Today, Explained - Mexico’s deadly election

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Gangs and drug cartels killed dozens of candidates in Mexico’s midterm elections. Voters weren’t intimidated. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from... Did you hear about Mexico's election this weekend? You should have. It's the biggest one in the history of Mexican democracy, but it was also one of the deadliest. Dozens of candidates were murdered. Dozens. It was a brazen attempt to intimidate reformers. But as Carrie Khan from NPR told us today, it didn't intimidate voters. We started with the size of this thing. In terms of sheer numbers of races, it was quite astounding. Today's midterm elections here in Mexico are the largest to ever take place in this country. More than 20,000 candidates for a variety of offices on ballots nationwide. 15 governorship races. Those are the big prize, I think, in this election,

as well as every single seat in the lower house of Congress, and that's 500 seats. And unlike in the United States, it is a centralized electoral body that runs the election. Mexico's democracy is very, very young. It just started in 2000. Members of the Congress, it's my great privilege, and I deem it a high honor and personal pleasure to present to you His Excellency, Vicente Fox, President of the United Mexican States. Mr. President. For 70 some years, you know, this was a one party state run by the pre-party for 70 years. And now they just started having free and fair elections since 2000.

Muchas gracias. I'm sure this applause and this warm welcoming is being heard by 100 million Mexicans, which on the name of them, I thank all of you. For the electoral body to put on this big of election, it's a big deal. And then we spoke about the violence. It's not the most violent election. The presidential election last in 2018 was the most violent. But for a midterm election, if you really want to sparse it out,

it was more violent than the last midterm election. And we saw 36 candidates be murdered. Three dozen. That's crazy. If that happened in the United States, or if you spread that out, widen that net a little bit more to include aid workers, the drivers of those cars where those candidates were killed, political workers, politicians. It was, I think it was up to maybe 90 people killed. That's crazy. And that's wrong. Did people expect this to be as violent as it was, considering it is just a midterm election? The short answer probably is yes, because what we've seen is that violence has infiltrated all parts of Mexican political

practices and power struggles. So yes. The other thing that's happening is that there are more political parties than ever on the ballot. We have like 10 on the ballot. So that increases the number of parties, politicians vying for power. You have to keep in mind that criminal gangs operating in Mexico have proliferated incredibly over the last couple years, where now it's estimated that there are more than 200 organized crime, drug trafficking, and criminal gangs working in the country right now. The war on drugs in Mexico has become synonymous with grotesque acts of violence. Mass graves, dead bodies hung from bridges, decapitated heads left out on the street have all become increasingly normalized.

When you look at who was killed and the vast majority of them are the opponents challenging who's ever in power. So I could tell you about this one town I went to. It's called Morro León and it's in the state of Guanajuato. Who's ever in power? So I could tell you about this one town I went to. It's called Morro León, and it's in the state of Guanajuato. The state government there and the city is run by the PAN party. I'm not even going to give you an ideological, say this is from the left, this is from the right. Ideology means nothing in this election.

Everybody is just vying for power. The PAN has always been a center right party, business linked, but it's like ideologies all over the place. It's just a big power struggle. And they're making alliances with whoever they can to beat the person who's in power. In this town, the candidate that was running for mayor in a small party that has just begun several years ago, was vying for mayor to throw out the PON party. She was killed. She was killed in a rally. She had the microphone in her hand, and she was talking to a group of people, and gunmen came up and shot her. El deporte, abandonado, las calles, todos nosotros como ciudadanos abandonados muchos años.

She ran and they shot her to death right there. In addition, in that city, there was a man who used to be mayor. Now he's in a different party and he was running for state representative. He told me he survived this attack. He told me that he was coming back from a rally. He stopped at a speed bump and a motorcycle pulled in front of him. There were two guys on the motorcycle. He saw the guy on the back step off, pull out a gun and pointed at his the windshield of his car. He was in the driver's seat. He screamed everybody in the car, get down. They all did. And they were

a rain of bullets and shattered glass. He said the only reason why he thinks he survived was that the gunman, when he stepped off the motorcycle, kind of lost his balance. So he had like two more seconds before he could yell for everybody to get down or he would have been dead. And this is in the context of an election where you're saying there isn't this really forceful ideology at play. This is just a bunch of people trying to win elected office, and there's this much violence? Yeah. So if you become mayor, or you become governor, which is even greater, but what you do, you're in charge of the police force. You're in charge of, you've got the purse strings, the budget.

