Mexico: The Other Side of the Wall

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 electio...

  AMLO:  This is a new Mexico, the money that the poor are receiving is their money, and the resentments of the middle classes and the upper middle classes reflect the fact that they are egotists and “aspiracionalista”, which makes sense of the election results. The key point here is that the interests of the professional middle classes are in conflict with those of the poor and this is the central conflict that is inscribed into AMLO’s republican austerity budgets.  Just like magic, the overwhelming power of Mexico’s richest families disappears from the equation or is simply baked into the cake of Republic  austerity.  https://twitter.com/hdemauleon/status/1403424489778696202  

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...