Shortly before we left for our visit to friends in Mexico City and to our son in Bahía de Banderas on the Pacific coast, I read the obituary of Luis Echeverría Álvarez who was President of Mexico when I first arrived in the country in the summer of 1972. The governments of Mexico had agreed an exchange programme: Mexican students would go to the UK to bring back technical skills and British students would be awarded a stay in Mexico funded by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (National Council of Science and Technology). The three who arrived together on a BOAC flight were historians: my companions were Alan Knight, who would become Professor of Latin American History at Oxford and Guy Thompson who had a long career at the University of Warwick. Reading of Echeverría’s death, I realized that my connections with Mexico are now half a century old. It seemed a good time to reflect on those five decades.
Those three months in 1972 were incredibly exciting. I read about Mexican history in the library of the Colegio de México (the elite graduate social sciences school of Mexico) and travelled at the expense of the Mexican taxpayer to visit places that I read about in histories of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1921: to Cuautla, where the forces of the peasant leader Emiliano Zapata once gathered his troops; to San Luis Potosí, the northern city that gave its name to the manifesto of the first revolutionary leader, a wealthy, rather mystical northern landowner, Francisco Ignacio Madero, who actually launched his rebellion from the USA, not from San Luis; to Veracruz, the Gulf coast port, so often invaded by foreign powers in pursuit of territorial and political profit; from there Alan Knight and I took a long bus journey to the port of Tampico in the far north, travelling through tropical land where the British Pearson company once had its oil fields. I discovered how hospitable the Mexican people are and made friendships that have lasted for half a century. I returned in 1974-1975 to carry out research for my doctorate.
I was fascinated by the great metropolis which was Mexico City, once Tenochtitlan, the city in a lake that was the capital of the Aztecs. The centre of Tenochtitlan was a great plaza, framed by the palace of the Aztec ruler, the huey tlatoani (“the man who speaks”) and temples, the greatest of which was the Templo Mayor (the Great Temple of the Aztecs). When I was there in 1972 it lay hidden under the colonial structures of the Ciudad de México, the capital of New Spain as Mexico was known for three centuries of Spanish rule, but was discovered in 1978 by workmen and is now a visitor attraction and a museum. During Spanish colonial rule the square was the Plaza de Armas, where Spaniards mustered if needed to defend the King’s realm or to calm period fears of a Black slave rebellion. On the site of the palace of Moctezuma the Spaniards erected what Mexicans now call the Palacio Nacional, where the President has his offices (and the current incumbent his official residence). The historic centre soon filled up with palaces and a considerable number of churches, monasteries and convents, all funded by the rich and powerful who made their money in trade with Asia and Peru, in silver mining, livestock, or corruption, the Mexican vice introduced by the Spaniards. In 1972 many of the religious buildings, expropriated by anticlerical governments of the 19th and 20th centuries, were public institutions: the National Library, the National Newspaper Library, museums and so on. In modern Mexico, the great square is known as the Zócalo, which translates as “plinth”, an odd name to give to the political centre of the country. The reason is that in 1843 Antonio López de Santa Anna, who frequently but usually briefly occupied the presidency in the first decades of independent Mexico, had work begun on a grandiose monument to independence in the square. The project had got as far building a large plinth when the Americans invaded in 1846, after which Santa Anna’s monument was forgotten, except in the popular name of the plaza. The plinth, by the way, was discovered by archaeologists, who usually unearth Aztec remains, in 2017.
