Mexico’s populist president-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his new Movement for National Regeneration party (MORENA) swept into power on July 1, riding a backlash against the corrupt status quo.
By handing MORENA a majority in Congress and victories in local elections across the country, voters gave the party, and the new president, a mandate for change.
Sounding like a Mexican Bernie Sanders, López Obrador, or AMLO, as he is widely known by his initials, promised repeatedly during his campaign that he would break up the “mafia of power” that has had a stranglehold on the country for many years.
Indeed, the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) not only lost the presidency, but dropped the number of seats it holds in Congress from 204 to forty-two, while the conservative National Action Party (PAN) lost its hold on Mexico’s northern states. MORENA, an acronym that also means brown-skinned, overthrew established power in a country where skin color is tied to a deeply entrenched caste system.
The day after he won, López Obrador announced he was moving to sell the presidential airplane and turn the luxurious presidential palace into a national museum.
Pro-democracy activists are optimistic that López Obrador will combat the violence and brazen election fraud that have become common practices of both the PRI and the PAN.
This was Mexico’s biggest election in history, with thousands of federal, state, and local offices up for grabs. It was also the bloodiest in recent memory, with 132 candidates murdered in the lead-up to Election Day. Among those was Aarón Varela, a MORENA candidate for mayor in the little town of Santa Clara Ocoyucan, in the state of Puebla, who was found dead in a van.
I visited the spot where the murder occurred with local MORENA activist Araceli Bautista Gutiérrez and a group of international election observers. We were monitoring polling places in the area to document irregularities and, by our presence, to try to deter voter intimidation and fraud.
“We are not on yellow alert here,” Bautista Gutiérrez told the group. “It’s red.”
“We have gotten used to violence in our town now that we are governed by Antorcha Campesina,” she added.
A political group with powerful connections in state and national politics, Antorcha Campesina has a long and shady history. Founded in 1974, it functions as a paramilitary arm of the PRI and claims to fight for the interests of the poor. But in rural communities throughout Mexico, Antorcha candidates have seized power using death threats, vote-buying, and intimidation, and have enriched themselves by seizing public assets and community land. The website Sin Embargo has labeled Antorcha Campesina “the PRI’s extortion machine.”
In Puebla, Antorcha has also worked with PAN governors, including former governor Rafael Moreno Valle, who sent troops to Bautista Gutiérrez’s hometown in 2014 to fire on citizens who were protesting a state law that reduced municipal government power.
In the clash between state troops and local protesters, a thirteen-year-old boy was killed. That was when Bautista Gutiérrez became politically active. “Here, every single person is paid to vote,” she told us, as she led the foreign observers on a tour of local polling places.
Among the irregularities we witnessed were a truck with the PRI logo on its side idling outside one polling place, drawing groups of citizens aside, while the men inside apparently handed out something to voters, contrary to Mexican election laws. The truck sped away when our group of yellow-vest-wearing election observers arrived.
At other polling places, I saw municipal officials accompany voters to the voting booths and even cast their ballots for them. One polling place was located in the courtyard of a private home.
At the Emiliano Zapata public school in Santa Clara Ocoyucan, a young mother, Rosa Gómez Cabrera, emerged from the voting booth and complained loudly to officials that she had not been given the ballots to vote for governor of Puebla nor for the president of the municipality. Voters were marking six separate ballots for six separate offices, but Gómez Cabrera said she was given only four ballots, waving them in the air.
The local official in charge of handing out the ballots shook her head firmly. “I gave you six,” she said.
“You can search my purse! I only have four,” Gómez Cabrera yelled, becoming agitated.
The municipal official refused to back down, saying she could not give Gómez Cabrera any more ballots, because it would mess up the count.
In the standoff, a crowd gathered outside the door. Glancing nervously at me, the foreign observer in the room, another local official intervened. “This is now becoming an incident,” she said. “You’re going to have to nullify those votes and let her vote again.”
The official handing out the ballots finally backed down.
But the drama was not over. A man in a white T-shirt barged into the room from outside, waving a letter he claimed proved that he was an election official from the state. “This is fraud!” he yelled. “They grab some of the ballots beforehand and give them out outside, already filled out!”
“Let’s have calm,” another local official pleaded as people shouted from different corners of the room. “Please, let’s let the voting continue.” Outside, the crowd was pressed against the glass.
“You see what a difference it makes to have you here,” Bautista Gutiérrez told the team of observers as we walked away to visit another polling place. “Every time we arrive they suddenly start cleaning things up.”
The nearly farcical lack of order cast a pall over what turned out to be a historic election day. The PRI and the PAN did not try to overcome López Obrador’s daunting lead. But in local and state elections there was plenty of interference, some of which I witnessed. A few hours after we left one polling place, a group of armed men burst in, firing guns and burning all but one of the ballot boxes.
All in all, in Puebla, seventy ballot boxes were violently stolen and five people were killed. Despite a MORENA sweep of most offices, the PAN mysteriously managed to hang on to the governorship of Puebla, and the Antorcha party kept local offices in strongholds including Ocoyucan (where I watched the voter complain that she had specifically been denied state and local ballots).
“The hope is that, as López Obrador says, there can be a change from the top, like steps, coming from the higher level to the lower level,” said Bautista Gutiérrez.
The same activists who helped López Obrador win his bottom-up campaign hope that his victory will interrupt a cycle of corruption that has poisoned democracy even at the very humblest local level.
David Alvarado, one of the lead organizers of the citizens’ group AHORA Atlixco, which ran the election-monitoring effort in Puebla, said, “If only a few people vote, it’s easy to turn an election. If everyone votes, it becomes really hard. You can’t buy everybody.”
Despite the dire circumstances he has witnessed, Alvarado, like Bautista Gutiérrez, is extraordinarily hopeful about the power of neighbor-to-neighbor organizing.
“I have some relatives in the States who are Trump supporters,” said Alvarado, a dual citizen of Mexico and the United States. “We disagree on a lot.” Still, he believes that people of all political persuasions can come together for the good of their communities.
Having worked as a labor organizer and human-rights activist in Africa and El Salvador as well as Mexico, where he currently lives, Alvarado has a global perspective on politics. “All over the world, people tend to think that the other side is just going to disappear,” he said. “But they never do. These are my neighbors. I have to learn to live with them.”
This observation struck me as both obvious and profound. Working together, despite differences of opinion, to achieve a functional government, is democracy at its most basic.
You could see the principle operating in Puebla, where poll workers seemed shamed by the presence of outsiders who were watching how they did their jobs. These people, if they are members of the “mafia of power,” are its lowest foot soldiers. Social pressure might cause them to defect.
In Atlixco, the midsized city where Alvarado lives and where the team of election observers was based, Antorcha Campesina failed in its bid to take over the local government, even though four out of six officials in charge of counting votes (under the watchful eye of election observers) were accused of being PRI and Antorcha supporters by the other parties.
Alvarado, Bautista Gutiérrez, and other citizen activists saw this as a major victory on election night. In Ocoyucan, where ballot boxes were stolen and the municipal election council attacked, Antorcha hung on to power. And at the state level, the day after the election, the governorship of Puebla was still being contested. Martha Erika Alonso Hidalgo (wife of Rafael Moreno Valle, the former governor who ordered the attack on citizens in one of the towns we visited, and who has been implicated in a vote-buying scheme) won under a cloud of alleged fraud.
The most impressive thing about Mexico’s massive change election was the simple bravery of the locals who organized to stand up to intimidation and fraud.
“The corruption has to change. It’s inevitable,” said Alvarado, who describes himself as “cautiously optimistic” about the new AMLO administration. “People will only take so much.”