Mexico will elect a new president on July 1, and the leftwing populist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is leading by a wide margin.
This being Mexico, López Obrador’s lead has led to widespread speculation about what kinds of dirty tricks the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will use to ensure that its own candidate, José Antonio Meade—currently in third place—ends up the winner.
López Obrador, often called AMLO, for his initials, has run twice before. In 2006, after results showed he had lost by a mere 0.06 percent, he cried fraud and led massive protest marches. In 2012, he again demanded a recount. Now, he has launched a new party, MORENA, published a book called ¡Oye, Trump!, and is riding a wave of disgust with the current regime.
In the first presidential debate, all of the candidates, including Meade and second-place Ricardo Anaya, the rightwing coalition candidate, devoted most of their time to attacking the frontrunner.
Sounding like a Mexican Bernie Sanders, López Obrador mostly ignored his rivals’ charges that he would coddle criminals and hurt foreign investment. He returned over and over to his main themes: poverty, inequality, and a corrupt political establishment.
The establishment has responded with campaign ads suggesting that López Obrador is a dangerous radical who will plunge the country into chaos.
“¿Miedo o Meade?” is the tagline on one PRI television ad. In it, a father frets about economic uncertainty, and how he will afford his kids’ tuition. “Don’t worry,” a colleague tells him, “Meade is going to win.” Then the tagline swims up, offering voters a choice between fear or the ruling party’s status-quo candidate.
The problem, for the PRI, is that fear, for many people, is already the status quo.
Mexico had its most violent year on record in 2017, with more than 25,000 homicide cases.
The problem is that fear, for many people, is already the status quo.
The current Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has been accused of fostering an atmosphere of impunity, of being complicit in the disappearance of forty-three student teachers who were protesting government education reforms, and of spying on members of the press, who work in what Reporters Without Borders has labeled the most dangerous country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. The group said Mexican journalists who cover political corruption or organized crime are “often systematically targeted, threatened, and gunned down.”
I got a snapshot of the anarchy that forms the backdrop to Mexican politics recently while walking through the zocalo in Oaxaca City—the central square in the capital of one of Mexico’s poorest states. The zocalo has been the setting for countless demonstrations, including the massive 2006 teachers’ union protest, joined by thousands of citizens, in which police shot and killed U.S. journalist Brad Will. It’s also home to a permanent encampment of rural people living in tents, with signs that declare they’ve been illegally pushed off their lands.
Antorcha Campesina, a national organization dedicated to the rights of the rural poor, was holding a rally when I happened to walk by.
“The problem in Mexico is the unequal distribution of wealth,” Antorcha Campesina leader Jonathan Rodriguez was telling a small crowd. His group is fighting mining companies, water privatization, and the government’s failure to adequately fund education. Antorcha Campesina, he said, doesn’t support political candidates who only show up in rural communities at election time to hand out T-shirts and hats in exchange for poor people’s votes.
Just as Rodriguez was winding up his speech, a knot of agitated people arrived in the zocalo, carrying a large banner and attracting a flock of reporters.
“We are going to stop this event so that our comrades may hold their press conference,” Rodriguez announced.
I joined the other journalists gathered around the group with the banner. They were municipal officials from the town of San Carlos Yautepec in the southern Sierra mountains. Ramiro Gaspar Martínez, the municipal agency representative, explained that they had been run out of their homes by armed men allied with a rival political faction associated with the PRI’s senate candidate, Sofía Castro Ríos.
The group had come to the state capital to file a complaint and seek justice.
According to Martínez and the other municipal officials, the rival political group had decided to forcibly reverse the results of a January election. They threatened and expelled the families of legitimately elected officials, forcing them to sign papers agreeing to leave town within twenty-four hours and pay a fine of 50,000 pesos. Rubén Garnica Ríos, the San Carlos treasurer, patiently answered my questions as I tried to sort out the story.
As he was talking, Garnica Ríos looked past me into the square and pointed to a man with a backpack who was making his way through the crowd. “That man is one of them!” he said.
