lover YouTube channels sprung up with names such as El Chapucero and El Charro Político. While mainstream journalists mocked them, they reached an audience of millions, spreading the AMLO gospel and hating on the fifis. They would hit back against traditional journalists by calling them “chayoteros,” an old name for reporters who took bribes.

AMLO picked on journalists and intellectuals who criticized him, calling them out personally. He attacked the historian Enrique Krauze 474 times. He published the alleged income of journalist Carlos Loret de Mola and photos of a chalet he owned. And he flashed up the phone number of a New York Times reporter after she worked on a piece about alleged narco funding in his election campaigns, an especially sensitive issue that really triggers both Am-lovers and Am-haters.

IV.

At the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, AMLO was visiting the pueblo of Badiraguato, home of the infamous drug lord “El Chapo,” when he was filmed on camera greeting Chapo’s mother with a friendly handshake. It was one of the bizarre Mexico moments that leave you scratching your head. Was it really just a chance encounter? Or was he in Badiraguato, which is in Sinaloa state, to meet unsavory characters?

The trip was five months after the so-called Culiacanazo, or battle of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. In that debacle, federal police and soldiers arrested Chapo’s son, Ovidio, but gunmen took to the streets and fought raging battles with troops. After hours of firefights, AMLO ordered the cops to let Ovidio go.

For Am-haters, the events showed the president bowing to drug traffickers and said his campaign slogan, “abrazos no balazos,” or “hugs not bullets,” was really about hugging narcos he was in bed with. On Twitter, they posted the tag #NarcoPresidente.

The allegations of narco financing were first published in January in the outlets Pro-Publica, Insight Crime and by journalist Anabel Hernández, claiming mobster “La Barbie” financed AMLO’s 2006 presidential campaign. The New York Times piece in February reported more recent allegations of cash from various cartels going to AMLO’s henchmen.

The claims certainly sounded plausible. But they had issues. They appeared to come from active or retired DEA agents, who were unnamed and citing their own sources in the cartel world. And while the DEA made their investigations, they never turned them into formal criminal charges against AMLO.

They certainly rattled the president though, especially as they came in an election year, and he hit back against what he called slander and foreign interference. “Who was it? The Justice Department? The State Department? The CIA? The DEA? Or who?” AMLO said.

Still, it didn’t ultimately affect AMLO’s electoral triumph or popularity. One reason is that people in Mexico are so accustomed to narco corruption and see it as across the board. The public security secretary under President Felipe Calderón (2006 to 2012) was convicted in 2023 of cocaine trafficking by a New York court. Raúl Salinas, brother of President Carlos Salinas (1988 to 1994), was accused by Swiss investigators of taking hundreds of millions in drug bribes. This list goes on.

Still, AMLO certainly failed on public security and this is a huge deal that affects people’s lives. Under his watch, there were about 200,000 murders in Mexico.

Unlike boosting wages, security was not a core issue for AMLO in his long years seeking the presidency. In his 2012 campaign he hardly mentioned it while in 2018, he used the phrase “hugs not bullets” as a response to massacres by security forces.

The idea that Mexico needs to embrace communities with crime prevention is certainly good. But AMLO didn’t create programs with enough focus. School scholarships, which he dubbed “becarios, no sicarios,” were nice but they didn’t reach the violent disruptive youths mostly recruited by cartels.

It might seem a contradiction that AMLO also built a military complex, giving generals the power over the National Guard, airports and railways. But AMLO was always a believer in the militia, or as the late Alejandro Hope put it: ““He really sees the army as the army sees itself. As the people in arms. As a pueblo uniformado. As an inheritor of the Revolution.” AMLO used the army to go back into Sinaloa in 2023 and recapture Ovidio, slaying that demon.

Keeping the army in Mexico’s fight against cartels worries many, especially human rights defenders. But surveys show Mexican public support for it is over 80 percent. Mexico still spends a smaller percentage of GDP on the military than the belicose powers of the United States, China, Russia or even the UK. Mexican troops also got criticized for not hitting cartels enough, with their failure to stop the paralysis of Culiacán amid the current civil war in the Sinaloa Cartel.

AMLO stopped in Sinaloa on of his very last tour as president. Before he landed, thugs left a van with at least five corpses and the slogan, “Welcome to Culiacán.” In a speech there, AMLO blamed the bloodshed on a U.S. operation to capture the gangster El Mayo. “We didn’t have a problem (in Sinaloa) until these last days. And that was because of a decision that was incorrect, and made from abroad,” he said.

It was a curious statement to make in the heartland of cartels at the end of his presidency. It sounded like he was saying Mayo should not be behind bars. He did, however, have a point that the U.S. operation, and it’s whole war on drugs strategy, was dubious and provoked violence. But he still had a responsibility to protect the people of Culiacán, rather than just see it as a plot by his enemies to make him personally look bad.

V.

When AMLO passed the presidential sash to Sheinbaum on Tuesday, he contrasted himself with many other populist leaders in Latin America by giving up power. Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega, Nayib Bukele, all trampled over restrictions on re-election. AMLO respected the single six-year term established after the Mexican Revolution.

Instead, AMLO says, he will “ir a la chingada,” a phrase that means “fuck off” but is literally the name of his ranch in the pueblo of Palenque in the southern state of Chiapas. Am-haters retort that he will still rule and post a meme of Sheinbaum as a string puppet. They fear AMLO will be like Plutarco Elías Calles, who ran the presidency from behind the scenes in the 1930s, a period known as the Maximato.

Sheinbaum inherits a powerful hand politically but a difficult one to play. She has to decide how to manage the changes approved by AMLO, including the judicial reform, which is opposed by judges and lawyers and could paralyze the courts. She has to keep up wages amid pressures of inflation. She has to rule over the cartel bloodshed, including the new Sinaloa war. And she has to decide how to handle her mentor.

Becoming Mexico’s first female president at 62, Sheinbaum was an interesting choice for AMLO. An environmentalist and feminist with a PHD, she earns points with mainstream progressives in the Anglo world as well as the Latin American leftist camp.

It’s hard to predict where she will steer Mexico. She doesn’t seem to inspire the love or hate AMLO did and was a pragmatic mayor of Mexico City. But she also has to contend with an empowered army and a Morena party in which AMLO’s son, Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, will have a senior position.

Am-haters say Morena has become a new one-party state like the PRI that ruled for seven decades in the twentieth century. I think that remains to be seen and much actually depends on how effective the opposition can be at building an alternative. The true impact of AMLO, and AMLOism, is yet to be understood, while the man himself goes back to a pueblo in the southeast of Mexico, or so he says.

Photos 1, Ioan Grillo, 2, Ioan Grillo 3, Fidel Durán, 4, Ioan Grillo

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2024