AMLO’s Surrender | Camilo Ruiz Tassinari

Lopezobradorismo is without a doubt the most significant political movement to have emerged in Mexico over the past three decades. Since 2018, it has reconstituted the country’s post-authoritarian political system. The movement’s new leader, Claudia Sheinbaum won the Presidency with 60 percent of the votes in early June. With a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena) will have the power to completely rewrite the country’s constitutional compact. 

The reach of Morena’s popularity—leading twenty-two out of thirty-two states with its allies—is astounding. For twenty years, Mexican politics was a three way game between the National Action Party (PAN) on the center-right, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) on the center-left, and a shape-shifting Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which had ruled the country for most of the twentieth century. During those two decades presidents seldom had a majority in congress and any constitutional change required corrupt bargains between the parties’ grandees. That game is now over: the PRD has disappeared, the PRI has hollowed out as most of its leaders moved to Morena, and the PAN has shrunk into a local organization of socially conservative families in the Catholic center-north. Morena has gained more electoral support than any party throughout the country’s quarter century of democracy. 

When he came to power in 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) promised to contain unbridled neoliberalism and end political violence. This, he argued, could only be done by protecting and uplifting the poor, by “disjoining political from economic power,” by ending the military occupation of so many regions, and instead tackling the “root social causes” of violence. Indeed, Morena’s popularity has been bolstered by the passage of minimum wage laws, infrastructure programs, and old age pensions. But these successes belie important setbacks. Two key planks of Morena’s platform—curbing military power and reforming Mexico’s tax system—were abandoned before AMLO’s inauguration. A third—resisting the US’s inhumane treatment of migrants—was abandoned less than a year into his presidency. 

The constitutional reforms that did reach the legislative floor were often of a completely different character: empowering and institutionalizing the power of the army, enabling punitive sentences for the incarcerated, and effecting an authoritarian power grab over the judiciary and the autonomous institutions in charge of organizing elections. To understand the government’s apparent shortcomings, we ought to situate its efforts in relation to three central features of Mexico’s political economy: the state, the elite, and the military. In its loyalty to the first, Morena ultimately yielded to the latter two.

A state hollowed out

AMLO’s presidency came on the heels of deep rooted discontent. The PAN, the first party to hold top office through democratic elections, shed its progressive elements in the early 2000s. In 2006 President Felipe Calderón distracted from electoral fraud accusations with an empty campaign against the cartels—an effort which only exacerbated the violence and power abuses of the military. The PRD, the traditional party of the left, became as corrupt and neoliberal as its adversaries. The PRI returned to the Presidency in 2012, and the three parties formed a super legislative coalition to fast-track a series of structural reforms, one of which tampered with time-honored features of Mexico’s petronationalism by allowing foreign companies to extract oil. Overall, the three parties sought to make Mexico more appealing to foreign capital by reducing wages, corporate taxes, environmental regulations, and government oversight. 

It’s for this reason that one of Lopezobradorismo’s early talking points was “PRIAN”—the idea that the two major parties are the same. Mexican democracy had been characterized by the complete retreat of workers as a structuring force of the political arena and the explosion of violence. Unions were dismantled or hollowed out and new ones were not formed across Mexico’s enormous industrial belt in the north. 

It was during these years that the minimum wage plummeted to a nearly global low, competing with Haiti’s and El Salvador’s. Carlos Slim, Mexico’s foremost business tycoon, replaced Bill Gates on the Forbes’ list as the drug war spiraled out of control. Drug-related violence transformed from armed resistance over trafficking routes into a decentralized battle against a patchwork of loose criminal cell networks in the business of extorting small producers. Over 400,000 people have been murdered, and a further 100,000 have disappeared since 2006. 

