Midterm Results
Let’s review the results of the Mexican mid-terms: some slippage in Morena’s majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Morena and its coalition partners will still have a majority, but not an absolute majority, so it will be difficult for AMLO to revise the Mexican constitution in order to reverse the privatization of the energy sector that was carried out in the previous institution. This is important because AMLO views the revitalization of Mexico’s state owned oil corporation, PEMEX, as a basis for strengthening the state in Mexico and generating higher levels of economic growth. So one preliminary point to make about the elections is that they do not favor a dramatic renewal of resource nationalism in Mexico.
The other important constitutional option that now seems foreclosed is to revamp Mexico independent political institutes. Chief among these is the Instituto Nacional Electoral which is in charge of impartially administering elections in Mexico. An autonomous electoral institute was one of the great breakthroughs of Mexico’s transition to democracy over the course of the 1990s. This is clear when one considers that during the era of PRI hegemony, the electoral authority was located in the Secretary of the Interior, directly under the authority of Mexico’s PRI president. It was these circumstances that allowed the PRI in 1988 to suddenly declare that the tabulating machines for counting the votes of the presidential election had broken down after initial returns indicated that the PRI candidate would lose. AMLO has been shortchanging the independent institutes budgetarily and attempting to recruit partisan figures to their boards. Constitution reform would enable him to abolish these institutes and consolidate even greater political powers around the president. Civil society activists who played key roles in Mexico's democcratic transition fear that AMLO was attempting to reestablish the PRI party state, only now under the auspices of Morena.
It does not help that AMLO has little respect for Mexico’s democratic transition. For him, the transition is just part of the catastrophic era of neoliberalism which the Fourth Transformation seeks to end. This is a historiography that does not name the PRI-party state era as the dark ages of Mexican politics. In fact, things were rather good back then insofar as Mexico enjoyed higher rates of economic growth and greater autonomy and self-reliance with regard to energy and food production. What did the democratic transition yield? An alternation of power of the PRI-PAN - often referred to as the PRIAN. This was not democracy, but rather, to use one of AMLO’s terms, a mafia of power, which could only be broken by means of the ascendency of AMLO’s party, Morena. What one sees in AMLO’s discourse is skepticism about the legitimacy of any opposition to his rule because he and Morena are the embodiment of Mexican history and the Mexican people.
But, returning to the outcomes of the midterm elections, Morena did retain a majority and so it will still be able to pass its poor people’s budgets. These budgets are based on AMLO’s notion of republican austerity - that state should be frugal and efficient in its management of resources rather than extravagant and corrupt. AMLO opted at the beginning of his term to neither raise more taxes nor borrow more money in order to finance his social programs - including the expansion of PEMEX’s refining capacity. This is work that would be done by reallocating existing resources toward AMLO’s policy agenda. Republican austerity will continue for the remainder of AMLO’s term, which is not a good thing. More on this below.
Two other key points about the election concern state governments and the municipal government of Mexico City. Morena swept gubernatorial elections, winning the 11 out of 16 races (half of Mexico’s governorships were up for grabs this election cycle). In Mexico City, however, Morena lost assembly seats in Mexico City, long a stronghold of the left. The pattern was quite clear: working class neighborhoods to the East went Morena and the middle class neighborhoods of the West went for the PRI-PAN-PRD alliance:
So while Morena lost ground in its political heartland, it gained power in state elections, particularly in the Northwest, a region of the country that had been a historical center of PAN power and influence. The midterm results signal a change in Mexico’s electoral geography, but the implications of that change remain unclear - at least to me.
