Today, Explained - They call him AMLO

Episode Date: July 2, 2018

Meet Mexico’s next president: Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Call him AMLO. He’s a leftist, a populist, and wasn’t shy about calling Donald Trump a “neo-fascist”. Professor Carlos Bravo Regidor explains how AMLO went from losing the presidency twice to winning it in a landslide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Johnny Harris, the last time we spoke, you were in Hong Kong checking out some epic views of the harbor, yeah? Yeah, yeah. That was amazing. And you had your getquip.com slash explained purchase toothbrush, and you were on the cusp of like this huge personal breakthrough of brushing your teeth two times a day. Yeah, big toothbrush revolution for me, for sure. Have things gone well since? Yeah, well, Hong Kong was amazing, and I'm back now editing the Borders videos that we'll be publishing in a couple weeks. Excellent. I'm a little bit downtrodden because something happened with my quip while I was in Hong Kong. Yeah.

Oh, no. I'm actually kind of embarrassed to come out and say it, but yeah, something pretty bad happened with my quip. Mexico just had its biggest election ever, not just because of the stakes or the gravity of this moment for Mexico. It was literally the biggest. Well over 3000 seats were up for grabs this time, including the throne, the presidency. But that particular race? Not exactly suspenseful. As a race, it was boring because the leading candidate was so far ahead that, you know, the most interesting part in that regard was the fight for the second place, which in a presidential system like Mexico, it's pretty much irrelevant. Carlos Bravo Regidor is a professor at the Center

for Research and Teaching in Economics. It's in Mexico City. Yet, if we think about the election, not in terms of the horse race, but actually in terms of the field where the horses were running, that's when things got interesting, to put it mildly. We had, you know, one episode where Mexico's Justice Department intervened directly in the race to try to damage one of the candidates, Ricardo Anaya, from the center-right coalition. He had a momentum, he was growing. And then the Justice Department, without an actual legal file to back it up, accused him of being involved in a money laundering scheme back in the day. This was huge, it was all over the media, and it really damaged his chances. Then we had, you know, another issue, which was violence against politicians.

In Mexico, running for office can be very dangerous. A bit over 110 politicians were murdered during the campaign. This surveillance video shows Mexican congressional candidate Fernando Pudon posing for a selfie with a supporter after a campaign debate last Friday, when a man walks up from behind, raises a gun, and fires point-blank at the back of his head. This is how organized crime votes, in a way. They decide who gets in the ballot and who doesn't.

And even when people are on the ballot, if they don't like them, well, they threaten them and sometimes they kill them. And the last thing I think related to the field of the race was the prevalence of fake news and disinformation. Researchers say that they have found a host of Facebook pages that are attacking the leftist frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Okay. I mean, Mexico was a bit in the vanguard of this.

There were bot farms in Mexico before there were bot farms in Russia. In addition, there have also been tons of fake news stories circulating. Some say that the Pope has criticized the leftist Andres Manuel López Obrador, and others falsely claim that Ricardo Anaya, the number two candidate, has endorsed Donald Trump's plan of building the wall. This was just like out of control. How did Mexicans feel at this point about the incumbent president, Peña Nieto? Well, his popularity is incredibly low.

Right now it's around 20%. And in many ways, this election became a referendum on Peña Nieto and his party, the PRI. And the results were brutal. The party that won almost 40% in the latest presidential election got around 15%. Oh, wow. And, I mean, this party lost all gubernatorial races at stake this time around. The Mexican people are sending a message to the PRI and Peña Nieto,

and the message is, we can't wait for you guys to leave. And why were people so disappointed with his party and his leadership? Well, I think it was two things. On the one hand, his government, you know, was full of corruption scandals since the second year. Though he campaigned and had an early record as a reformer, corruption scandals and public outcry have sparked a political crisis for the Mexican leader. And these were nonstop corruption scandals. Every week we would hear about a scheme to launder money, a scheme, you know, to deviate resources. And this going up the ladder until,

you know, it reached the very president himself. And then there's the issue of violence, of course. I think the most known episode of this administration was the 43 of Ayotzinapa, the students that disappeared. For more than three months now, we've followed the terrible mystery of what happened to 43 college students who disappeared in Mexico. Tonight, there are troubling new questions about what the government in Mexico City may have known when those young people vanished. And then we ended up knowing that the police had turned them to a narco, to an organized crime gang, and they killed them and they disappeared them. Right. And, you know, the amount of violence in this administration

has, you know, reached record levels. Poverty is still an issue. Inequality is still an issue. Economic growth is very mediocre. So, you know, Peña Nieto's government was thought of as a great fiasco. So who won this presidential election yesterday? Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won by a landslide. He is the first president in the history of Mexican democracy to get over 50% of the vote. To remind our American listeners, Mexico is a presidential democracy with a multi-party system. So in contrast with the U.S. that only has two parties, and where, you know, most of the time, one candidate would get almost automatically over 50%. This is López Obrador's third time around.

