AMLO in office: pre-pandemic days

In the first installment of a three-part series on the political shifts Mexico has experienced, we analyzed the election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In 2018, AMLO won a notable victory running as an anti-crime and anti-corruption candidate from the left-wing, and in the second part of this series we will examine his record in government so far, until the Covid-19 pandemic hit Latin America.

AMLO finished his first year in office with a staggering approval rating of 86 percent, with such achievements as paying scholarships for more than 10 million students, implementing subsidies and price supports for small farmers, offering interest-free microcredit to small business, opening a new public bank to distribute benefits to the millions shut out of the private banking sector, setting up a public telecoms company to provide internet to those overlooked by private ISPs, and increasing the minimum wage by 16 percent. 

However, his government has faced immense difficulties and increased opposition while enacting its program.

AMLO on crime

AMLO came to power promising to end Mexico’s War on Drugs and restore a semblance of normality, following over a decade of carnage that has left anywhere between 115,000 and 250,000 dead. His anti-crime platform was based on three key positions: ending the drug war, replacing the army with a national guard, and granting amnesty and social opportunities rather than death or jail for those caught up in the drug trade, a campaign he dubbed “hugs not bullets.” 

However, violent crime is higher than ever. Mexico recorded a record number of 11,535 murders over the first four months of 2020, notwithstanding the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, femicide has also risen to new horrific highs: April was the deadliest month in five years for Mexican women, with 267 murders. 

AMLO has been confrontational on the femicide issue, accused feminist groups drawing attention to the problem of being part of a conservative anti-government agenda, even though these movements backed him in the 2018 elections. Mexico’s femicide problem certainly predates AMLO — one needs only take a step back to hundreds of unsolved murders of young women in the border city of Ciudad Juárez in the late 90s, famously chronicled by Roberto Bolaño in his magisterial novel 2666. But the president has tended to downplay or even dismiss the murder of hundreds of Mexican women.

His grip on organized crime and drug trafficking also seems to have slipped, encapsulated by an incident last year, in which federal police released Ovidio Guzmán López from prison — son of notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán — following his brief detention during a military operation. AMLO claimed that he had ordered Mr. Guzmán López’s release to prevent bloodshed, as hitmen belonging to the Sinaloa Cartel had flooded Culiacán, a city of a million people, taking the families of police officers hostage and erecting roadblocks. Similar incidents have been occurring for decades in Mexico and entire regions of the country have been controlled by organized crime for years. Intensifying the violence of the drug war is a solution that has failed again and again, wherever it has been tried.

Critics have accused AMLO of continuing the drug war by another name,...