The Pandemic
The midterm can be read as a referendum on AMLO, of course. What general points can be made about AMLO’s presidency? I will dig into the article by Dawn Paley in the Nation and then follow up with discussion from several other sources. Paley begins with an interview with a market vender in Puebla whose earnings have been sharply cut by the Pandemic and whose kids are trying to learn from home by watching TV. She’s not getting any help from the Fourth Transformation in the midst of the pandemic, aside from a cash assistance program to pay for the funeral costs of family members that die from COVID. The lethality of COVID in Mexico is very high, with 9% of the people contracting the virus eventually succumbing to it. Jesus Hermosillo has an interesting discussion of why this is the case: because COVID has laid bare the pattern of deprivation that has been accumulating in Mexico over recent decades. One of the profoundly damaging impacts of NAFTA has been the withdrawal of food subsidies, the collapse of national agriculture and the deterioration of people's diets. Over 75% of Mexicans are obese. Many suffer from diabetes. Hermosillo recalls, in this regard, the Vincente Fox presidency:
Twenty-three years later, with five diabetics’ deaths per hour, Fox faced calls to crack down on industry antitrust violations and illegal ads targeting children, and get junk food out of schools. Instead, his government arrived at “the same diagnosis” of the health crisis as Pepsico, Kellogg’s, and Nestle—and partnered with them on a healthy lifestyles campaign that underscored the role of personal behavior over any need for regulations. By the end of his term, Mexicans were drinking more sugary soda per capita than people in the U.S.
This is similar to the health problems that afflict African Americans in the U.S. - hypertension, high blood pressure and other comorbidities that have rendered them vulnerable to COVID. I do not think that Paley would dispute any of this. Her argument though, is that the AMLO did little to diminish the impact of COVID. He suggested superstitious responses to it - weaning amulets and images of saints, for example. These combined with hygiene, social distancing and moral behavior would ward off the virus. Hermosillo defends AMLO’s medical advisor, suggesting that he put forth defensible responses to the pandemic. And this fellow (Lopez-Gatell) had no easy task because Mexico is a federal state and states were ignoring federal guidelines and lacked the resources - in part because of their profound corruption - to respond effectively to the virus in the first place.
Hermosillo focuses on the way in which neoliberalism took a wrecking ball to health care policy in Mexico, inculcating in Mexicans a reluctance to avail themselves of the very limited healthcare resources they could access - such as the public hospitals. The government encouraged self care by making a wide range of medications available for over the counter purchase. Mexicans could simply self medicate.
Even when at death’s doorstep, the poor quality of care popularly associated with public hospitals and clinics—so frequently burdened with staff and equipment shortages, corruption, and a reputation shaped haunting tales of malpractice and abuse—leads many sick people to postpone a doctor’s visit until it is too late, or to forego it altogether and choose to die at home.
Then Hermosillo argues that the AMLO’s government has dramatically reversed the disintegration of the healthcare policy that had occurred under the previous PRIAN governments. Here is an extended passage from his article:
The biggest advances by the AMLO administration may be in healthcare, however. These include the hiring last year of 70,000 health personnel, a step toward solving a massive shortage. In 2017, Mexico had 2.4 physicians for every 1,000 residents, compared to a 3.4 average among OECD countries, “and less than one-third the number of nurses and hospital beds per 1,000 population than the OECD average.”
By last November, the government had built out 130 hospitals out of 326 incomplete projects left over by past administrations. At many of these sites, construction had either faced serious delays or had stopped altogether, an inventory found in 2019, after their funding dried up, got illegally diverted, or was sidetracked when contractors failed to deliver.
The most promising change in health policy, however, is the federalization of health services for the uninsured, who are the majority in Mexico. Although a work in progress—partly because eight state governments are not yet on board with it—the overhaul includes the creation of the Institute for Health and Wellness, or INSABI, which will provide free, universal healthcare to anyone with a government-issued ID.
But this story of renewed governmental commitment to social policy - here, healthcare policy - simply does not square with the data that Sanchez Talanguer presents. In fact, per capita public health expenditures soared during the Calderon presidency, dropped sharply during the Pena Nieto sexenio and have yet to recover under AMLO’s tenure. Meanwhile, military expenditures have edged steadily upwards.