He was candidate for president in 2006, and in 2012, he lost both elections. He didn't recognize his defeat. Leftist Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is calling for Mexico's electoral tribunal to cancel the results of the July 1st election, claiming they were not free and authentic as the constitution requires. Not only did he refuse to accept the results, he held a gigantic alternative inauguration ceremony in Mexico City

in which he was sworn in with a fake sash and declared himself the legitimate president of Mexico. So he became, you know, very famous as a sort of a sore loser. Okay. And this time around, he really cleaned the clock of his adversaries, and not only in the presidential election, but also in the gubernatorial races. And in Congress, his party has, you know, the largest legislative contingent, both on the Senate and the lower chamber.

None of the other parties had a strong showing. So there's, on the one hand, a new hegemony of López Obrador's party. And on the other hand, a very fragmented opposition. What was López Obrador's platform? What was he running on and what connected with the Mexican people? Well, this is interesting because this points us towards the typical question of why did he win this time around? López Obrador has always been a man of the left.

He's very concerned with social policy, with the poor, with the underserved, with the forgotten, the left. He's very concerned with social policy, with the poor, with the underserved, with the forgotten, the marginalized. Number two, he always relies on popular mobilization. You know, he's a street politician, which in Mexico has become like a sort of a rare thing. And López Obrador is also a nationalist. I would say even a populist in some of his stances. He has always been a man of the left, but in this electoral cycle, apparently there was a learning process within López Obradorismo. In the other elections, he openly identified himself as a man of the left, and this time around, he didn't. He adopted a much more moderate and conciliatory tone. He toned down, you know, some of his proposals.

He's a leftist candidate, for instance, who openly said that he would not raise taxes. So it seems that López Obrador this time finally, you know, made his peace with the fact that Mexican voters are a lot more conservative than he had thought previously. So he found this formula for, you know, still being a man of the left, but becoming a sort of conservative left. Progressives have this idea that we need to change society, you know. And conservatives are much more traditional. They don't really want to change who we are. So López Obrador is a man of the left because he's very critical, you know, of neoliberalism, of market economy.

But he is conservative because he doesn't want Mexicans to become something different. He just wants Mexicans to be who they are, you know, at peace and maybe with better living conditions. He has played the card of the outsider. He speaks like an outsider sometimes. He even looks like an outsider. But, you know, truth be said, he has never been a true outsider. He was a man of the system for a couple of decades, and then he became, you know, a man of the opposition, but of the institutional, official opposition. So he has found this very effective and successful formula

where he is the outsider from within. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador played the outsider card and won in Mexico, even if he wasn't really an outsider. So how is he going to get along with the actual outsider, the ultimate outsider, his neighbor to the north? That's in a minute on Today Explained. Johnny Harris, the last time we spoke was at the top of the show when you told me something really bad happened to your clip. So I don't know exactly what happened,

but I know I got back to the United States and was going to brush my teeth after a long flight, and I couldn't find my toothbrush. Oh, no. I have no idea. It's probably in some hotel room or on the street of Hong Kong at this moment. Oh, my God.

You introduced the clip to Hong Kong by literally just leaving it somewhere. Yeah, that's part of it too. There's kind of me pushing it on to the other part of the world, but really, I just lost it, and now I don't have a toothbrush. I mean, I do, but it's a gross old toothbrush. It's a good thing you can go to getquip.com slash explained right now to get a new one for just what starts at $25 and your first refill pack free. Isn't that great? That gives me a little bit of solace here for sure. Not that they're disposable or anything, Jotty. You're supposed to hold on to them.

I'll keep that in mind for the next one. So Carlos, you mentioned there was a lot of violence in this campaign, that violence was one of the biggest issues on the minds of Mexican voters. What can López Obrador do about violence in Mexico? What does he pledge to do and what can he actually do? Well, López Obrador was very successful in portraying himself as an alternative. For around 12 years, we've had governments of different parties, but that have stuck with the same vision regarding violence, focused on putting people in jail, of mobilizing the army, of mobilizing the police. And the thing with this is that violence levels have gone up and the punitive strategy is not working. There's no peace for the families of the more than 30,000 Mexicans who were murdered last year and the equal number who are still missing, records that are expected to be surpassed this year. So López Obrador became, during this campaign, like a very vocal critic of the punitive consensus.

