On June 6, around ninety-five million Mexicans will be called to vote for the largest election in the country's history. About twenty-one thousand offices will be controversial, including mayorships, state legislatures, fifteen governors, and all five hundred members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the federal congress. An unholy alliance of right-wing parties consisting of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Action Party (PAN) and the ruined ruins of the once proud Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) will prevail against the ruling MORENA coalition.
In the hustle and bustle of campaigns, spots and controversies, one thing is clear: Mexico in 2021 is not the same country as it was in 2018.
There are scholarships for students, apprenticeships for non-students, a universal pension for the elderly, benefits for the disabled and insurance for the unemployed. There are interest-free microcredit loans for small businesses and a range of programs for farmers that include technical training, fertilizers, a basic grocery package, and staple food price support.
The minimum wage was raised by 60 percent within three years. The peso is stable. A public option for banking has been set up. Marijuana is legal and thousands of federal prisoners have to be released from prison and their records deleted. An amnesty law will exempt other nonviolent offenders, including those imprisoned for drug possession, abortion, and indigenous people who have been denied the right to an interpreter in their trials.
Large companies were forced to avoid years of post-taxation to such an extent that tax collection increased in the 2020 pandemic year. Private prisons as well as genetically modified corn and the toxic chemical glyphosate are being phased out. Processed foods have been given warning signs. A secret ballot has been introduced for union elections. Outsourcing has been reset. Recall and mandatory referendums have been passed, and AMLO has volunteered to vote in a recall election next year. Social housing benefits have been reformed to help debtors and stop evictions. Pensions were reformed to lower the retirement age, increase state contributions, and lower commissions. And instead of flying around the world in a luxury jet and hiding behind standard interviews, the president stays in Mexico and answers questions for two hours at daily press conferences.
On foreign policy, Mexico has traded its former slavish devotion to Washington for a rigorous defense of its own national sovereignty. It has curtailed US intelligence operations, refused to recognize Juan Guaidó in Venezuela, called a coup a coup in Bolivia, opposed the Organization of American States and dispatched a plane to the rescue of Evo Morales.
She has pulled the levers of multilateralism, warning the United Nations that it has not acted against hoarding of COVID-19 vaccines in the First World while cutting import and filling agreements with China and Russia. Mexico currently ranks twelfth in the world in terms of the number of vaccines administered. AMLO and the MORENA majority have passed two important laws to restore public control of the electricity grid and restore self-sufficiency. With seizures and beginnings, a long-neglected Proyecto de Nación or national project has started all over again.
At the center of this national project are AMLO's systematic efforts to dismantle the combination of state imprisonment and state terror that has plagued Mexico with particular ferocity over the past thirty years of neoliberal governance. In the 1980s and 1990s, the nation's fortunes were sold to a cabal of elite cronies, creating a new class of mega-millionaires after privatization. By the 2000s, this elite – based around the banks, trains, telephone services, iron and steel industries, and other countries in the country – had teamed up with their benefactors in the PRI and PAN to create a kleptocracy that pushed all previous boundaries exceeded.
No sector of the economy was safe, no government decision was made without consultation. Countless billions of public money have been channeled through phantom companies and public universities into political campaigns, pet projects, and the pockets of politicians. Through a pay-per-vote system by Moches, the legislature was bribed to pass the ongoing counter-reforms that benefited the very interests that made the payouts.
At the center of this national project are AMLO's systematic efforts to dismantle the combination of state imprisonment and state terror that has plagued Mexico with particular ferocity over the past thirty years of neoliberal governance.
Presidents cavorted with cabinet ministers in the use of cartels. Governors filled luxurious ranches with menageries of exotic animals, while their wives in First World capitals insisted on their diaries that they deserved the abundance that had been thrown upon them. Meanwhile, the general public, having survived two currency devaluations and the sell-off of its public services, was exposed to the new hell of a "drug war" that killed hundreds of thousands and tore the fabric of the nation apart with immeasurable ferocity.
Again, Mexico is not what it was. As a result of the joint and sometimes strenuous work of the Justice Department and the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Revenue Service, the former Development Minister Rosario Robles is in jail because the public funds were diverted during the Peña Nieto administration. Emilio Lozoya, who, as a member of Peña Nieto's campaign, negotiated millions in bribes from Brazilian firm Odebrecht – only to repay the firm with contracts after being appointed director of state-owned oil company PEMEX – has become a cooperating witness for the government .