We can criticize neoliberalism to our heart’s content. Some of this criticism may represent a historiographical excess of simply condemning all things neoliberal. So, for example, Mexico had some cash transfer programs that were effective and a healthcare program targeted at individuals who work in the informal sector. AMLO curtailed these in some cases and rebranded them in others, simulating a radical transformation in social policy where there was none.
Republican Austerity
The reach of AMLO’s social policies is limited. One recent study finds that there are 14 million beneficiaries of cash transfer policies in Mexico. AMLO claims the number is more on the order of 22 million. These numbers are not especially high. I do not think they are comparable to Brazil Bolsa Familia under Lula, which had notably diminished poverty. AMLO has been working within a set of self imposed constraints: an unwillingness to raise taxes or to borrow money to finance his social programs and also a commitment to increasing military spending. AMLO’s defenders point to his determination to enforce existing tax laws and increase state tax revenues, but the overall weakness of Mexico’s tax state is still notable. What this represents is an unwillingness to undermine the power of Mexico’s economic oligarchs.
It is worth thinking about some of the underpinnings of republican austerity - the framework for AMLO’s social policies. The fundamental idea here is that Mexico has been betrayed by its political class - the detested PRIAN. This has created systematic corruption within the state, the remedy for which is republican austerity. Government should embrace a kind of “Fransican poverty” (in AMLO’s term) in order to finance greater cash transfers to the poor. One implication of republican austerity, of course, is that it lets the whole process of neoliberal development off the hook - or rather, it makes the focus of neoliberalism into the PRIAN governing class. What is needed to rectify all of this is more centralized presidential control because AMLO does not have, in his view, any trusted partners he can work with in the state sector. This explains both the fiscal austerity and also the appointment of superdelegates to the states in order to “oversee delivery of the government's flagship social assistance programs to the population, sidestepping conventional bureaucratic channels— much as Carlos Salinas or Alberto Fujimori did during the golden area of “neo-liberalism” in the 1990s.”
The centralizing thrust of AMLO’s policy initiatives is notable.
In AMLO's view, only a strong leader firmly in control of state resources can curb self-dealing officials and restore the state's ability to act coherently, in order to achieve common goals. The Madisonian vertical and horizontal fragmentation of power is not considered the antidote against abuse, but the very condition that enables it.
But, say AMLO’s defenders, what choice does the president really have? The decentralization of governmental authority to the states was a hallmark of democratization in Mexico - returning power to the states would diminish centralized rule and create more effective and accountable local governments rather than local governments that were the appendages of a highly centralized network of patron-client relations. Hermosillo points out that this whole process of decentralization turned out to be highly dysfunctional (we see this with the obscene levels of the corruption undertaken from various PRI governors during the Pena Nieto sexenio). To accept renewed centralization, however, is also to reject undertaking the work of state building associated with the strengthening of local governing capacities.
What emerges in place of all of this is AMLO’s populism which is concerned with cultivating a direct, unmediated relationship between the people and the leader (AMLO), a relationship that Carlos Illades, writing in Nexos, characterizes in the following terms: there is a new sort of relationship between state and society - not one based on previously corrupt mediations between state and society, which occurred through the corporatism of the PRI, but rather a more immediate identification between AMLO and the constituencies toward which he publicly orients himself - and all of this happens through the sacred receptacle of the family - “the nucleus of a torn society...reinforced by a moral constitution that is in the process of being written”, which can be summarized in the following statement from AMLO: “sin reformas sociales y sin el fortalecimiento de los valores no será posible frenar el deterioro de la sociedad”. What does all of this amount to? A conservative social hegemony, a scarcely secularized conception to social morality? One thing for sure, AMLO does not do emancipatory politics - hence his disinclination to sympathize with the feminist movement in Mexico. What also follows from this is AMLO’s loss of support in Mexico City’s middle class/affluent neighborhood. See, in this regard, the following graphic from El Financiero:
The Working Class
But, say AMLO’s defenders, the government has raised the minimum wage. Workers rights under the new NAFTA have been enhanced. Unions in the maquiladora sector have grown more assertive. Up until the pandemic hit, real wages had risen in Mexico while the number of Mexican living in extreme poverty had dropped, with considerable progress being made in rural Mexico. These wage gains could be one of the reasons why Morena attracted greater support in the maquiladora belt regions of Mexico.
