In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum has won the presidential election, thus giving a renewed mandate to the left political movement called Morena (Movimiento Regeneracion Nacional). Morena was founded by the incumbent president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). He has favored Sheinbaum, who had served in AMLO’s administration as environment secretary when he was the mayor of Mexico City. Being the mayor of Mexico City has commonly been considered a launchpad to run for the presidency, as Sheinbaum had recently resigned as Mexico City mayor to run for the Morena presidential nomination. Sheinbaum had promised her voters to continue her mentor’s political program which includes an increase in the minimum wage above inflation, guaranteeing social benefits as constitutional law and electing members of the judiciary by popular vote. She wants to introduce new social programs for students from preschool to secondary education and women from age 60 to 64. She also runs a left-wing social agenda, favoring abortion and LGBT rights. Let us examine why the center-left is doing so well in Mexico and the practical challenges of governing it.
Morena was established as a non-profit organization in 2011 and registered as a political party in 2014 by AMLO. AMLO had begun his career as a federal official within the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was the dominant political party before 2000. Mexico developed a pluralist political system only after 2000. In 1988, AMLO had left PRI and joined PRD, the Party of Democratic Revolution, which has been more left-leaning and was closer to AMLO’s own political sympathies. PRD was not a very successful center-left party having lost all presidential elections it contested, including with AMLO as leading contender in 2006 and 2012. AMLO’s earlier political career was not successful, because he had lost the governor’s race for his home state of Tabasco in 1994. He gained national attention when he appeared on TV drenched in blood after he confronted the police while blocking a Pemex oil well to defend the rights of indigenous people. Pemex is the national oil company and oil production is the third-largest export commodity for the country. As president, AMLO became much friendlier to Pemex.
In 2000, AMLO was elected Mexico City mayor, and he promptly increased social programs for single mothers, senior citizens, the physically and mentally challenged. He created housing and school programs, and expanded old-age pensions. He founded the Universidad Autonoma de la Ciudad de Mexico. He created new shopping centers and residential areas in downtown Mexico City resulting in gentrification. He liberalized zoning regulations and granted tax breaks to construction companies to incentivize private sector housebuilding. He renovated the public roads and he added a public bus line. Before he was able to run for the 2006 presidential elections, the attorney general Rafael Macedo de al Concha wanted to remove AMLO from office because he refused to stop the construction of a private hospital that was approved by AMLO’s mayoral predecessor Rosario Robles. However, AMLO was very popular and many voters regarded the attorney general’s prosecution as a political ploy, so president Vicente Fox stated the matter would not be pursued further. AMLO had been a popular mayor, ending his term in office with an 84% approval rating. He was ready for national office.
When AMLO narrowly lost the 2006 presidential elections against president Fox’ preferred candidate, Felipe Calderon, AMLO had accused the electoral authorities of being rigged. He declared himself as the legitimately elected president, but the election denial actually lowered AMLO’s popularity. Interestingly, AMLO criticized the US judiciary of vindictively pursuing lawsuits against the popular Trump, who is running for the 2024 US presidency. AMLO likes the transactional nature of Trump, and mirrors a different version of populism (AP 2023).
AMLO pushed for left-wing populist policies and President Calderon was forced to adopt some of these programs, e.g. introducing a price ceiling with tortillas. During Calderon’s tenure, AMLO was very critical of his war on drugs that had resulted in the deaths of many innocent bystanders following military-cartel confrontations. Once the military removed high-level cartel leaders, the survivors would fight for leadership positions, which resulted in more killings. Some military leaders themselves became corrupted by cartels and profited from the drug trade. Some military units have been accused of human rights violations by using torture to extract information from suspected cartel members.
AMLO thought that lowering corruption and raising economic growth could lower the dependence of Mexicans on the transport of drugs into the US to make a living. AMLO believed in “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets). The significant US demand for drugs from Mexico is one of the major reasons that cartels can continue to profit from the drug trade. As for the Mexicans, the lack of alternative economic opportunities increases drug consumption and the chances to work for the cartels, which employs an estimated 175,000 individuals. Mexico is a major producer of opium/ heroin which was quite profitable for otherwise poor farmers, though the rise of fentanyl diminished heroin demand. In recent years, fentanyl is much cheaper to produce but also deadlier for the user (Grandmaison et al. 2019). But even fentanyl is produced in Mexican labs, while the raw material is imported from China. Fentanyl is indirectly purchased because cocaine, meth and marijuana is laced with fentanyl often without the knowledge of the user (Dudley et al. 2019).