Everywhere I travelled in the now enormous metropolis, Mexico’s turbulent and often sad history was evident. The Metro, recently constructed for the Olympic Games of 1968, unearthed Aztec remains which were on view in some stations. In Coyoacán, once a rural town, I saw the mansions of some of the most important conquistadors, such as Diego de Ordaz and Hernán Cortés himself, the leader of the Spanish invaders. On the hill of Chapultepec stands the castle (really a large palace), the residence of Emperor Maxmilian, the Austrian prince installed by Napoleon III as the second emperor of Mexico from 1864 -1867 (the first, a Mexican royalist, Agustín de Iturbide, wore the crown from 1822-1823). The palace was later the favourite residence of dictator Porfirio Díaz (1877-1911). At the foot of the hill stands the monument to the Niños Héroes, cadet soldiers who refused to surrender to the invading Americans (1846-1848), preferring to jump to their deaths. Their sacrifice is commemorated every September just before the fiestas patrias that mark Independence. The latter begin at midnight on 15 September when the President emerges on the balcony of the Palacio Nacional to give the Grito (the “Yell” or call to arms against the Spaniards) first made by the priest father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810 on the steps of his church in Dolores Hidalgo. Nobody knows exactly what he said, but the traditional grito of Viva México! is brief and to the point.
The city expanded beyond the colonial-era centre in neighbourhoods known as colonias. Colonia Cuauhtémoc, a short distance from the centre was a late 19th-century development to the north of one of the city’s great avenues, the Paseo de la Reforma. Here the well-to-do of the Porfiriato, the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, built solid mansions that have survived earthquakes and political upheavals. The British embassy is in one of them (actually, it suffered considerable quake damage a few years ago, but still stands). Roma, and Condesa where I lived, were developments of the first decades of the 20th century. The expansion of the city picked up pace after World War II, eventually engulfing formerly independent villages such as colonial Coyoacán, and, as tram lines developed, further still to the south as far as San Ángel, an area of charming cobbled streets and expensive homes combined with still more plazas, olonial churches and monasteries. The city now sprawls over the valley, engulfing parts of the adjoining state of Mexico.
In the summer of 1972, I found myself in a Mexico that lived under the managed democracy of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) that emerged from the years of revolution. This was the Mexico that had committed itself to universal education, a goal still imperfectly achieved, but a noble goal nevertheless. The national university (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM) turned out highly qualified economists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, archaeologists and so on who staffed the government and provided professional services on a par, for the wealthy and the middle classes of the cities and major towns, with more prosperous countries. Rural provision was much inferior, although graduates were obliged to give a year of social service in the provinces, and schools and clinics appeared in small towns, but not in many remote villages and hamlets. I lodged with such a middle-class family (still dear friends) in Condesa (the land had once belonged to a countess). Nearby the Jockey Club had established a horse racing track in the 1920s, whose layout can still be seen in the oval shape of Calle Amsterdam. My first landlady, Consuelo, was the widow of a businessman engaged in shipping. Her eldest daughter married an UNAM-trained economist who worked for the Ministry of Public Works, the son of one of her father’s business friends. After Consuelo’s death her daughter’s family moved into the house and I lodged with them. The government kept such families happy by paying a salary top-up “off the payroll” (“fuera de la nómina”), providing a subsidized ministry shop and enabling them to live comfortably.
There were similar subsidized shops for some of the more humble classes run by the Consejo Nacional de Subsistencias Populares (CONASUPO). CONASUPO’s shops were closed in 1999 to be replaced with a much smaller number that cater only to communities that live in what the government considers extreme poverty. The poor’s share of economic prosperity is still much less than the lifestyle of the middle class: inequality has increased markedly in my own country, but in Mexico the gap between rich and poor is staggering. The man who belched fire from his mouth to earn a few pesos in 1972, the children singing romantic ballads or selling chewing gum on the buses and metro, or cleaning windscreens at red traffic lights, were not beneficiaries of the PRI’s “Mexican miracle”. These poor people worked hard and with great ingenuity to scrape together enough to eat one day at a time. I remember one day seeing a young man pedalling a bicycle along the Alameda in central Mexico City. Behind him was a pile of newspapers and seated on the pile was his partner. As they approached a newspaper kiosk, the boy on the newspaper pile pulled a bundle from under him and flung it to the newspaper seller. To my amazement the pair barely wobbled, let alone lost their balance. Slightly better off perhaps were the members of the “informal economy” who sold fruit-flavoured water (known as aguas frescas), tacos, tortas (a sort of Mexican sandwich) and other foods on the street. The contrast with the lives of the middle-class residents of Condesa, the rather more upscale homes of the Pedregal de San Ángel, newly-built on an ancient lava field, or the rich and powerful of Lomas de Chapultepec emphasized the enormous inequalities of 1970s Mexico, which are still painfully visible today.
