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, the National Electoral Institute but also the courts, as the recent unconstitutional extension of a pro-AMLO supreme court justice indicates. AMLO has defunded significant sectors of the Mexico state in order to fund his nostalgia driven projects of reasserting resource nationalism and undoing the partial privatization of the energy sector under Pena Nieto. As AMLO reconsolidates presidential power, the opposition is failing to present a viable alternative. For many Mexicans, the neoliberalism of the PAN and the PRI remain deeply discredited, as does the drug war that these previous administrations waged with varying levels of intensity.
Is there a political alternative to the Fourth Transformation? There have been oppositional movements within civil society: the resistance of the indigenous peoples and rural communities to AMLO’s development projects and the increasingly active and vocal feminist movement in Mexico. We might add to this the critical media. AMLO has been adept, Dresser says, in using identity politics to dismiss his critics as the privileged, as snobs, as fifis, as sectors of population that are out of sync with the real people for whom AMLO speaks. These critiques can be folded into AMLO’s larger anti-elite rhetoric, which, again, is typical of populism. Dresser suggests that AMLO is drawing on a politics of nostalgia that is associated with the rise of authoritarian populism in other parts of the world. This is also leavened with clientelism: the distribution of state benefits to poor people, particularly in Southern Mexico. I think this is indicative of the patterns of the populist governance discussed by Mueller. Clientelism as diversion of resources to the real people. The populist occupation of the state. The development of a populist art of governance.
Another interesting rhetorical turn: AMLO has to take control of Mexican political institutions in order to defend the Fourth Transformation from the right and to avoid the fate of Lula, who was ousted by a judicial coup. Justice is more important than the law, says AMLO. That is an interesting comparison, but I think it falters because AMLO is not really attacking transnational capital or even Mexico’s own capitalist elite in any meaningful way. He is attacking a different elite: the political classes as well as the educated urban classes that have been the key partisans for democratization in Mexico. Nonetheless, Dresser engages in a bit of hand wringing Fundamental changes in Mexico’s economic model: is NATA/free trade at risk. Really? In 2019, when Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico, AMLO immediately complied with Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, an about face that was costly for him in terms of the redeploying the national guard for the purpose of the interdicting migrants and accepting a stay in Mexico policy for the asylum seekers that had reached the U.S. - Mexican border. Dresser would like to see Biden give Mexico great priority in his foreign policy. Here we see an interesting rhetorical movement: the U.S.-Mexican relationship can be based on cooperation - obviously a good thing (or is it? - but that is how the concept is implicitly framed) or the U.S. and Mexico could return to the status of being “distant neighbors” to cite the title of Alan Riding’s book - and, of course, that would be a bad thing. It would represent regression rather than progress.
All of this runs head first into the ideology of the Fourth Transformation, which sees the liberation of the Mexican nation from foreign domination as the basis for historical progress in Mexico. Guadalupe Correa takes the ideological appeal of MORENA more seriously than Dresser by emphasizing that AMLO speaks to the grievances of a broad segment of the Mexican people. These are mostly focused on corruption, characteristic of what AMLO terms the “mafia of power”. The difficulty for the opposition, continues Correa, is that they have no program for governing Mexico besides a return to the widely discredited neoliberalism of PAN-PRI era. The opposition is singularly unable to talk to the people, Still, AMLO’s party, Morena, is anything but what Gramsci would term the modern prince - a disciplined party capable of articulating a program of popular national renewal. As Correa suggests elsewhere, it might be more accurate to consider Morena as a personalist party - a party formed around the figure of AMLO and which has attracted recruits for opportunistic reason - to get access to power - rather than in a project of political transformation, which, the case of AMLO, would be the Fourth Transformation. One sees this opportunism in terms of the types of political actors that made their way into Morenas - caciques, criminals, grasshoppers (politicians jumping ship from the other sinking parties). There has been no grassroots driven process of party formation for Morena. The question is why not and what does that tell us about contemporary Mexico?
It speaks to, among other things, the profound divisions between civil society and the party system - a situation in which civil society is deeply divided along urban/rural, educated/uneducated and, regionally, North/South lines - and so there is little unity within civil society. One of the interesting points in the Darcy Tetreault (see Latin American extractivism) article is the way in which the AMLO administration set up popular consultas in urban regions in order to approve the Proyecto Integral de Morelos against which rural indigenous groups were organizing. More generally, class conflict does not penetrate into the political society; instead, political society is polarized by a kind of inter-elite conflict..
Part of the problem is the opportunism of the political classes: their unwillingness to challenge the economic elite and the extractivist/dependent model of economic growth embraced not only by Mexico but by the region as a whole. In this sense, it is interesting to think about the regression of the pink tide governments throughout Latin America toward an increasingly unimpeded model of extractivism. Miguel Angel Lara Otaloa summarizes AMLO’s major initiatives:
To name a few, these include creating a centralized National Guard, funding additional direct cash transfer programs, introducing ‘superdelegates’ (direct presidential representatives) in all 32 states, slashing support for civil society organizations, the elimination of independent agencies, and the disappearance of 109 funds and trusts (supporting activities from sports and the arts to the protection of journalists). The goal, as per AMLO, is to achieve an austere government, favor the poor, and get rid of the country’s “neoliberal” and corrupt past.
Notable here is a kind of co-governance between the government and the army, AMLO’s efforts to re-centralize political authority and his reallocation of public resources away from educated civil to rural cash grant programs for the poor.
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