The control of criminal organizations over large swathes of the economy spilled into the political class. Over the past two decades, the involvement of municipal presidents, prosecutors, police commanders, congressmen, and governors has been exposed, and the most notorious ones have been prosecuted in the United States. This is the institutional environment in which, in 2018, Morena attempted to put forward its earliest reforms. Key among them was the tax system, without which no infrastructure or social expenditure was viable. AMLO’s original proposal had an element of redistributive justice: at 13 percent, Mexico has the lowest tax to GDP ratio of the OECD, 10 points below other large countries in Latin America and half of the OECD average. The progressive economists he placed in charge of the transition and in the first Finance Ministry forecasted that while the government could pay its way through the first couple of years without a tax reform, a reform would be essential for the second half of the administration. But early on these ambitions had been replaced with a more modest focus on ensuring proper payment of current tax dues and reigning in graft. Six years later it is clear that collection has not been meaningfully increased. As head of Morena Mario Delgado said in 2021, “there is no businessman that has had a bad time with us. Among the big ones, you can’t find one”. Moreover, the progressive economists were out of the Ministry of Finance within a year—the most prominent of them, Carlos Urzúa, the first Minister, became an open critic of the government; the others were cowed into submission.

The sidelining of AMLO’s tax agenda had profound consequences. Deprived of a critical source of income, the government began to position the state as a bottomless pit, with major savings to be had by cutting the royalty perks of civil servants. This was the justification for what was widely nicknamed “republican austerity.” Government offices were merged and the wages of public employees slashed. The most dramatic instances have been the excision of government programs like full-time elementary schools, and the wholesale defunding of the non-contributory health system used by low-income and informal workers.

As a result, one undeniable feature of Lopezobradorismo has been the steep degradation of public services. Austerity policies did very little to curb corruption and abuse. Instead, they transferred money from one section of the state (health, education, and environmental protection) to others (infrastructure projects, pensions, and the military). While most people approved of cutting expenses on chauffeurs, private insurance premiums, and first-class flights, the cuts quickly became irrational, with the President at one point personally approving all international flights by public servants.

At the same time, the health system has exhibited structural decline. ^{Budget items for treatment of different types of cancer have been cut by over 90 percent since 2018. Arguably the most efficient arm of the Mexican state was the vaccination service, which often reached levels of 100 percent among children. In the first two years of AMLO’s administration, over six million children were left waiting for different types of vaccines. There were 46 percent fewer doctor appointments, 14 percent less surgeries, and 20 million fewer lab exams between 2018 and 2022.}

The reshuffling of resources within the Ministry of Education is another case in point. A successful full-time school and meal program was removed, and funding for school renovation via parents’ associations was initiated in its place. They carried out procurement, bought materials, and hired construction workers. A high proportion of these renovations were poorly done, with no architects or civil engineers involved. In many of them the money was lost, or poorly spent. López Obrador tellingly presented this as a veritable deliverance from the oppression of big government, with families now free to choose how to spend the money and cut the middlemen of the ministry’s bureaucracy. But as in many other contexts, the language of free choice in education masked a shifting of resources from public to private hands.

Budgetary tightening left no room for other programs. Inspired by Lula’s energetic expansion of public higher education, for instance, early on a program of new public universities for people of lower income was discussed. The Benito Juárez University System never took off though: only some $50–60 million USD were assigned to it yearly for over 145 campuses. The best of them were old houses hastily turned into classrooms, but some were in ruins, and other “schools” were just empty, barren lands. Teachers complained of poor working conditions and low salaries, but when they organized to pressure the administration over two hundred of them were fired.   

Republican austerity was ultimately a consequence of AMLO’s surrender to Mexican elites over the question of  taxes. Morena’s flagship infrastructure projects and cash transfers demanded money. And without raising taxes on the country’s wealthiest, funding came from other sources. It is no coincidence that the institutions hardest hit by Republican Austerity were those related to the provision of public services to the poorest. The overall consequence of this pattern is that while cash transfers have increased considerably, the provision of public services has worsened.