Much as these urban dwellers lived precariously, in rural areas life was more basic still. The homes of all but the well-to-do (if there were any) were frequently one-or-two-room affairs of adobe. Larger settlements would usually have a basic school building, although smaller places even in the 21st century sometimes still have schools made of “palos” – literally “sticks”. Larger villages might also have a one-room clinic run by the Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social (IMSS). The more fortunate might have a parcel of land provided by the agrarian reforms of the post-revolutionary era, but by the 1970s population growth was fragmenting the holdings, creating a landless rural population and driving migration to the United States.
The post-war economic growth managed by the PRI regime had provided families such as the one I lived with an income sufficient to employ two young maids, to live in a comfortably appointed modern home and to run a car. True, imported goods were heavily taxed and beyond their reach. While a similar British family might serve wine at a social gathering, the parties I attended were lubricated with plentiful rum and tequila. Wine and other foreign luxuries were for the wealthy, as were restaurants such as Churchills, a veritable institution which braved every national misfortune except for the recent pandemic during which it closed its doors for good. But by 1972 the shine was beginning to wear off the political and economic “miracle” of the Mexican revolution. There was discontent in rural areas fuelled by poverty and the rule of corrupt and brutal political bosses. There were rural guerrillas in the mountains of the state of Guerrero where I studied the 1910 Revolution. In Mexico City there had been enormous peaceful student demonstrations (later joined by workers) in 1968 just before the Olympic Games to protest against restrictions on liberty, official corruption, and the still widespread poverty. My landlord Alfonso and another friend were present in Plaza of the Three Cultures and the housing complex of Tlatelolco, famous for its provision of decent working-class homes, on 2 October 1968, when the regime lost patience. Soldiers shot many students dead, arrested others, and the fortunate fled to hiding places in the countryside.
Luis Echeverría, who as Secretario de Gobernación (Interior Minister) had ordered the massacre, was chosen by the PRI to be elected President in 1970 (the PRI always won national elections until 2000: the competition was to be chosen as candidate, not elected). Echeverría struck a leftist pose, getting politically close (but not so close as to irritate the USA too much) to Cuba, and associated Mexico with the movement of non-aligned nations. He promised an “apertura democrática” (democratic opening) but sent soldiers to the mountains of Guerrero to conduct a dirty war against dissidents, despatched government-paid thugs called halcones (falcons) to commit the Corpus Christi massacre on 10 June 1971, and shut down a critical newspaper, Excélsior. Journalists and other writers were kept onside with cash subsidies or appointments as ambassadors to desirable countries. The government controlled paper imports, and consequently could silence excessive dissent in the press. Echeverría splashed cash with abandon on projects that took his fancy, such as a fruit canning factory in the village in coastal Nayarit where he had a vacation home. His six-year period in office ended with a currency crisis. This rather verbose man, one of whose much-derided phrases was “No es ni el uno ni el otro, sino todo el contrario” (“it’s neither one thing nor the other, but quite the opposite”), failed to secure the PRI’s dominance of Mexican politics in the long run.
In the next two and a half decades the PRI would struggle to hold power with the firm grasp to which it was accustomed. In 1988 the party had to resort to post-election rigging of the count to prevent the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution) of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (son of one of the regime’s most famous presidents) from reaching power. Finally, the PRI’s candidate for 2000, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated four months before the election. As luck would have it, constitutional provisions prohibited anybody who held a government post less than six months before the election from being a candidate, which eliminated all the most powerful alternative candidates. The only possible candidate available, Ernesto Zedillo, did one remarkable, unheard-of, thing: at the end of his term, he permitted a free election that the PRI lost.
