In AMLO’s Mexico, the State’s Loss Is the Military’s Gain Eduardo Porter - Bloomberg
go to original July 13, 2023

President of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (C) takes part in the military parade during the annual shout of independence (Grito de Independencia) as part of the independence day celebrations in Mexico City, Mexico. (Hector Vivas/Getty Images)

It’s been the judiciary’s turn to play the villain in the ritual morning tragicomedy dished out by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the Mexican people.

In his “mañanera” press conference over the past few weeks, he has accused judges of untrammeled corruption and blasted Supreme Court justices as rotten allies of the conservative elites who trample all over the constitution and earn too much money. Hopefully, he said, the next president will have a constitution-shaping majority in Congress to bring the judicial mafia to heel.

This thwacking is not unrelated to the hard time the judiciary has been giving the president. The Supreme Court blocked his efforts to dismantle and, when that didn’t work, then defund Mexico’s election monitor. It stopped him from handing over control of the National Guard to the military. It forbade him from designating his pet infrastructure projects as national security priorities.

But AMLO, as the president is known, is not narrowly motivated by a specific peeve. Other institutions — the opposition and the press, of course, but also the election monitor, the freedom of information agency, the antitrust watchdog, the telecommunications regulator, the public health system and the main antipoverty program of the four previous administrations — have all taken a turn at the presidential pillory.

The president sees himself in a broad battle against a Deep State. Repeatedly over the last five years, he has assaulted the institutions built in the quarter century since Mexico embraced multiparty democracy, taking particular aim at any agency capable of checking the presidency’s power.

In this quest to supplant civilian government, he has resorted to the one institution that promises unquestioned loyalty, alongside scale and real firepower: the armed forces, to whom he has handed a vast array of new jobs, responsibilities and money.

Read the rest at Bloomberg

Related: AMLO Anniversary Rally Draws Reported 250,000 to Zócalo (MND)

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