1. Great Expectations and Grim Realities in AMLO's Mexico
- Author:
- Mary Speck
- Publication Date:
- 05-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Strategic and International Studies
- Abstract:
- Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly known as AMLO, assumed office in December 2018 with a robust electoral mandate having trounced traditional parties and secured a clear majority in the Mexican Congress. With approval ratings at about 80 percent, López Obrador seems so far to be satisfying his supporters’ expectations.1 To the delight of those disgusted with elite privileges, AMLO flies commercial (in coach), plans to sell the presidential plane, and slashed the salaries of top officials (including his own), putting their government vehicles up for auction.2 He has acted quickly to redistribute wealth by increasing pensions for the elderly, offering scholarships or apprenticeships to millions of young people, and providing additional subsidies to marginalized small farmers.3 López Obrador has also solidified labor union support by reversing some of his predecessor’s most controversial “neo-liberal” measures. He suspended an education reform enacted to improve the country’s underperforming public schools.4 And he has started to undo an energy overhaul designed to modernize the state-dominated oil industry, promising workers that he will rescue the heavily indebted government company, Petróleos Mexicanos or Pemex, by investing billions in a new refinery to make the country self- sufficient in gasoline.5 But the new president still faces his toughest challenge: reducing violence in a country plagued by some of the world’s most vicious criminal gangs. About 230,000 people were murdered between 2008 and 2017, more than double the number killed in the previous decade.6 This tsunami of violence continues to crest: during the first quarter of 2019 homicides have risen nearly 10 percent from the same period in 2018.7 On security, Mexico’s radical new president has thus far offered more continuity than change. He favors the same top-down, militarized approach that failed to curb violence over the past decade. The government’s marquee security reform is the creation of a national guard with at least 50,000 members recruited largely from the armed forces. Under fire from human rights defenders, López Obrado agreed to place the force under the Secretariat of Security and Civilian Protection, though its commander will be General Luis Rodriguez Bucio, an active duty officer who is in the process of retiring.8 López Obrador has taken steps to address past atrocities (appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the 2014 killing of 43 students) and to prevent future abuses (signing an agreement with the UN to oversee the guard’s human rights training).9 But critics worry that a force led by and recruited from the military will simply reproduce past patterns of repression, gang fragmentation, and dispersion, followed by violent escalation. An iron-fist approach to crime, moreover, fails to address Mexico’s fundamental problem: rampant impunity. Government victimization surveys suggest that authorities fail to investigate more than 90 percent of the crimes committed, often because citizens don’t bother to report crimes to state or municipal police regarded as incompetent, impotent, or corrupt.10 More than a decade of federal military intervention has undermined, not strengthened, the country’s approximately 345,000 state and local police.11 Poorly trained, under-resourced, and often under threat themselves, municipal and state authorities have little incentive to combat Mexico’s increasingly diverse and localized criminal gangs. López Obrador must grapple with the reality that federal power alone is unlikely to bring violence under control. There is no populist playbook for building effective police and an efficient, fair judicial system. The criminal groups operating in Mexico have proven remarkably resilient, surviving the killing or arrest of cartel leaders by morphing into smaller factions that not only produce and transport illegal drugs for sale in the US market but also steal gasoline, derail and rob rail cars, run illegal mining and logging operations, and hold entire communities hostage to extortion and kidnapping rings. The United States has a huge stake in Mexico’s success: the criminal organizations responsible for rising violence in Mexico have also fueled a U.S. drug epidemic resulting in 72,000 fatal overdoses during 2017 alone. U.S. agencies have worked closely with Mexican police and military forces to capture drug kingpins; Congress has also appropriated nearly $3 billion in equipment, training, and capacity building assistance.12 This is only a fraction of the approximately $14 billion Mexico spends each year. But by accepting shared responsibility for the illegal drug trade—long a Mexican demand—the United States has secured cooperation on security issues that would have been unthinkable less than a generation ago. This article examines the evolution of security policy under Presidents Felipe Calderón, 2006-2012, and Enrique Peña Nieto, 2012-2018. López Obrador could learn much from his predecessors’ failures. Calderón began his term with a frontal attack on drug cartels, though he came to understand that Mexico could not control organized crime without social programs and institutional reforms. Peña Nieto initially promised demilitarization and violence prevention, but soon abandoned these efforts, reverting again to military intervention. Neither president strengthened the country’s embattled state and local police who are responsible for enforcing the law after federal troops depart.
- Topic:
- Labor Issues, Elections, Unions, and Liberalism
- Political Geography:
- North America and Mexico