Tropical Messiah

But here is a good piece to get started on analyzing current events again: Enrique Krauze, “Mexico’s Ruinous Messiah”. Krauze is a convervative critic of AMLO and of the Mexican left in general - although whether AMLO can be associated with the left is problematic. For Krauze, AMLO is a charismatic leader, a tropic messiah that wants to save Mexico from “neoliberalism” even though his major economic policies scarcely diverge from the general neoliberal model of seeking growth by opening Mexico up to the foreign corporate investment, with some measure of greater degree of participation by the state, epitomized by AMLO’s efforts to the revive PEMEX. Krauze’s central criticism of AMLO is his attempt to the dismantle the construction of multi-party democracy in Mexico through weakening the independence of the federal electoral institute - a cornerstone of the democratization project - and also, interestingly, the of AMLO’s republican austerity, which have defunded key Mexican social programs, such as Social Seguro, in order to finance is his development projects, such as the Dos Bocas refinery in Tabasco. But Krauze does not go a step further and inquire into my AMLO was so dead set against raising taxes on the rich, nor on this special relationship the upper rungs of the Mexican bourgeoisie. That is a lot to sweep under the rug. It is also a point that Krauze’s critics - Edward Blumenthal and James Cohen - fail to address.

But one point that I find interesting in Krauze is AMLO’s evangelical conception of politics, as he travels from the village to village in Mexico to share the good news of his presidential administration with ordinary (and poor) Mexicans. Interesting as well is the fact that AMLO has not traveled abroad once in his presidency. Similar to Hugo Chavez, with whom Krauze compares him, AMLO makes extensive use of the media with his morning press conferences, or mananeras, which Krauze characterizes as civic masses or sermon, where AMLO attacks the press and his other domestic enemies - conservatives, fifis, alcuahetes (pimps), aprendez de carterista (pickpocket), etc. And like Chavez, AMLO has constructed a grand national narrative - the Fourth Transformation - in which he inserts himself as the modern day savior of the nation. AMLO is attempting to secure the purification of the Mexican nation from corruption. One of his main instruments of power are Morenista militants that spread out through the country instructing the people on the moral tenets of the Fourth Transformation. This idea of purification is what constitutes AMLO as a messianic leader. One of the core aspects of AMLO’s political disposition is his disinterest in the consequences of his policies. The only thing that matters is that he thinks they are right.

This, suggests Krauze is AMLO’s public facade, but his social programs, oriented toward the poor, are implemented by Morena activists, an arrangement that smacks of clientelism. When, as a result of AMLO’s practices of fiscal austerity, the social security system ended up being bankrupted, AMLO blamed it on the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and the doctors rather than his own policies. The elimination of the popular seguro - a health insurance program specifically directed toward the poor, established in 2003, has been another consequence of fiscal austerity. The result of these decisions is that Mexico has become highly vulnerable to COVID-19, and even here AMLO has exacerbated its impact in early February (2020) of the pandemic by having mass rallies - rather like Trump - inviting people to rejoice and embrace on account, presumably, of the good news of the Fourth Transformation. When U.S. papers reported that Mexico City’s COVID death rate was vastly underreported, AMLO dismissed sources as “famous papers without ethics” - which is revealing in the sense that AMLO sets himself out as the ultimate arbiter of good/bad, right/wrong, and true/false for Mexico - an aspect of the ethos of sovereignty which he projects and that is also characteristic of authoritarian populism. To circle back to clientelism, one can make the Weberian point that AMLO is creating an apparatus of rule - Morena - that will outlive him and pursue its own purposes - similar to the way in which the Bolivarian revolution outlived Hugo Chavez and has assumed a particularly corrupt and perverted form under the rule of Nicholas Maduro.

