Era of US Hegemony Over Mexico Is Coming to an End Rodrigo Guillot - Peoples Dispatch
go to original July 12, 2022

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (MND)

In 2010, Cuba’s former President Fidel Castro said: “López Obrador will be the person with the most moral and political authority in Mexico when the system collapses and, with it, the empire.” He was referring to Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), who is the current president of Mexico and head of the Morena (National Regeneration Movement) political party.

Despite the wide lead he had in all the polls before the elections, Obrador’s victory in 2018 took almost everyone by surprise. Even the Morena militants remained doubtful for some days, since the dynamics of electoral fraud in Mexican politics had made defeat seem inevitable.

Few of us knew what to expect from Mexico’s new government since AMLO is the first leftist president in our country’s modern political history. The first two years of his term were marked by the absence of any concrete foreign policy, at least publicly. The theory that the best foreign policy is domestic policy led President Obrador to concentrate his efforts on trying to solve the larger problems being faced by the Mexican people, as well as dealing with former US President Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration policy that was mainly directed toward the Mexican migrant population entering and already in the US.

Fourth Transformation

The only noteworthy Mexican public diplomacy initiative undertaken by Obrador during the first three years of his six-year term was to advocate for the Comprehensive Development Plan for Central America. This plan was developed by El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). President Obrador’s government began working on the plan from the day he took office. The initiative addressed both issues, the attacks faced by migrants from Central America in the United States and the real needs of the people who are compelled to migrate to other countries from the region. The structural causes of migration—poverty, inequality and insecurity—framed the discussion by the stakeholders who worked on finalizing the initiative. The plan challenged the US border security doctrine, which treats socioeconomic problems as military problems.

The triumph of Morena in one of Latin America’s largest countries opened a cycle of hope among progressive forces in the region; Latin American leaders and intellectuals have spoken of Mexico as the epicenter of the new progressive wave in the hemisphere. But Morena’s triumph was met by three complexities. First, the difficulties being faced by Obrador as he has tried to lay the foundations for national development and address the glaring inequalities in the country (10% of Mexicans hold 79% of its wealth); this included a national project to end inequality and discrimination, which would be funded by the revitalization of the oil industry, the nationalization of lithium, and the implementation of various infrastructural works.

Second, because the pandemic accelerated the process of the neoliberal crisis at a global level, including in Mexico, Obrador has spoken about the need to “end” neoliberalism by 2022 in the country. Third, there has been a renewed aggression by the US through its blockades and sanctions campaigns against several Latin American countries, including Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Obrador’s fourth transformation (4T), which is the name of his political project—referring “to a moment of change in the political system”—has led to disputes with the U.S. government and US-controlled institutions (including the Organization of American States). This is what gradually drew Mexico’s government into a more prominent role in the Americas.

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