Militarization
These achievements have to be evaluated alongside the other policies of AMLO’s government. Paley calls particular attention to AMLO’s bait and switch with the military, promising to end of the war on drugs and to diminish the role of the military on the campaign trail but then shifting toward institutionalizing the role of military in the maintenance of law and order in Mexico through the establishment of a national guard - largely commanded and staffed by the military. As Paley notes, the war on drugs rages on in Mexico, in spite of AMLO’s protestations that it has ended:
Contrary to AMLO’s promises to end the drug war, the army remains active in enforcing prohibition. On any given day in Mexico, there are an estimated 150,000 armed forces deployed throughout the country, more than half of them devoted to pacification. Soldiers detained more people between September 2019 and September 2020 than in any year since the outset of the war on drugs, and the armed forces continue to confiscate cocaine, marijuana, and fentanyl.
Not only is the military continuing to carry out drug prohibitionist policies, but it is also becoming actively engage in other state projects - such as building out the Santa Lucia military air force base following AMLO’s cancellation of the new Mexico City Airport in Texcoco, laying tracks for the Tren Maya in the Yucatan, administering social programs and vaccine distribution, controlling ports and interdicting Central American migrants traveling North to the United States. One observation to make here is comparative. The expansion and diversification of the military’s portfolio of activities reflects patterns of militarization in other developing countries, such as Cuba and Egypt. The point here is that the military is colonizing larger and larger chunks of the Mexican state and, as it does so, the possibilities for non-militarized state building in Mexico become diminished. Or as Mariano Sanchez Talanquer puts it:
AMLO's turn to the military for public safety may have been inevitable given deep-seated state deficiencies, but his administration appears to have wholly surrendered critical state-building tasks to strengthen the rule of law. These include civilian police reform and the professionalization of highly inefficient criminal prosecution institutions.
Resources that might have focused on fixing the civilian criminal justice system - an essential aspect of state building in Mexico - have instead been turned toward increasing the capacities of the military. It is singularly unfortunate, then, that these investments have not yielded any reductions in the amount of violence in Mexico. Murder rates were at all time highs for 2019 and 2020. As in 2018, the 2021 election cycle was marred with violence - the assasination of the 36 candidates and over 90 politicians. Another significant part of this pattern of violence in Mexico has been assassinations of journalists: 120 have been assassinated since 2000 and 90% of the cases have not been resolved. There were nine killings of journalists in Mexico in 2019, making Mexico the most deadly country for the media in the world. AMLO has not helped matters. Similar to Trump (and other populists), he attacks the media as enemies of the people (with AMLO as their ultimate friend). AMLO’s government reduced protections for journalists, but the deeper cause of the violence is the collusion of local government officials with organized crime, a situation that, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists,
leads to journalists being not only targeted, but also not finding any help from the authorities that are supposed to protect them. The federal government had done very little to stop the violence. The result is impunity in the vast majority of crimes against the press, which fuels and incentivizes more attacks against journalists...”
Paley also takes note of the broader human rights failures of the AMLO government. These consist of not investigating widespread instances of people being “disappeared” in Mexico. At least 85,000 disappearances have occurred since 2006 - the beginning of Mexico’s war on drugs. Among the disappeared that have still not been accounted for are the 43 normalistas from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. One of the obvious reasons for these shortcomings on human rights is that investigations into disappearances would wind up demanding greater accountability from the military. After having conducted conferences with the families of the disappeared while AMLO was president elect, his government has turned toward less generous treatment of these families, as Paley notes.
Recent changes to the Executive Commission for Assistance to Victims (CEAV), which assists families who experienced a disappearance involving state security forces or organized crime, have disqualified many from monthly assistance. “They gave us 12 days to send in all the paperwork to re-qualify for monthly aid,” said Ortíz. “Now they’re saying that we have to make our purchases and bring in receipts, and they’ll reimburse us—but how will this help those that don’t even have enough to buy food?”