And instead of focusing on, you know, putting more people in jail, he proposed to focus on the social roots of violence and of crime. This is, of course, a very lefty vision. What he's saying is that, you know, a lot of people joined drug trafficking gangs or organized crime because they've become their only vehicle of social mobility. There are regions of the country that are very poor, where people have, you know, very few years of schooling, very few opportunities, marginalized. And according to López Obrador, what we need to do, you know, is to strengthen our social policy, really make a dent on poverty, reduce inequality, and then, you know, with that,

open up avenues of social mobility that do not, you know, push people, so to speak, to the ranks of organized crime. For instance, poor peasants in the mountains of Guerrero, a state in the south, you know, that cultivate poppy. They're incredibly poor, incredibly isolated. What López Obrador is saying is these people don't belong in jail. This sounds smart, but the thing is, a policy like this, it's going to take a long time, you know, to deliver its fruits. Right. And in the meantime, you still have to deal with the fact that there are armed, dangerous, very aggressive gangs, you know, around, you know, the country. I wonder how else you resonated for Mexican voters.

You know, Mexico has one of the biggest wealth gaps in the West. Did he say anything about that since he does have sort of this populist bent? Yes. In a way, López Obrador is an old-fashioned politician, and he speaks more about poverty than about inequality. I mean, he's not an ideologue. He is a man of slogans and of formulas, so to speak. And one of his, you know, most known formulas is Por el bien de todos, primero los pobres. We'll listen to everyone, we'll respect everyone,

but our priority is the poor. For the good of everyone, the poor first. And, you know, Mexico's economy has been growing at very mediocre rates. Democracy was supposed to bring prosperity, and it really hasn't, to the degree at least, that people expected. So López Obrador, I think that's another one of the issues where his message really has resonated, you know, with Mexican voters. Mexico is, in a way, one of the biggest issues in the United States right now.

Our border with Mexico, the president's immigration policies. I wonder, how much did the United States factor into the Mexican election? Well, this is such an important question. I've read so much about this in the American press, and I can tell you confidently that the U.S. was not really an issue in this election. Mexico has many and very pressing domestic problems, corruption and impunity, violence, poverty and inequality. To put it somehow, we were not really that into you guys this time around. And the way the United States press seemed to be portraying López Obrador was, you know, he's Mexico's version of Trump. He's

a reaction to Trump. I mean, was there any truth to that? Okay, so there's this idea, I've seen it float around, that López Obrador is Mexico's answer to Donald Trump. I can tell you quite confidently, and to put it in very polite terms, that that's fucking bullshit. López Obrador has been around since way before Trump was even in the political radar. He was major of Mexico City, which is a very important post, from 2000 to 2005. He was a presidential frontrunner in 2006 and 2012. So his win might coincide with Trump's ascendancy, yes, but, you know, López Obrador's popularity comes from way, way before Donald Trump was even around. Now, regarding the comparisons, López Obrador is not anti-American in the way that Donald Trump is indeed anti-Mexican.

López Obrador is also not a nativist or even a xenophobe. He has never said things that would be comparable on any scale or by any degree with Trump's anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim rhetoric. It seems like a lot of this will hinge on relationships. Peña Nieto and Trump had a pretty contentious one. Do you think the election of López Obrador is a chance for Mexico and the U.S. to hit reset? Well, I think López Obrador is a lot more nationalistic than Peña Nieto. But at the same time, nobody wants the Mexican president to enter into a fight with the American president. So he might just trying to contain the worst impulses of Donald Trump, but I don't think he's going to try to develop a relationship with him. You know, this is something that we Mexicans have come to learn. When Donald Trump speaks about Mexico, he's not really speaking about actually existing Mexico or Mexicans. He's talking about this country that exists in his electoral basis minds, you know, that

is a threat that is taking advantage of the U.S., that is flooding, you know, America with immigrants. That country really doesn't exist. The migration rate has gone down to a point where now the balance between the U.S. and Mexico is negative. More people are crossing the border each year towards the south than towards the north. If you're concerned about a presidential election disruptive for the Mexico-U.S. relationship, you don't need to look at the 2018 Mexican presidential election. You need to look at the American presidential election in 2016. And whatever effect López Obrador election has in U.S.-Mexico relations is anecdotal at best compared with the effect that Donald Trump's election already has. Carlos Bravo Regidor teaches at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City.

I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. Johnny, before we go, I mean, is there a chance that the reason you lost your quip is because it is so well designed that it's so smooth and compact and felt that it just slipped out of something or, you know, like. That's a pretty good theory that the design is just too sleek, just too sleek. And it just I couldn't keep my hands on it because it was just too sleek. Although they remedy this because it comes in this carrying case, this capsule that's, I think you're supposed to put it in there while you're traveling. I didn't do that. Oh, Johnny. Yeah.

And it just slipped through the cracks apparently. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for your loss. It's okay. At least I can get a discount on a new one if I so decide. Getquip.com slash explained.