I can agree with ideological critique the Krauze develops about AMLO, but I am less certain about his discussion of Mexico’s political economy. Krauze’s argument here is that Mexico’s low rate of economic growth before COVID and its economic contraction after COVID is a result of an investor strike because Mexico’s capitalist class has no confidence in AMLO. This is the typical neoliberal idea that the state has to create a positive investment climate for the private sector, which implies the absence of any critique of capitalism. It's all the fault of the state. And this view of the political economy also overlooks AMLO’s efforts to court the private sector through his advocacy of the same mega-projects that his predecessors pushed - particularly the notion of Mexico’s South as a new growth pole by means of the Tren Maya and the massive development of the isthmus of Tehuantepec. Still some of what Krauze reports here is of interest, particularly with regard to the impact of COVID on the Mexican economy.

This situation was already worrying, but the pandemic has caused a serious breach between AMLO and the private sector. Instead of applying the fiscal and economic measures being undertaken now in the majority of countries to help companies and save jobs, AMLO ruled, “Let them go bankrupt.” In a recent mañanera, he declared that standard measures of economic growth like GDP are now useless: what matters is the spiritual well-being of the people.

Krauze next turns to AMLO’s unsuccessful efforts to staunch criminal violence in Mexico. AMLO had proposed to demilitarize the war on drugs during his campaign for the presidency in 2017 and 2018, but has since opted to dismantle the Mexican federal police - the only agency with significance investigative capabilities - and fold this organization into the National Guard - AMLO’s attempt to restructure the army as a national police. And AMLO then used the National Guard to hunt down Central American migrants - an abrupt capitulation to Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs if Mexico did not do more to interdict Central American migrants. And, of course, this is a tradeoff. To the extent that the National Guard is focused on hunting migrants, it is not engaged in establishing public safety.

In his conclusion, Krauze turns to the idea of corruption - in particular, the kind of moral corruption that AMLO represents, which is the effacement of truth or reality in favor of AMLO’s preferred narrative of national existence: “power corrupts the meaning of reality,” Where is all of this headed? Toward the threshold of generalized state failure in Mexico, which suggests that one of the precursors of state failure is the denial of reality so that the state loses whatever limited capacities it had to negotiate reality and it winds up overwhelmed by it. Krauze:

Mexico urgently needed change. It needed to end the shameful corruption among its political elites and to make a serious attempt to correct social inequality through economic growth and the distribution of cash without clientelism; it needed respect for the environment, a professional fight against crime, and a strong, independent judicial system. But the longed-for change has arrived only in the Orwellian realm of power and propaganda, not in reality. Months ago, before Covid-19, I thought that an apocalyptic scenario of economic and social crisis, a crisis of security and violence more serious than anything we had experienced, was still improbable. That scenario would further encourage migration to the United States, which no wall would be able to stop. With Covid-19, that nightmare seems near.

The response from Blumenthal and Cohen raises some interesting points about Krauze’s critique. In particular, these authors get at some of the Krauze’s conservative biases.

"The leitmotif of Mr. Krauze’s complaint is that AMLO, although personally incorruptible in material terms, has been “corrupted” by power and seeks to become a modern-day caudillo. He is apparently in thrall to outdated normative representations of Mexicans and other Latin Americans as culturally backward and prone to charismatic authoritarian leaders, caudillos. In this view, popularized by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, president of     Argentina (1868–1874), and taken up by Mr. Krauze in one of his books, Latin Americans naturally tend toward authoritarian, “barbarian” leaders and are incapable of exercising the restraint needed for republican rule in “civilized” societies."

On this account, liberalism represents the civilized horizon that Latin America never quite reaches owing to its barbaric (non-Western) nature. There is not quite enough of the West in Latin America! This is not so different from Octavio Paz and his essay, “the Pyramid” and really the work of numerous other pensadores whom we might see as a manifestation of Angel Rama’s La Ciudad Letrada. But in his response to Blumenthal and Cohen, Krause counters that he is not systematically anti-statist; in fact, he laments AMLO’s destructive dismantling of state institutions as Social Security and Seguro Popular. Blumenthal and Cohen, on the other hand, contend that AMLO’s policies are not submerged in a populist mystification of reality but that AMLO’s popularity is a function of how he prioritized the needs of ordinary Mexicans and this is what has conservatives like Krauze so upset. I do not see how this is the case.