Andrés Manuel López Obrador won a landslide victory in the Mexican presidential election with 53 percent of the vote, more than double his nearest rival. Claudia Sheinbaum was elected Mexico City’s first female mayor.
President Trump sent Obrador a congratulatory Tweet.
Congratulations to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on becoming the next President of Mexico. I look very much forward to working with him. There is much to be done that will benefit both the United States and Mexico!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2018
Despite that warm note, US relations with Mexico, already under NAFTA and immigration strain, may come under further pressure.
Mexico’s New President
Meet AMLO, Mexico’s New President.
López Obrador, who also goes by his initials AMLO, has been in Mexican politics for more than 40 years. He first joined the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1976 but left the institution in 1988 due to internal problems and ideological differences. In 1989, AMLO became a member of the social democratic Party of the Democratic Revolution, in which he served as its leader between 1996 and 1990. He served as Mexico City’s mayor between 2000 and 2005 and ran for the Mexican presidency in the 2006 and 2012 campaigns. At 64, AMLO ran for the third time this year.
For years, López Obrador has been compared to Venezuela’s late leader Hugo Chávez because of his populist ideas, including the construction of oil refineries, the reduction of oil prices and equal distribution of wealth among the population, to name a few. Even staunch detractors such as former President Vicente Fox accused him of wanting to implement the same policies that have led to Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian crisis.
“Mexico is not Venezuela—it boasts a diversified economy based on exports and led by advanced manufacturing; oil represents less than 10 percent of its economy. And AMLO is not Chavez. He is a distinctly Mexican nationalist populist,” Shannon K. O’Neil, Mexico expert at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, told Newsweek.
Duncan Wood, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Wilson Center Mexico Institute, echoed the same thoughts. “Mexicans no longer believe the tactics of comparing AMLO with Nicolás Maduro or Chavez. This has more resonance among upper-middle classes, but it doesn’t among with people in the poorer echelons of society. AMLO’s economic policies are based on free trade and foreign direct investment, so this is an economic platform that any center or center-right candidate would actually be happy to embrace.”
AMLO very much resembles Trump’s personality.
“It’s important to recognize him as an economic nationalist, and it that sense, there is a great deal that he has in common with Donald Trump,” Wood said. “AMLO talks about producing food, gasoline and automobiles in Mexico. He wants to bring much more production back to Mexico, which is very similar to Donald Trump’s rhetoric. He has been criticized for having authoritarian tendencies he doesn’t like people to disagree with him, so that’s another thing he has in common with Donald Trump.”
When it comes to immigration, AMLO and the rest of the candidates had also criticized Trump’s handling of militarization across the border in April. López Obrador said that the president “is using this campaign as propaganda against Mexico..he says that there is a threat alongside the U.S.-Mexico border, but there is no such threat.”
AMLO’s comments about offering amnesty to those involved in the drug trade sparked controversy, but others believe that López Obrador will initiate a coordination among several police forces and that cooperation between corrupted authorities and criminals will end.
He inherits a trifecta of major external problems on top of internal drug trade and corruption issues.
Trifecta of External Problems
- Nasty migration issues
- Nasty NAFTA negotiations and tariff issues
- Slowing global economy
Chavez Clone?
Heaven help Mexico if AMLO is indeed a Chavez clone. At this point, I don’t know and no one else does either. The opinions are strong on both sides. Actions will prove louder than words.
Best wishes to Mexico!
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
The both have the same number of legs. Same number of Chromosomes. Similar will and skill to do what it took to climb to the top of the latter in their respective societies. Neither seemed particularly bothered by “having to” engage in a bit of bombing and killing of those they decided were “against” them…. And both pursued economic policies with the same inevitable endpoint. Lots of similarities.
There were certainly differences as well. Pol Pot, for one, seemed quite a lot more impatient. Both wrt killing, and how fast he wanted to reach the inevitable end goal of a totalitarian Dystopia. While Reagan seemed content to go about things at a slower, more measured pace. Hoping the frogs would notice neither the slow boil, nor the direction of temperature changes. “The Frogs” in this instance, quite likely including himself….
A Critique of Interventionism, by von Mises
From the intro to the book:
“….interventionism is an inherently unstable policy because it creates new dislocations that would seem to cry out for further interventions, which, in turn, do not solve the problem. The end of interventionism is socialism, a fate which can be logically avoided only by a sharp turn towards free markets.”
“Chavez Clone” only matters for the speed with which Mexico goes Venezuela.
The guy’s a progressive. He believes government is some sort of useful institution. Which needs enough power to be able to influence Mexicans’ economic choices. The end result of all such societies is Venezuela. Pol Pot’s Cambodia being no different from Reagan’s America. Only the rate of descent into a no longer disputable, by even the densest indoctrinate, hellhole, may vary.
Just what Mexico needs, a leader in favor of “equal distribution of wealth among the population”, with “authoritarian tendencies” who “doesn’t like people to disagree with him.” Already a semi-failed, semi-narco State, this neo-Bolshevik will be the coup de grace for Mexico.
Trump better get that wall built, and fast.
Trump and AMLO will probably engage in verbal sparring from time to time, but I wouldn’t expect anything too outrageous. New Banco de Mexico chair Alejandro Diaz de Leon is probably the more important figure but I don’t know much about him. Carstens was okay and Guillermo Ortiz was actually pretty good, but it takes a steady hand to keep things stable south of the Rio, especially with our lunatics running the Fed.
Nobody wants a crisis in Mexico, not on either side of the (non) wall. Hopefully AMLO focuses on corruption and cartels and de Leon keeps the peso in line, for everyone’s sake.