“Get him!” the people around us started shouting. The man began to run, chased by several San Carlos residents, who caught him by the arms and marched him back toward the group.
The man, looking panicked, was pushed into the center of the circle. A woman shook her finger in his face: “You! You! You hit me! You humiliated me! You’re the one who forced me to sign the document!” she shouted.
Later she wrote down her name and title for me: Berenice Montes Rio, councilor for education.
The circle began closing in, menacingly. “Make room, make room,” a man said, and people took a step back. A few men standing apart from the group began to point and laugh.
“You came to drag me out of the house, and you hit me, and you hit my daughter, too!” Montes Rio yelled.
“They made me do it,” the man said in a low voice, his arms hanging limply by his sides.
Another woman, Nancy Tomása Juárez Cruz, stepped up and shouted, “We are women and you can’t just hit us!” A man in the circle joined in: “You don’t have the right to hit people!” he yelled. “We understand very well what’s going on. We are not about to sell our town.”
“They hit me in the stomach, and they damaged my ear, because I was part of the municipal authority of San Carlos,” an emotional Juárez Cruz told me. “My whole family had to flee. . . . We’re all displaced people. If we go back, they’ll kill us.”
As the crowd continued to enjoy holding their captive, Garnica Ríos and I looked on.
“They want to hold him, but I don’t agree,” he said. “That’s how they treated us. They grabbed us.”
As he spoke, some members of the crowd made the man hold a corner of their banner while they took pictures with their phones. Some people laughed. He told them he had to go to the bathroom and the women hooted. “Do it right here!” one woman yelled. They weren’t letting him go, but the menacing mood had dissipated and the crowd seemed relaxed. This was likely to be the closest they would get to vindication. Garnica Ríos had no faith the state would resolve the dispute.
Oaxacan economist Luis Rey, who has written extensively on disputes in Southern Mexico, points out that there are 500 unresolved conflicts, mostly over land rights, in Oaxaca.
The feeling of lawlessness that results from this situation, as citizens take justice into their own hands, extends to the neighborhood watch groups that hang banners all over the city of Oaxaca, warning, “Thief, we are watching. We will catch you and lynch you.”
Shortly after I witnessed the San Carlos conflict, I went to visit the spokesman for Sección 22, Oaxaca’s radical teachers’ union, in a grimy, rundown office building a few blocks from the zocalo. Wilber Valdivieso sat behind a battered table in a cubicle with flimsy walls covered with posters of Mexican revolutionaries. Broken chairs littered the hallway, and people were hawking CDs and videos in the foyer.
“There’s a discontent in all sectors of society,” Valdivieso told me. He had just returned from the Isthmus region of Oaxaca, where schools were still lying in ruins, waiting to be rebuilt seven months after the massive earthquake of September 2017.
“People see the government is not coming through, not making good on its promises,” he said.
The PRI will lose the July 1 elections, Valdivieso predicted, thanks to what he called the “Peña Nieto effect.”
Sección 22 has been fighting the Peña Nieto administration over an education reform law mandating that teachers pass a test to keep their jobs, along with other measures that push privatization and diminish labor rights. These measures have left many Mexicans worse off, and they know it, Valdivieso said.
Sección 22 has a policy of “free militancy,” which means it does not endorse political candidates. But clearly, Valdivieso was backing López Obrador, whom he referred to affectionately as “Andrés Manuel.”
“There’s a new political economy of the country. It doesn’t benefit most people,” Valdivieso said. Nowhere is this more true than in the earthquake-devastated Isthmus region.
The PRI will, doubtless, hand out disaster-relief aid just before the election to buy votes, he predicted: “We have seen that there are people in extreme need—they will vote for the sake of a sandwich, a meal, a T-shirt.”
But the union is collaborating with citizens’ groups on voter education, get-out-the-vote, and election monitoring efforts. And Valdivieso is optimistic. “By listening to the people, Andrés Manuel is opening up possibilities.”
Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive.