Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

The Mexican Midterms :  I am listening to a podcast this morning from the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center, which featured a presentation of polling data followed by commentary by Denise Dresser and Guadalupe Correa.  What stands out with the polling data are the geographic and economic distinctions in the data so that Northern Mexico is relatively more aligned with the opposition parties and Southern Mexico more strongly supports Morena.  This is similar to the pattern of partisan division that existed in Mexico with Calderon vs. AMLO in 2006.  Demographically, younger voters are breaking more toward the opposition parties and older voters more toward Morena, which is consistent with the populist politics of nostalgia in other parts of the world, which appeal to older voters.   Dresser picks up on this theme and focuses on Mexico’s democratic backsliding under AMLO.  AMLO, of course, is attacking Mexico’s autonomous institutions - in particular, ...

A recent article in T he Intercept, documents an effort by the U.S. Department of Justice to intimidate MIT researchers who demonstrated that Evo Morales won the 2019 election.  It is interesting as well to consider the impact the New York Times editorial page had on coup leaders Bolivia and how eagerly the OAS jumped on the coup bandwagon in order to drive Morales from power.  Here is an “Interpreter” column of the Times.  “The line between coups and revolts can be blurry, even nonexistent,” wrote Max Fisher for the New York Times. He cited what political scientist Jay Ulfelder calls “Schrödinger’s coup”— those cases which “exist in a perpetual state of ambiguity, simultaneously coup and not-coup”— and dismissed the distinction as “old binaries” now considered “outdated” by scholars.  Democracy, we have to understand, does not really exist in the post colonial world.  The difference between a coup and a legitimate government is, it turns out, undecidable....

  There was a pretty extensive article this morning by Ione Grillo on Nayib Bukele, El Satvador’s New Strongman .  Kind of sounds alot like AMLO in terms of 1) forming a new political party; 2) achieving majority status for himself and his party in the legislature; 3) upending the previous two party system (Arena and the FMLN) in a way analogous to AMLO in Mexico routing the PRI and the PAN while essentially transforming a large chunk of the PRD into Morena; 4) intimidating the opposition and the media (declaring, for example, that the critical publication, El Faro is engaged in money laundering; 5) violating the constitution in order to dismiss unfriendly judges from the constitution and get rid of a less than friendly Attorney General (again, AMLO did the same in Mexico having his party unconstitutionally extend the term of a friendly justice). In both Mexico and the El Salvador:  the populist logic is the same:  the leader represents the people and in the name o...

Mexican Voices has begun to publish translations of Mexican op eds - mostly these are pieces that appear in Reforma.  Two recent articles are: 1)  a book review of Roger Bartra (Regreso a la juala de melancolia) , renewing his vituperative critiques of AMLO and 2) the dictatorial logic of AMLO's government.  Bartra had been sharply critical of AMLO before the election and it is hard not to conclude that his criticisms have all been amply confirmed.  AMLO has been a return of the PRI - the worst aspects of Mexican nationalism and authoritarianism - rather than a turn toward social democracy or even a reasonable version of Pink Tide governments in the rest of Latin America which sought to redistribute the wealth produced by the export sector.  AMLO has evinced a very mild form of resource nationalism, but has steadfastly refused to raises taxes on the rich and has funded his mostly clientelistic redistributive programs through a policy of “Republican austerity” - ...

Here is a an interesting article by Giovani Batz in NACLA on the domination of indigenous peoples by Ladino landowners in Guatemala as the root of the U.S.’s immigration problem. What I particularly think is important here is the critique of the Obama era Alliance for Progress, overseen by Joe Biden, which Biden wants to continue and pass on to Kamala Harris.  The program is founded on the pillars of good governance, development and security, where development means the system of unequal land ownership and racial/class domination that emerged in Guatemala in conjunction with that country's integration into the world market as a primary goods producer. The Alliance for Progress is similar to Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative:  both programs of militarized security that attempt to stabilize an imperialist model of development.  Here is Biden writing in the New York Times in 2015:   The economies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras remain bogged down as t...