The cartels routinely engage in turf wars with rival cartels, assassinations against journalists and public servants reporting on their activities, bribery of judges and politicians to cooperate with them, trafficking of women as sex slaves, protection rackets for small businesses, reconnaissance of police and military activity, as well as kidnapping.
AMLO lost the 2012 elections with a 7 point margin against Enrique Pena Nieto from PRI. Again, AMLO accused PRI of rigging the vote via vote buying. After that repeated election loss, AMLO left PRD and co-founded Morena as a political party. He accused PRD of selling out to Pena Nieto, who convinced the PRD leadership to support gasoline tax increases, which he perceived as a betrayal of the poor and the working class. Morena is an electoral coalition that joined forced with PT (Labor Party) and PES (Solidarity Encounter Party) to contest the 2018 general and presidential elections with AMLO at the head of the ticket. This time around, AMLO won the election fair and square. The general frustration with the political establishment had been so strong as to give AMLO a resounding victory.
His main campaign promise was to lower the salaries of top government officials, crack down on government corruption (his predecessor Pena Nieto was accused of benefiting from the bribe of a Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht which resulted in the downfall of various political leaders in Latin America). His government introduced new anti-corruption authorities, although they have no real autonomy and operate in a limited way. He put the presidential airplane up for sale (he flies commercial). AMLO laid off non-unionized federal workers and use these savings to expand welfare programs, including guaranteed schooling and employment to all young Mexicans. AMLO removed standardized testing as a grounds to fire teachers, which was the previous government’s initiative. He is a supporter of public schools and teachers unions. AMLO increased pensions and minimum wage.
AMLO cancelled the Texcoco Airport project that the prior administration implemented, converting it into an ecological park instead. He cited corruption, geologic limits and the high cost for opposing the project. The new airport was created in Santa Lucia Air Force Base instead, which is somewhat further from the center of Mexico City. He supported other major infrastructure projects like the Mayan Train connecting the center of the country with Yucatan Peninsula.
AMLO moved out of the official presidential residence Los Pinos and converted it into a cultural center. AMLO has been critical of the privatization of Pemex, the state oil company, and had promised a freeze on deepwater drilling using international oil companies. But once in office, he has not stopped these oil explorations. In 2019, Pemex discovered 500 million barrels of new crude in the deep water region. AMLO wants to invest in oil refinery capacity, arguing that the export of crude in exchange for more expensive refined oil from the US was disadvantageous to Mexican interests, especially as Pemex itself carried heavy debts. Construction on Dos Bocas refinery began in 2019. AMLO cracked down on gasoline theft, saving the treasury 11 billion pesos. Capitalists may be fearful of AMLO’s left wing credentials but AMLO respects the autonomy of the Bank of Mexico, promised not to confiscate private assets arbitrarily, and works together with the private sector to develop infrastructure in the poorer southern states.
Despite announcing an end to the war on drugs, violence continued to increase and AMLO called on the National Guard to fight the cartels, thus de facto continuing the war on drugs. Many of the National Guard officers were drawn from existing police and military units. In the NAFTA renegotiation AMLO insisted on protecting small corn and avocado farmers and higher wages. Indeed, the US enforced a higher wage content requirement for producers that were supposed to shift jobs from cheaper Mexico to more expensive US, but the outcome of the USMCA was an increase in Mexican wages by over 17% from 2018 to 2023 (Marrufo 2024), while jobs stayed there. To comply with the USMCA, AMLO’s administration has passed legislation to improve collective bargaining rights for Mexican workers. USMCA was signed by AMLO’s predecessor Pena Nieto, but ratified in the Mexican parliament during AMLO’s tenure.
When in power, AMLO was not very confrontational with the US acceding to US requests for the extradition of cartel criminals. While drug-trade based violence and murder decreased somewhat after 2020, it remained quite high and is still three times higher than before the war on drugs in 2006. When the US demanded Mexico to enforce its own southern border near Guatemala to crack down on illegal migration in the direction of the US, AMLO complied.
