AMLO’s Final Act

AMLO’s Final Act

The Mexican president has built his durable popularity by combining traditionally left- and right-wing policies and positions.

During his five years in office, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, has rarely left the country. But in September 2023, AMLO, as he is commonly known, made a trip to Colombia and Chile, Latin American countries that are also currently governed by the left. In Colombia, AMLO met with President Gustavo Petro and participated in the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Drugs, where Petro called for an end to the failed strategy of “viewing drugs as a military problem and not as a health problem for society.” AMLO said that preserving family unity and combating poverty are essential to that fight.

In Chile, AMLO joined President Gabriel Boric to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup d’état that deposed socialist president Salvador Allende. AMLO, who was nineteen years old at the time, vividly remembers learning about the coup. (Boric, by contrast, was not born until 1986.) At their joint press conference, Boric praised Mexico for providing a haven for thousands of Chileans forced into exile by the resulting dictatorship. AMLO described Allende as “the foreign leader I most admire,” adding, “he was a humanist, a good man, a victim of scoundrels.”

If the goal of the trip was to send a message of unity among left-wing leaders, there were more than a few ironies. AMLO took a military jet in order to avoid the airspace over Peru, where he has been declared a persona non grata after supporting a president who tried and failed to dissolve that country’s Congress in order to stay in power. Petro decried the militarization of the war on drugs, and Boric lamented military intervention in Chilean politics, but AMLO has given Mexico’s military a greater role not only in anti-drug campaigns but in other areas of government. Boric has been outspoken against authoritarianism on the left as well as on the right, while AMLO has held his tongue about autocratic left-wing governments in Cuba and Nicaragua, in the name of respect for sovereignty. But perhaps the greatest irony is that AMLO retains popular support in his country, while Petro and Boric have struggled in theirs.

“President Allende left us many lessons,” AMLO said in Chile. “From him we learned that the best form of achieving a real transformation depends a great deal on the effort we make to awaken civic consciousness—a change in mentality—in our people, not only in one group or a minority but by broad sectors of society, of a majority sufficiently powerful to establish a new social and political order.” This was a painful lesson of Allende’s failure; his share of the vote never comprised a broad majority of Chileans. But AMLO’s does. As he enters his final year in office, his approval ratings remain where they have been for several years: between 60 and 70 percent. At t…

Source: dissentmagazine.org