In three years, around thirty-one thousand bank accounts valued at billions of pesos were frozen. Both Peña Nieto and former President Felipe Calderón are currently under active investigation. Calderón is currently embroiled in a new scandal in which he allegedly diverted pesos 300 billion ($ 15 billion in today's dollars) into undelivered crony contracts to start Mexico's private prison industry.
In late April Tamaulipas Governor Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca of the PAN was stripped of political immunity by the Federal Congress – for the first time for a seated governor – to bring charges of fraud that resulted in him being around thirty people in the knees forced-odden properties, including luxury residences, restaurants, and art galleries. This is just the latest in a seemingly endless stream of PRI-PAN governor criminals spanning the past decade.
In short, the AMLO government and its allies in Congress are unraveling a network of corruption on the order of Italy's Mani Pulite or Brazil's Lava Jato (to which it is related via Lozoya, Odebrecht and the Spanish company OHL). Of course, not that you would know from international coverage of Mexico over the past three years.
Spectacular coverage of drug violence is easier, cheaper, and better for headline news than taking the time to find out who is who and track the progress of law enforcement. Interest in anti-corruption crusades also diminishes when carried out by a government that does not meet the wishes of the international elite who determine media design.
In short, the AMLO government and its allies in Congress are unraveling a network of corruption on the order of Italy's Mani Pulite or Brazil's Lava Jato.
More importantly, however, tracking down corruption in Mexico would expose U.S. complicity at every turn: through funding, guns, rogue intelligence operations, and the daily fact of playing nice with officials like former Security Secretary Genaro García Luna that they knew was at great risk from organized crime.
The long arm of the United States was shown another way during the medium-term election campaign: by helping to fund the political opposition. Through the US Embassy in Mexico and as reported by the magazine Contralínea, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Foundation for Democracy (NED) fund the organization "Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity" (MCCI). , founded by Claudio X. González. In addition to leading the indictment against MORENA in this year's election, organizing the coalition of parties opposed to her and funding its candidates, González was an active figure in the war of attrition that seeks to block key elements of the president's agenda – the courts.
Far from representing a passed check, the millions funded by US agencies in 2019 and 2020 amounted to nearly 20 percent of the organization's revenue. And while MCCI isn't a direct political organization, the United States has actually saved a healthy salary (González has received the equivalent of around $ 375,000 from the organization over the past three years) to the main organizer of the Mexican opposition.
Spurred on by the revelations, Mexico sent the United States a diplomatic note on May 6, asking them to resolve the matter. At its press conference the next morning, AMLO classified it as a form of golpismo or coup promotion and compared it to US Ambassador Henry Wilson's participation in the overthrow of President Francisco Madero during the Mexican Revolution. "It is an act of interventionism that violates our sovereignty … Our constitution forbids it. You cannot get money from another country for political purposes."
The long arm of the United States was shown another way during the medium-term campaign: by helping to fund the political opposition.
The case raises the specter of USAID's dark history across Latin America, from promoting “tax reform” and the “competitive business climate” to clumsy attempts at regime change in Cuba to helping mass sterilization of the poor in Peru. In its heyday in the Cold War of the 1960s and 1970s, USAID helped strengthen dictatorial regimes across the region by training police officers in counterinsurgency, counterinsurgency, explosives, public relations and "improved interrogation techniques" in soundproofed basements.
Claudio X. González's electoral interests are not limited to funding the opposition and accepting checks from USAID: two of his allies will be on the technical committee appointed by the National Electoral Institute to oversee the Election Preliminary Results Program (PREP) Night. According to the institute, they will "contribute to the development of democracy" and "monitor the authenticity and effectiveness of the vote".
MORENA's performance in these three years was not perfect. It was too shy on a number of fronts, including curtailing the privatized mining and banking industries, attacking the grotesque inequality of the country's prosperity, and defending migrants against US pressure.
She has been inactive on indigenous rights, insensitive to protests against the plague of feminicides, and inadequate in creating a long-term environmental vision in the face of climate change. The budget cuts have been too close to the bone in a number of areas including science and culture. And despite the fanfare of a new National Guard, the violence has not abated.
All in all, however, the results were positive. At this urgent historical moment, the MORENA coalition must win the mid-term elections on June 6th.