AMLO’s electoral strategy focused on moderate expansion of the welfare state, an anti-corruption crusade and not rocking the boat with private capitalists and the neighboring US is clearly working because in the 2021 midterm election Morena gained 7 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and another 50 in 2024 making Morena 3 seats shy of an absolute majority. In the Senate elections the tally increased from 55 to 60 from 2018 to 2024.
This is the context in which Sheinbaum was elected president. Sheinbaum regards AMLO as her political mentor, and she agrees with Morena’s socially redistributive agenda, but there is a point of divergence on climate change. Sheinbaum is a trained environmental engineer at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and she worked in the UC Berkeley laboratory in the 1990s. She co-wrote various chapters in the 2007 and 2013 IPCC report, and is very committed to limiting the negative effects of climate change. AMLO cut funding for the national park service, the National Commission of Protected Areas, environmental protection and environmental NGOs.
When Sheinbaum became mayor of Mexico City in 2018, she produced an environmental plan to reduce air pollution, plant 15 million trees, ban single-use plastics, promote recycling, build a new waste separation plant, provide water service to all homes, and add 100 kilometers of trolleybus lines for public transit. She promoted new metro lines and a modernization/ electrification of existing lines. In her education policy, she promotes a scholarship program for low-income students and community centers to promote arts, sports, education and cultural activities in marginalized communities. Sheinbaum has been very rigorous in opposing crime by expanding community centers and police forces, which halved the homicide rate in Mexico City between 2018 and 2022. There have been setbacks under Sheinbaum too: the Metro line collapse in May 2021 due to engineering flaws resulted in 26 deaths and 80 injured, and has been blamed on the negligence of the city government.
It is a big question whether and how she will push the environmental agenda as president. Mexico is harmed by ever more powerful hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico that destroy coastal cities. Extreme heatwaves produce rolling blackouts. Sheinbaum has vowed increased investments in renewable energy, less carbon emissions, the electrification of transport, but she is also supportive of more oil drilling due to the newly found oil resources in the Gulf of Mexico. She wants higher oil production and more domestic oil refineries to reduce dependence on US oil. She promotes an oil pipeline to the Yucatan peninsula (Pskowski 2024).
For the political left, including Bernie Sanders in the US or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Sheinbaum’s victory is regarded a positive role model that poses a true alternative to the right-wing populism that is more prevalent in core capitalist countries like the US and many European countries. The EU elections brought significant gains for the anti-immigrant right in countries like France, Italy, Germany or Austria. In the US, Donald Trump has very high chances to be elected back into power. Despite the lower GDP, Latin American countries are more receptive to political messaging focused on redistribution from the wealthy owners of capital. Wealth is traditionally tied to land ownership and that has been very concentrated going back to the days when the Spanish crown dispensed land rights to a few conquistadores, the military conquerors. Wide dispersion of wealth to a professional middle class common in the rich capitalist countries has not happened. In Mexico, there is more wealth that is tied up in the export of primary commodities like oil that gives the state significant leverage over redistribution of national resources to the public.
In the Mexican case, there is also significant regional inequality emanating from the northern states integration into the US manufacturing production chain that goes back to the Mexican maquiladora law in the 1960s. Maquiladora are US-owned factories producing duty and tariff-free products on Mexican soil. Northern Mexico is right across the US border, allowing US manufacturers to take advantage of the lower cost Mexican labor and then ship the final products back to the US consumer market. Asian manufacturers, e.g. Japanese carmakers, seeking to bypass higher US tariffs to reach the US consumer market also invested in Northern Mexican plants (Gantz 2024).
There are certain disadvantages in being the US backyard, because NAFTA, the original free trade agreement in the 1990s, did not only create jobs in manufacturing but also displaced farmers who were outcompeted by big US agricultural producers who no longer faced tariff barriers to enter the Mexican market. This displacement increased Mexican migration to the US, although that stream has abated with the shrinking demographics and the lower labor demand due to the 2009 financial crisis (Public Citizen 2019). Another unintended consequence was the worsening metabolic health and rising obesity (75% of the population are overweight or obese) due to the consumption of the US-imported ultraprocessed junk food (Lapique and Rotunno 2022). Northern Mexico also attracts many internal migrants from the poorer southern states, but that creates precisely the extreme regional inequality that makes voters more receptive to left-wing redistributionist messaging.
