AMLO
By 
Yesterday, Mexican voters overwhelmingly elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the presidency. This is a huge moment for that nation. Mexico’s problems hardly need to be listed here, but a combination of endemic corruption going back for decades, entrenched poverty, and gang violence have made each of Mexico’s major political parties unacceptable to people. The PRI, which was last vaguely the party of the revolution sometime around 1940, is completely unable to reform. Even after being out of power of 12 years, it couldn’t nominate anyone smarter or more competent than Enrique Peña Nieto, who might be best described as much dumber version of George W. Bush. His administration was a complete, unmitigated disaster. For Americans, it is perhaps most famous by him legitimizing Trump with a visit from the Cheeto during the 2016 campaign. But for Mexicans, the final straw for the PRI was the murder of 43 education students in 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero by a mayor working with a gang. With the federal government completely unable to prosecute this horrible crime, the level of disgust in Mexico rose to unprecedented levels.
Lopez Obrador, better known as AMLO, is a long-time independent leftist political candidate. Leftists have nearly won the Mexican presidency before in recent decades. In 1988, the PRI flat out stole the election from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, burning the paper ballots after the election. There’s a very good chance that the 2006 election was stolen from AMLO himself. The former mayor of Mexico City, he started his career as a member of the leftist party, the PRD, but started his own party in 2014. He is running as an outsider on a platform of coming down hard on corruption, working for anti-poverty programs, and to try and end the violence.
There has been all sorts of what I assume must be drug-addled commentary from the international business community and the Latin American right that AMLO is going to be another Hugo Chavez. This is patently ridiculous. A far better comparison than Chavez is Bernie Sanders. They share quite a bit in common–both are long-time semi-outsiders with large personal followings, both are ultimately moderate reformers and not revolutionaries, both represent anti-corruption politics that don’t respect political parties.
This does not mean that AMLO is going to be able to do what he says he will do. I really don’t know how you stamp out Mexican corruption. What is so frightening about the rise of high-level corruption in the United States under Trump and his minions such as Scott Pruitt is that once this becomes the norm, it is extremely difficult to stamp out. It’s the same with the gang violence. Dozens of local political candidates were assassinated by gangs during the election cycle; hundreds of more were intimidated into not running. Ever since the disastrous Felipe Calderon administration, who stole the election from AMLO in 2006, when he decided to go big on the War on Drugs and did nothing but bust the top cartels and open a huge and bloody battle for control on the ground between different gangs, violence has moved away just from moving drugs to the United States and toward things such as controlling avocado supplies, illegal logging, and stealing from the coffers of local municipalities. Day to day, the small villages in states like Guerrero and Morelia and Sinaloa are far away from Mexico City. The state lacks the capacity to be a consistent presence in places such as this. Mexico is a nation of a few very large cities and thousands of tiny villages, often deep in the mountains. These are where the gangs dominate.
Whether AMLO succeeds or not, this is a huge moment for the Mexican population. Who knows if the PRI can make a come back, but the core of its base was always those small villages. If those people have abandoned the party, maybe something positive can happen going forward. More concerning in terms of long-term reform is that AMLO really is an independent operator and his party isn’t much of a structure beneath him. So after his six year term, what happens?