A bourgeoisie unchallenged

Who are the elites that AMLO was unable to challenge? Compared to its peers across Latin America and the developing world more broadly, the summit of the Mexican bourgeoisie is in a class of its own in terms of economic power. The twenty wealthiest Mexican families have a fortune several times over that of the Brazilian ones. With government concessions in telecommunications, television, and mining, this tip of the Mexican bourgeoisie holds an aggregate fortune of $200 billion dollars, of which Carlos Slim, owner of a telecom empire, gold, and silver mines, owns little over $100 billion. Other relevant names include Germán Larrea, copper mogul; the Bailleres family, also in mining; Ricardo Salinas, holder of a TV concession and a retail and banking network for the poor; Carlos Hank González, in banking and tortilla making; and Daniel Chávez, tourism mogul. These twenty families increased their wealth by over $150 billion over the past six years. Mr. Slim and Mr. Larrea, the two wealthiest, have increased their net worth by over 70 percent since the pandemic.

As the primus inter pares of the Mexican bourgeoisie, Slim has received preferential treatment from the government, which he has reciprocated through constant public appearances with the President. When it became clear that the collapse in 2020 of an elevated metro line that had killed twenty-six people was due to poor workmanship by Mr. Slim’s engineering firm, then-mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum reached an agreement with the billionaire: the firm would rebuild the line at a cost of about $40 million dollars. The victims received a compensation of $20,000 to $290,000, depending on whether they had been wounded or killed. For less than $50 million dollars, Slim bought his innocence. 

AMLO has cast his career and his government as a mythical struggle between the poor and the rich. The truth is that he has governed not just with the oligarchy, but through the oligarchy, and for the oligarchy. And they have paid in kind. The three large television networks, owned and controlled by individual families, have been friendly to the government, in part out of political opportunism and in part because they have received hundreds of millions of pesos in government ads. Whatever else has been discussed in their meetings in the National Palace, the periodic encounters between the Forbes’ summit and the President have sent a signal to the broader bourgeoisie: the big men stand with López Obrador, and López Obrador lets them have their cut of the cake.

A military empowered

The militarization of public security harkens back to 2006, when PAN President Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels. The military was deployed across different regions to compete with the cartels’ firepower. They have patrolled much of the country ever since, setting up a revolving door between the military and state-level police forces, which are in most cases led by former military commanders. It is now well established that the arrival of the military has not eroded the power of criminal organizations, and that on the contrary it has brought about more intense waves of violence. The army, to the surprise of no one, has been involved in countless episodes of excessive use of force, murdering civilians and innocents in too many scandals to count.

López Obrador’s campaign advocated for sending soldiers back to the barracks, promising to reduce the military’s abuse of power. But after a series of high-level meetings with the military command in the fall of 2018, he reversed his position. Declaring that the “problem was much worse” than he expected, López Obrador reinforced the strength of the Armed Forces—increasing their budget more than three-fold over the past six years and passing a new constitutional reform giving them full control over the remaining national civilian force. 

Lopezobradorista militarization has been qualitatively different from the prior iteration  between 2006 and 2018. In a pattern not unlike that of Egypt or Pakistan, the military has been made owners, concessionaires, or contractors of major public works and enterprises. Like Mr. Slim, the military was give a concession for the Mayan Train, and with it a share of the tourism boom in the Yucatan peninsula. The military are now building a luxurious hotel in Tulúm, and own the airport in this tourist spot. The Armed Forces are in control of customs points and airports; they now build hospitals, plant trees, run freight and passenger trains, and distribute textbooks.
^{Through public concessions, the military now has autonomous and opaque sources of funding. It has become a private economic agency with no oversight from public bodies.}

The most dramatic symbol of military empowerment during Morena’s tenure is the derailed investigation of the disappearance of the forty-three students of Ayotzinapa teachers’ college. In September 2014, six people were murdered and forty-three young students from a rural teachers’ college disappeared in the city of Iguala. This remains the darkest moment of Mexico’s past quarter century. The government argued, in a hastily concocted cover-up, that students were involved in drug trafficking and that their murder was yet another episode in the ongoing war against crime. But public outrage forced then-President Enrique Peña Nieto to let an independent, international commission carry out an investigation. Each report has shown more evidence of the Armed Forces’ involvement in the disappearance. There is no doubt today that the Army had spies among the students—who spearheaded a radical, broader peasant movement—that students’ phones were tapped, that the students’ movements were being carefully monitored by different security agencies during the night of the disappearance, and that the government carried out a massive cover-up operation, which included extracting confessions through torture from dozens of people. 

