Will Mexico be the next Venezuela?

In 2018, I wrote a column qualifying the future Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obradoror AMLO, as the left-hand version of Donald Trump.

Readers have not been persuaded.

The comparison between the two men, wrote one person in the comments section, “was preposterous.”

Another called the column “outrageously ignorant“.

Let me retract.

AMLO is not just another version of Trump.

It’s worse, thanks to the fact that it’s a demagogue and a more efficient bureaucratic operator.

This was made clear yet again when Mexicans took to the streets on November 13 in demonstrations against AMLO’s efforts to dismantle the National Electoral Institute (INE).

For three decades, the state-funded but independent public body (formerly called the Federal Electoral Institute) has been central to Mexico’s transition from a one-party regime to a competitive democracy in which parties in power they regularly lose elections and accept the results.

So why is the president – who won by a large margin and maintains a high approval rating, thanks to a cult-of-personality political style and a policy of transferring money to the poor, his main constituency – aiming for the crown spearhead? of the country’s civil institutions?

Shouldn’t he represent the forces of people’s democracy?

AMLO’s response is that he simply intends to do more democratic to the INE, by having its members elected by popular vote after candidates are nominated by the institutions under its control.

It would also cut funding for the INE, remove the power to draw up electoral rolls, and get rid of state electoral authorities.

In a Trumpian twist, AMLO calls out his critics “racist, snobbish and very hypocritical”.

The reality is different.

AMLO is a product of the former ruling party, the PRI, which dominated nearly every aspect of Mexican political life from the late 1920s to the 1990s.

Ideologically, the party was divided into two wings: modernizing technocrats versus statist nationalists.

But the party was united in its devotion to cronyism, repression, corruption and, above all, presidential control as a means of perpetuating its grip on power.

AMLO may have belonged to the statist wing, but his ideas on governance are straight out of the old PRI playbook, only this time he is in favor of his Morena party.

“His goal has always been to recreate the 1970s: an arrogant presidency without checks and balances,” Luis Rubio, one of Mexico’s leading thinkers, wrote to me on Monday.

“So, he undermined, eliminating or neutralizing a whole network of entities destined to become checkpoints of presidential power”.

This includes the Supreme Court, the country’s regulatory bodies, and Mexico’s human rights commission.

The INE and the Central bank of the country are among the few entities that have remained relatively free from its control.

What would it mean if AMLO got away with it?

His six-year presidential term expires in 2024 and he is unlikely to formally remain in office.

But there is an age-old Mexican tradition of governing behind the scenes.

Filling the INE with cronies is the first step back to the good old days of filling out ballots that characterized the Mexico I grew up in in the 70s and 80s.

But it also marks a deeper deterioration, in three important ways.

First, there’s the expanding role of the military under AMLO.

“The military now operates outside civilian control, in open defiance of the Mexican Constitution, which states that the military cannot be responsible for public safety,” writes Mexican political analyst Denise Dresser in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

“Following the presidential decrees, the military They have become ubiquitous: they build airports, manage the country’s ports, control customs, distribute money to the poor, implement social programs and detain immigrants”.

The second is that the Mexican government has capitulated to drug cartels, which, according to one estimate, they control up to a third of the country.

That became clear two years ago after the Trump administration returned to Mexico a former defense minister, General Salvador Cienfuegos, who had been detained in California and accused of working for cartels.

AMLO quickly released the general.

Eight of the world’s most dangerous cities are now in Mexico, according to a Bloomberg Opinion analysis, and 45,000 Mexicans fled their homes, fearing violence, in 2021.

Finally, AMLO’s new statism works even worse than the previous one.

An attempted overhaul of Mexico’s healthcare system has led to a catastrophic shortage of medicines.

He has invested heavily in the state oil company PEMEX, which continues to lose money, despite record commodity prices.

Spending on welfare has increased 20% since the previous administration, but AMLO eliminated one of Mexico’s most successful poverty reduction programs, which tied aid to the children stay in school.

AMLO defenders can reiterate that the president remains popular with a majority of Mexicans, thanks to his stated concern for the poorest.

This has often been the case with populists ever since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey to the governments of the Kirchners in Argentina.

But reality has a way of catching up.

What Mexicans increasingly face under AMLO is an assault on their economic well-being, personal safety, political freedom, and the rule of law itself.

If Mexicans aren’t careful, this will be their way to Venezuela.