The capacity of AMLO’s government to extract accountability from the military was put on vivid display when the former military chief (of the Pena Nieto administration) Salvador Cienfuegos was arrested in San Diego under U.S. Department of Justice indictment for facilitating narcotrafficking into the United States. As PBS notes, AMLO defended Cienfuegos, by accusing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of fabricating the charged frough against them. The DOJ arrest of Cienfuegos had evidently crossed a red line for Mexico (no legal accountability for the military), prompting Mexican threats to suspend all cooperation with the U.S. in the fight (as AMLO assures us, it is no longer a war) against narco-trafficking. The result: the U.S. stopped its case against Cienfuegos. Mexico indicated it would undertake its own investigations, under Mexican law, but then dropped the case with no charges shortly after Cienfuegos’ return to Mexico. And, as a parting shot, the Mexican Congress passed a law limiting the diplomatic immunity of U.S. agents in Mexico.
Development
AMLO’s economic development plans are a combination of neoliberalism and resource nationalism. The resource nationalism component of his agenda is focused on rebuilding the refining capacity of Mexico’s state oil company PEMEX so that Mexicans would consume more of their own oil and PEMEX would go from being a money loser to a money maker for the government, just like in the good old PRI days of yore. The neoliberal part of AMLO’s agenda is to open Southern Mexico to more intensive economic development via the Proyecto Integral de Morelos, the Maya Tren and the development of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. These are policies that would pick up on the thread of the Panama to Puebla project associated with the Vincente Fox administration and of which AMLO has been a long time proponent. These projects have involved a large-scale invasion of indigenous lands and communities and have also generated widespread resistance indigenous resistance. That resistance has been met with paramilitary violence. In 2019, during AMLO’s first year as president, 19 defenders of the land, territory and environment were assassinated with the government making no progress on resolving any of these cases. AMLO has been dismissive of indigenous protests and incredulous that groups like the Zapatistas and Indigenous National Congress do not wholeheartedly support them. We are not like them, he told La Jornada in 2019, seeking to distinguish himself from his neoliberal predecessors. But listening to one of his chief advisors, Alfonso Romo, he does sound quite neoliberal. Mexico’s growth problem, Romo told the Mexican business press, is that it is not attracting foreign investment on the scale of Brazil or Colombia. The great megaprojects of the South and Southeast would remedy that. And, at any rate, according to the fraudulent consultas populares the AMLO has engineered for all of these major economic initiatives, these megaprojects are what the people want. The complaints of indigenous peoples are out of step with the will of the people, which AMLO manufactures through the popular consultas.
Migration
The regional focus of AMLO’s major development initiatives can be connected with migration policy. Migration is a huge topic. There are about 5 million undocumented Mexicans living more or less permanently in the United States. They have been subject to increasingly intensive waves of the immigration enforcement on the part of the United States, but not full scale deportation, as many on the anti-immigrant right demand. Still, since the beginning of the Great Recession, the major focus of migration policy has been on the emigration of Central Americans from the Northern Triangle to the U.S. border, where they have been surrendering themselves to Customs and Border Patrol Agents in order to claim asylum in the U.S. In May of 2019, the Trump administration threatened to impose sanctions on Mexican exports to the United States if Mexico did not do more to stop the movement of Central American migrants through Mexico’s territory. AMLO got the message and redefined the mission of the National Guard so that at least half of its forces would be involved in interdicting immigration in Central Mexico and deporting Central Americans back to their home countries. The new Biden administration has been looking to address the root causes of migration from Central America. For them, economic development and good governance are crucial long term solutions and, in this context, labor intensive megaprojects in Southern Mexico might be effective in capturing migration flows and advancing AMLO’s economic growth agenda. As Paley notes:
Construction of the Tren Maya is expected to create 80,000 jobs. Over the longer term, UN Habitat has estimated three quarters of a million jobs will be created in the peninsula, and the government has promised that the industrial parks and transit corridor across the isthmus will generate 400,000 direct and indirect jobs. Both of these mega-projects align with Washington’s desire to encourage increased investment and economic development in southern Mexico so as to stave off migration.