Financial markets have been somewhat spooked by Sheinbaum’s electoral landslide, but Mexican stocks are not significantly lower than before the pandemic struck. Mexico could benefit from the US desire to find cheaper cost producers due to the political confrontation with the major Chinese trading partners. Furthermore, China responded to the increase in US tariffs by expanding their trade with Mexico, which re-exports most of these goods to the US while avoiding these tariffs (Cota 2024). Tertius gaudens. On the other hand, the increasing dependence on robotics makes the labor cost advantage in Mexico smaller, thus allowing US producers to keep their production in the US.
The Latin Americans exhibit a lot of racial diversity, but there is less racial and ethnic segregation than in the Anglosphere or the European countries. While there are many different racial categories in Latin America (mestizo, mulatto, pardo etc.), most people are racially mixed even if they have a predominant racial phenotype, so underhandedly racist messages are less palatable in Latin America compared to the Global North. Many Latin American countries emerged from right-wing military dictatorships (though not so much in Mexico), so the gradual democratization process gave more indigenous, non-Europeans who were excluded from political power more political power, especially in Bolivia. And they are more loyal to left-wing progressive movements. AMLO is notably very favorable to darker-skinned (Amerindian) voters in Mexico’s south. Morena is a reference to La Morenata, “the little dark-skinned one”, a Catalan patron saint (Felbab-Brown 2018).
The Europeans and North Americans find it much easier to mobilize against the “Other” ethnic group, a favored domain for the right-wing populists. The Global North is a magnet for global migration from the Global South, largely because of their wealth and functioning political institutions that are absent in the countries that people seek to emigrate from. Mexico is notably considered a transitory migrant state, having to accept only a limited number of the global migrants who are seeking for refuge in the US instead. 1% of the Mexican population is foreign-born compared to 15% in the US. In this insider-outsider discourse, the political right-wing has an easier time making its case than the left, whose human rights-focused discourse is considered tone-deaf by the working class in the Global North.
Sheinbaum’s election indicates that AMLO’s electoral coalition focusing on Mexico’s strength as US industrial hinterland, petroleum exporter and a gradually expanding welfare state is working. There are also no significant concerns for a complete left-wing takeover, as we have seen elsewhere in Latin America, especially Venezuela. It is a moderate socialist path focused on welfare state expansion, not the wholesale expropriation of US capitalists. There are still significant problems like the fact that 53% of the workforce are informal and thus insecure (Cantu 2024, compared to 16% in the US, Restrepo-Echavarria and Arias 2017) despite a governmental push to increase the formal sector. The high degree of informality lowers tax revenue and makes the state very dependent on higher extraction of revenues from the formally employed or the Pemex oil rents (that are now only 7% of the Mexican federal budget). It lowers state capacity and keeps welfare expenses low. AMLO has not been fiscally imprudent and only marginally increased debt to GDP ratio, most of it due to Covid.
Lastly, cartel and gang related violence remains a significant issue, which is even affecting the political elections, where 60 politicians running for office had been assassinated by criminals and drug cartels. Many politicians receive security protection, but that protection is not universal and not perfect. The Mexican murder rate (25 per 100,000) is 3.5 times as high as in the US (7), which itself is a violent place due to liberal gun laws. It is 30 times higher than in Europe (0.86). AMLO’s initial laissez faire approach to gun violence is clearly ineffective. He reversed and increased investments in national security, and we don’t know what Sheinbaum will do to rein in the violence but she will likely continue building up the state security apparatus that also raises the risk of torture, disappearance and arbitrary detentions of innocent civilians (Kloppe-Santamaria and Zulver 2024). She is unlikely to repeat Calderon’s war on drugs, and violence will likely remain elevated. The high degree of cartel violence, including the extortion of local businesspeople, makes it unlikely for a substantial business boom that would make the country as rich as their northern neighbor, but if trends on welfare, violence and economic modernization would gradually improve, Mexico would be on a positive path.
Further readings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_Manuel_L%C3%B3pez_Obrador
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9s_Manuel_L%C3%B3pez_Obrador
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Sheinbaum
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Sheinbaum
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