You're in charge of who gets the contract to pave the road down the street. You get the contract. You're in charge of doling out the contract for the hospital or a new school being built. So you can then skim off the top. You could say, okay, let's build this school. or a new school being built. So you can then skim off the top. You could say, okay, let's build this school. It's going to cost us $5,000, but let's put it down for $7,000, and I get to keep $2,000 of it.

The corruption is not just drug traffickers trying to vie for territory. You have to throw politicians in there too. Some politicians say that they've been told if they don't back the drug traffickers, they were killed. There's evidence that that is in very few cases. So it's just so murky. It's all, is it the politicians? Is it the drug traffickers? Is it both?

Are these political fields? It's just a lot. And nothing is clear because, and this is the big point, nobody's ever prosecuted. There is, the impunity in these crimes is incredible. More than 90% of these crimes go unsolved. The president insists that in the 36 candidates that have been killed, that there have been at least one arrest in each case. But is anybody prosecuted? Does anybody go to jail? Do we find out who was involved in these crimes beyond the gunmen?

And where is that evidence that there's, we've been shown no evidence of how these crimes are investigated. There's no consequences for that. That's what's fueling the violence. I just want to make that clear. That is what is fueling the violence, the impunity in this country when it comes to criminal prosecution. Okay, so you've got the biggest midterm election in the history of democratic Mexico. You've got something like almost 100 people killed with impunity. What effect does that have on turnout this weekend? OK, that's crazy. That's a great question because it's crazy. Turnout was 51 percent. Just over half the electorate took the opportunity to either show the government their anger at the direction the country is taking or to mark their continued support.

And this is a midterm election. I think, I don't know how the exact number for the presidential election, but it was a lot higher, but this is a midterm election, and that many people turned out. That says something about what Mexicans are feeling right now. I think that's just an interesting point. When I was in Morro León, I was like, I was asking people, are you afraid to vote?

Do you have confidence in the democratic process here? I was asking people, are you afraid to vote? Do you have confidence in the, you know, democratic process here? Everybody said, yeah, they were going to vote. The most important person in Mexican politics wasn't on the ballot, but this was very much still a referendum on his leadership. That's in a minute. Thank you. by Wirecutter. AuraFrames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. So, Carrie, for people who aren't familiar with Lopez Obrador, the president of Mexico, what do they need to know about him? Oh, boy, that's a big question, because he's been in politics for his whole life. Before the democratic transition in 2000, he was part of the left here that was always fighting against the one-party authoritarian state here in Mexico.

He became mayor here in Mexico City. He's just always been a politician. He's always been a larger-than-life force. I mean, we covered him when he swept into power in 2018. Now we're going to be listened to by our president. That's the change I voted for and why I'm here. It's the first time in my 46 years that I've come to this type of event. And it felt like there was some excitement about the potential of his presidency.

Why was that? Because he is a very folksy populist. He knows how to talk to the people. If you ask me to explain one phrase of the plan of the government, I'll say, wipe out corruption and impunity. And he's never veered from that line. He is all about fighting corruption in this country. That corruption is the root of almost

every problem in mexico he says the money saved from cleaning up graft will furnish new social programs he also is a nationalist and he wants to return mexico to the time when oil was king here and it was the funder of the national budget, and he believes that energy should stay in national hands, should be run by the state, should fuel the state literally and fill its coffers. He's pushed through a bill that favors the state company, CFE, to supply the country's electricity and sends private firms to the back of the line. In the press, he's known as a socialist or a leftist, but he believes in a balanced budget. He does not want Mexico into debt throughout the pandemic. He has provided no significant

economic stimulus to businesses that have just closed and shuttered or to workers. But on the other hand, he's raised the minimum wage. He has increased scholarships and subsidies to the poor. And he also says he is here to transform the Mexican society and to rid it of free market policies that have kept the rich rich and the poor poor. And he puts the poor first. So that's pretty much his policies in a nutshell. Thank you. That was a pretty good nutshell. It sounds like he's delivered on some, at least, if not many of his populist promises. What kind of campaign was his opposition running against him? You mentioned earlier that this wasn't really a very ideological race.

