If you think the new Mexican government is a problem, wait until you see the solutions

Hello everyone. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from very humid North Carolina. Today we’re going to talk about the changes that are happening in Mexico. Claudia Shane Bond is the president-elect. She took office on October 1, Tuesday. Tuesday? Yes. See you this Wednesday? She is among the people who have run for office in North America in recent years and is probably the most qualified.

Unlike Justin Trudeau. She wasn’t a kindergarten teacher. She was actually mayor of Mexico City. No less. And unlike Trump, she was not a marketer. She had a real boy’s job. And unlike people like Harris, Biden or Obama, she was not a senator. She was actually responsible for the people and making the trains run on time. So in terms of expertise and management skills she is clearly among the top.

The question is whether she will show any independence. Outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will go down in history as one of Mexico’s worst leaders, despite leaving in relatively popular fashion. He was an ideologue who wanted to punish most of the other factions responsible for policymaking in Mexico.

And in doing so, he dismantled many of the country’s institutions. In his last few months in power, he essentially wiped out the judiciary. So if you’re an American, imagine your most popular hated presidential candidate wins, and then he or she goes ahead and changes the way the judges are appointed. So instead of going through Congress, it just goes through party meetings like that person’s party meetings.

Some version of that is actually what Mexico has now, which will make it very difficult for the country to recover and have any form of judicial independence in a multi-party system. The question now, of course, is whether Shane will be part of the problem or part of the solution. And since she considers herself Lopez Obrador’s protege, I can’t say the prognosis here is particularly good.

We also have another reform that has just been implemented; the lower house of Congress just approved the integration of the National Guard into the military force. It’s already over, the Senate or is it the Senate? Just passed. Anyway, it has already passed both houses of Congress and now goes to the states where they need seventeen states to ratify it.

And given that Lopez Obrador and Shane Bonds’ party controls 20 of the state legislatures, that should be a fairly simple process that then returns to Mexico City and the president formally rubber stamps it into law. Why does that matter? Well, the National Guard was created a few years ago because the military was so terribly corrupt and Mexico City needed a new semi-military operation to fight the cartels.

Now it is simply being collapsed again to guarantee central control by the president. So we are looking at the state’s instruments of violence being consolidated under one party, and we are looking at the judiciary being consolidated into one party and using elections. That one party has already dominated most political conversations in the country.

Now this happened without a coup. This happened through the ballot box. One of the disadvantages of the Mexican economic model is that it is largely the same. And because the country is so difficult to govern, because it is so difficult to build, it is a mountainous issue. Most of the country is mountainous in the north. It’s desert, mountainous in the south, it’s mountainous in the jungle, and in the middle it’s just mountainous.

And so you get a lot of oligarchs basically taking control of their local cities. And it has been that way since independence in the 19th century. And so Lopez Obrador sees this, to some extent, as a problem. And he wants to take power away from these local oligarchs, or could be used, if you want to use the Spanish term and give power to the people.

And so instead of having the most economically unequal state in the world, as Mexico was when he came in, he redistributes resources from the states to the federal government. Then the federal government gave them mainly to the poor. And that’s one of the main reasons why Lopez Obrador, despite destroying the country, is leaving on a high is because there are a lot of people who have never read and want to speak for them.

The challenge for the future is that we are now looking at a situation where the security situation in Mexico will deteriorate enormously. There is a civil war going on between the Sinaloa Cartel, which used to be the most powerful cartel in the country, and is now. Security in the country is the responsibility of the army, which is corrupt.

And for the past five years, Lopez Obrador has refused to take action against the drug cartels. So they have actually taken over many aspects of daily life, including in the Mexico City Central region. So Shane Bond has her work cut out for her, and we’ll find out if this relatively pragmatic governor will be able to ditch the ideology and govern like a normal person, or if she’ll make things worse.