López Obrador’s first official act as President in December 2018 was to meet with the parents of the disappeared and promise them full support for an independent investigation. But the military exerted its newly acquired political power to force Omar Gómez Trejo, the special prosecutor’s ousting in the Fall of 2022. The once-independent prosecution was captured by the government and all access to military files or personnel was denied.  After López Obrador accused the prosecutor of seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the army at the behest of American agencies and hinted that charges would be raised, the prosecutor fled the country.

In 2024, the arch of the Ayotzinapa case bends back full circle to where it began with Peña Nieto a decade ago, far from the promise with which López Obrador started his presidency. In an open letter sent to the parents of the disappeared published on July 20, the President tells them that there has been a conspiracy of the DEA, the OAS, and local reactionaries to stain the Army. They have been manipulated, he suggests, by foreign-funded human rights organizations into a plot to undermine the state.

The manifold faces of Lopezobradorismo

The Morena government’s most characteristic features have been its unflinching loyalty to the Mexican state. With tax reform discarded, the government’s narrow budget made it vulnerable to military influence. Upholding the ideological legitimacy of the state builds on longstanding nationalist and progressive traditions. But in a country ravaged by violence and inequality, loyalty to the Mexican state meant complying with its repressive legacy. 

On the other end of loyalty to the institutional status quo was the continued demobilization of labor. Many of the cities of Mexico’s industrial belt—Monterrey, Ciudad Juárez, Tamaulipas, Tijuana, recently Guanajuato—are the most castigated by cartel-related violence. The upshot of this void is that there was no political locale from which to elaborate a cogent critique of Lopezobradorismo. Movement demands have been sublimated into hyper-local grievances. This shielding of the government from criticism has yielded a depoliticizing faith: while approval ratings for the President sit at about 70 percent, many people simultaneously disagree with the government’s actions and policies. 

An illustration of these dynamics is provided by the June protests in Veracruz against a major pork farm accused of pollution and water grabbing. Sheinbaum had won that region with an above-average turnout barely two weeks before, yet that did not stop anyone from joining the protests. In turn, electoral support did not prevent the Morena governor from sending the police, who shot and killed two men and wounded many more. Protestors point to the governor as the direct culprit, which is true as far as the repression is concerned, but this risks obscuring the role of the federal government in empowering the company and, later, in the lack of a forceful reaction to pressure local authorities and bring justice.

The upshot of Lopezobradorismo’s statist orientation has been the unremitting failure to resolve some of the core structural problems plaguing Mexican society. While the last six years have seen a respectable 10 percent increase in average real wages, economic growth remains sluggish.^{Violence has not dwindled (witness the 40,000 yearly murders), state capacity has withered, and environmental catastrophe is a non-issue.}

Claudia Sheinbaum’s incoming government thus faces an uphill battle. The alliance with the bourgeoisie and the military are structural supports of Morena’s rule, and chipping away at them means fracturing the party’s support. Already, there are reasons for concern. In the two months since her election, Sheinbaum has delivered one key message: there will be no tax reform. Similarly, she has rejected union-backed proposals for a reduction of the working week.  In a move that has enraged a large chunk of Morena’s so-called progressive wing, she appointed one of the commanders of the Federal Police involved in the Ayotzinapa scandal her incoming Minister of Security. Morena’s critics worry that AMLO will rule from the shadows. It is an immaterial preoccupation: military rule and billionaires’ reign remain the key influences to be unmade.