They have no campaign. They have no platform. They are in shambles right now. The opposition is very weak. And their campaign is, we hate Lopez Obrador, vote for us. How did voters respond in the midterm elections this weekend? I think it was a good win. And he said he was feliz, feliz, feliz. Happy, happy, happy the other day when he went over the election results.

In Mexico City, in a stronghold, he did lose ground. In the Congress, you see in a lot of the foreign press and a lot of the national press here talking about how he lost his super majority. Together with allied parties, he had a super majority in the lower house of Congress. So he's fallen down to a simple majority. I'm sorry, but at a midterm election, is that a big loss? Don't they usually take a bigger hit in midterm elections? So I don't think it was that bad at a midterm election. But if you look at governorships around the country and state legislatures, his party won big. And it won big in areas that you wouldn't expect him to win big, like the industrial north.

He made huge gains there. So I think this was a win for him. I wonder, what was his relationship with the former president like? And how might his relationship with the United States change under this new president? I believe he's meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris just today, right? Yeah, he's probably with her right now. It's very good to see you. I'm very happy to be here. He, surprisingly, he and Trump got along great. They were, they were buds. You know, at first Trump came out threatening to slap tariffs on Mexico, build that wall, you're going to pay for it, you know, but then they came to this great agreement together. And

part of it was that Lopez Obrador did capitulate. He changed his migration policy where, you know, he's been saying we need to get at the root causes of migration forever. And we need a more humane migration policy here in Mexico. And this is this is now like the Biden-Harris party line, right? The president and I also discussed the root causes of migration, in particular, the lack of economic opportunity. Yeah, but that's not the migration policy here in Mexico. What he did was he flipped and he capitulated to Trump when Trump threatened to slap tariffs on Mexican imports into the United States. And he has militarized the migration

policy. He has sent, he created his own National Guard military force here. And he sent them to patrol the Mexico southern border and the northern border. And he also, you know, allowed that Remain in Mexico program where the U.S. was able to expel migrants from wherever and they could stay in Mexico while they waited out their asylum process in the U.S. So you'd think he'd be upset with Trump for having him force this big change in his migration policy. They became best of friends. It was just such an odd relationship. But the thing that Lopez Obrador liked was that Trump could care less what he did. All these critics say that he's become more anti-democratic. He attacks the media. He attacks the judiciary.

He attacks independent institutions. So the U.S. would usually have a lot to say about that, but Trump couldn't care less because Lopez Obrador did what he wanted him to do about migration. The relationship between the United States and Mexico has never been closer than it is right now. And as the president said a little while ago, people were betting against that. They were actually betting against that. They were actually betting against that. Lopez Obrador was one of the last leaders in the world right before Putin to congratulate Biden on his win. And then he has done some things that have upset the Biden administration. He does not want them to comment anything on internal Mexican politics. You know, that's probably not going to come up in this conversations that he has with

Vice President Harris today, just because this is all about them cooperating on stopping Central American migration to the U.S. And so this is we're going to see a lot of we're partners, we're longtime pals, we're neighbors, and everything's going to work out great. Except for all that murder. When you look at polls on how the government is doing in certain topics like the economy, violence, and COVID, the government gets really low marks, but Lopez Obrador gets very high marks. He has a very laissez-faire way of dealing with the criminal gangs. He says that he doesn't want to fight force with force because that just creates more casualties. But the homicide rate is not decreasing here in this country, and it's a problem. Carrie Khan, she's an international correspondent for NPR based in Mexico City.

She covers Mexico. She covers Central America. She covers the Caribbean. She covers about 14 countries. Support your member station. It's Today Explained.