Fri, Dec 23, 2022 page9

• Lopez Obrador’s broken promises in Mexico

  • By Jorge G. Castaneda
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  Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has reached the beginning of the end. Lopez Obrador was inaugurated on Dec. 1, 2018 — having promised to improve Mexico’s economy, reduce poverty and inequality, and tackle corruption and violence, all while strengthening the country’s infant democracy — and is to leave office on Sept 30, 2024. With his term more over than not, most of what he was going to achieve has already been achieved — and it is not much.

  Lopez Obrador did not improve the economy. Mexico’s GDP has not even returned to its pre-pandemic level, and forecasts for next year and 2024 by the IMF and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggest that it might not have grown at all during Lopez Obrador’s six years in office.

  Worse still, the future looks grim. Overall investment fell to below 20 percent of GDP after 2019. Despite predictions that Mexico could benefit from the shift toward “near-shoring” by firms in the US, low investment almost guarantees anemic growth in the coming years. Mexico’s economy could one day grow again, but that day is far off.

  In fairness, a global pandemic and recession are not auspicious for economic growth or reducing inequality. More than 3 million Mexicans fell into poverty from the beginning of 2020 through last year. Notwithstanding Lopez Obrador’s social programs for the elderly, high-school students and indigenous peoples, it seems unlikely that Mexico would have stronger overall figures on inequality and poverty when he leaves office than when he arrived.

  However, there is much that Lopez Obrador cannot blame on the pandemic. He arguably became president in the first place because he put fighting corruption at the top of his platform. He broke that promise.

  Mexicans hope that a new administration would be less corrupt than the last, and this was especially true when Lopez Obrador was elected.

  Former Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto’s government and the return of the Institutional Revolutionary Party to power confirmed voters’ worst fears. To most Mexicans, the small coterie of officials who governed Mexico between 2012 and 2018 seemed endlessly corrupt. In running against them, Lopez Obrador created the expectation that, finally, under his leadership, Mexico’s original and perpetual sin would finally be expiated.

  Lopez Obrador’s government did charge and jail two of Pena Nieto’s Cabinet members, but they were widely perceived to be sacrificial lambs, their prosecution a wink at justice rather than the real thing.

  Polls show that the public thinks the promise to combat corruption has not been kept. One survey, published in the daily Reforma at the beginning of December 2020, found that only 40 percent of respondents approved of the government’s performance against corruption. To speak to business leaders, journalists, civil society groups and ordinary citizens is to understand the endemic belief that corruption at all levels — from the president’s pet projects to the traffic cop on the corner — is the same as ever, or even worse.

  Lopez Obrador has failed to deliver on his other promises, too. Violent crime is worse. Homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants — the only truly robust and reliable crime statistic available in a country where more than 90 percent of offenses go unreported — rose markedly in 2019 and the first half of 2020. Although the homicide rate slowed this year, it remains higher than under Pena Nieto — and could actually be higher.

  Although the number of homicides has dropped from above 90 to about 80 per day, the number of missing people has risen, leading some analysts to wonder whether officials are classifying homicides as “disappearances.”

  Likewise, while Lopez Obrador never promised to perfect Mexico’s incipient democracy, he did suggest he would strengthen it. Instead, he has undermined autonomous agencies, attacked the country’s electoral institute and jeopardized judicial independence.

  Critics have been “named and shamed” at Lopez Obrador’s daily news conferences, and human rights advocates and journalists have been silenced.

  Most chillingly, Lopez Obrador has expanded the role of Mexico’s armed forces. For years, the military’s activities in Mexico were restricted to attending to natural disasters, fighting drug traffickers and cartels, and parading on national holidays.

  However, in recent years, they have completely taken over not only law enforcement, but also infrastructure, customs offices in ports and airports, and air traffic control. They are at the forefront of the war on drugs, omnipresent on highways and even laying rails for a train linking popular tourist sites across the Yucatan Peninsula.

  The stated rationale for expanding the armed forces’ size and responsibilities was that the military is more honest and efficient.

  However, there is nothing in Mexico’s history to support this. On the contrary, a powerful military is a new challenge for Mexico’s democracy. If a new president decides to send the soldiers back to their barracks, would the troops and their officers resign themselves to losing their new perks?

  Lopez Obrador does not seem to have considered this possibility — or cared about it if he did.

  A sluggish economy, corruption, violence, the erosion of democracy and a more empowered military. Such is the presidency of Lopez Obrador. Mexico has been left with the age-old ritual of hoping the next president would be better and different.

  Perhaps the next president would keep his word. Perhaps the next one really would fight corruption. Perhaps the next one would transform Mexico for the better, or, failing that, at least achieve more than Lopez Obrador, who, for all his promises, has done little more than muddle through.

  Jorge G. Castaneda, a former Mexican secretary of foreign affairs, is a professor at New York University.

  Copyright: Project Syndicate
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