And here is Washington’s desire for more investment in Southern Mexico from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico in 2018:
The United States and Mexico today commit to strengthen and expand our bilateral cooperation to foster development and increase investment in southern Mexico and in Central America to create a zone of prosperity. Both countries recognize the strong links between promoting development and economic growth in southern Mexico and the success of promoting prosperity, good governance, and security in Central America. The United States welcomes the Comprehensive Development Plan launched by the Government of Mexico in concert with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to promote these goals. The United States and Mexico will lead in working with regional and international partners to build a more prosperous and secure Central America to address the underlying causes of migration, and so that citizens of the region can build better lives for themselves and their families at home.
On the question of how to keep Central American migrants from reaching the U.S. border through more development assistance for the region. But paradoxically, a lot of U.S. assistance has, in the past, gone to security, where security means securing an exclusionary model of development in Central America that is ultimately one of the push factors sending Central Americans to the U.S. As Marissa Leon Gomez Sonnet notes:
International development projects, often funded by development agencies and private sector business, can also fuel human rights abuses throughout the region. Development projects can and have resulted in natural resources being exploited and environmental and human rights defenders being targeted for harassment. The assassination of human rights and environmental defender Berta Cáceres in Honduras is just one tragic example that illustrates the broader point. The dam that Berta and the Lenca-led organization COPINH were protesting was partially financed by USAID and by other international development organizations, including the World Bank and FinnFund.
Meanwhile, at the U.S. border the Biden administration has continued to use rule 42 (related to public health) to exclude migrants from making asylum claims - the only exceptions to this rule are unaccompanied children. But in April, Mexico limited how many refugees it will accept back in Mexico. The Washington Post reports:
Asked for comment, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said the country “receives certain immigrants depending on institutional capacities” and in compliance with domestic laws. López Obrador has criticized the Biden administration for not investing more in development projects in southern Mexico and Central America to prevent citizens from leaving. “We are ready to do our part and work together in fighting human trafficking and protecting human rights, especially those of children,” he tweeted on Wednesday after a phone call with Vice President Harris.
It is easy to assume that it is Central Americans rather than Mexicans that are seeking asylum in the United States because this is the general picture of the U.S.- Mexican border that is conveyed through the media. But there are Mexican asylum seekers, a reflection of the level of violence inflicted on Mexican citizens by a combination of organized crime groups and government accomplices. The Mexican government has also facilitated shunting refugees onto waiting lists. As NACLA reports:
According to the Strauss Center for Security and Law, this patchwork of informal waiting lists, managed haphazardly by Mexican municipalities, humanitarian organizations, and migrants themselves in over 14 cities, grew to approximately 26,000 people by August 2019. Over half (52 percent) of those on the lists were Mexican nationals.
It turns out that Mexican nationals on waiting lists to ask for asylum can move up the list by paying off the local authorities that administer them. Even if Mexican nationals could submit asylum requests on the U.S. side of the border, which Mexican police keep them from reaching, they would have a difficult time securing asylum because such decisions by the U.S. would be a recognition Mexico is not able to protect its own people - not an admission that the U.S. would be willing to make or Mexico accept.
Conclusions: Does AMLO have a project to transform Mexico?
The article that is hyperlinked above is from Kurt Hackbarth, who provides a litany of policy successes for AMLO which work in one of two directions: improving living standards of the poor and attacking the power of the previous political elite. I tend to think that AMLO room for maneuver in adjusting basic power relationships in Mexico is quite limited. The clearest sign of this is AMLO republican austerity, which leaves the existing levels of inequality in Mexico largely in place. One indication of this is AMLO’s response to the pandemic, which was much stingier than those of other Latin American countries….
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