Many PRI politicians switched to other parties or formed new ones. One such was Andrés Manual López Obrador (known as AMLO: contemporary Mexico has a habit of turning public figures into acronyms), from the southern state of Tabasco, a region known to British readers from Graham Greene’s evocative novel of the anticlerical 1930s, The Power and the Glory. AMLO, also known less flatteringly as “el pejelagarto” (a Tabasco reptile with an extra-large mouth), for his verbosity, joined the PRD and was elected head of the Federal District, as Mexico City was formally known, in 2000. He ran for the Presidency in 2006 and vigorously disputed the result when his opponent Felipe Calderón of the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party) was declared winner. He similarly disputed the elections of 2012, when he was beaten in the polls by the PRI’s man Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN: as I said, anybody who is anybody is now an acronym), but then won big with an unprecedented landslide in 2018 as the head of his own party, MORENA ( and other acronym for Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional: National Regeneration Movement).
So, the Mexico I now visit to see my son is the country of AMLO. This is not the Mexico of 1972. The infrastructure is much more modern. Multi-lane toll highways now take freight, passengers and private cars to all the main cities and a good many lesser towns. All the major cities and tourist areas now have airports. 1972 Mexico City already had multi-storey buildings, but now it has many more skyscrapers. Wealthy Mexicans drive expensive cars, live in luxurious houses (probably several) and vacation around the world. The middle classes now eat in restaurants offering a variety of international cuisines, even in small provincial towns, and drink imported wines (and some good ones from the nascent Mexican wine industry). Almost everybody, it seems, has a mobile phone and communicates by WhatsApp to arrange everything from a drink in a bar to a business meeting. But the fire eaters, jugglers and trick unicyclists are still at traffic intersections, as are the children begging for a few pesos while a parent waits nearby (children receive more sympathy than an adult) and the children who clean windscreens at red lights. In Bucerías, where luxury condos line the beach, we saw a family of two adults and three small girls, the eldest no older than six, loaded with merchandise walking to the beach for a day selling to holidaymakers in the hot sun. We also saw a boy and a girl, no more than ten or eleven years old, with no adult present, trudging along the beach at Bucerías laden with textiles and bags for sale. These children and their parents still toil daily to barely meet their basic needs. The children’s education suffers and so poverty is reinforced.
I have not had the close-up view of contemporary Mexico that I had in 1972 and 1974-1976, but AMLO, who is regularly characterized in the British press (in so far as our press refers to him at all) as a leftist, strikes me as no such thing, but rather a politician made in the mould of old-style authoritarian PRI politicians. Not so much the suavely corrupt EPN, but the rough tough, often gun toting politicos of old. However, there is one difference. While an Echeverría might have kidded himself that the people adored him and his grandiose projects that came to very little, there was, in truth, no great enthusiasm for his government. Things are different under AMLO: those who believe with fervour see a plan to transform Mexico into a much more prosperous country standing tall in the world; semi-believers credit him with some good policies but dislike his authoritarian manner; others (including, as far as I can tell, the better-off middle class) loathe him as an authoritarian disaster who is taking the country in the wrong direction. AMLO tends to talk in quasi- mystical terms (one is tempted to say pseudo-mystical). For example, during the pandemic he told Mexicans that they would be all right because of their country’s deep cultural resources and produced assorted amulets and charms that he carries to ward off disease and other maladies. Nevertheless, whatever one might think of AMLO, he has undoubtedly succeeded in selling a vision of a more promising, even glorious future for Mexico to win enough votes to control almost all levers of power. The overarching framework of the vision is the Fourth Transformation (acronymed, of course, as the 4T). In AMLO’s view (it can hardly be called an analysis, since it would fall apart if tested against what actually happened in the past), Mexico has undergone four transformations which constitute triumphant moments in Mexican history: Independence from Spain in 1821; the Liberal Reforma of the 1860s (led by one of AMLO’s great heroes, President Benito Juárez); the Revolution of 1910-1921 (started by another hero, Madero); and AMLO’s own promised transformation.
A theme in all four transformations, in AMLO’s account of history, is independence. He expresses Mexico’s independence in a number of ways. Like Echeverría, he makes a point of offering support to Cuba, to which AMLO adds Nicaragua and Venezuela. Unlike Echeverría, however, AMLO seems uninterested in overseas travel and the international stage. Apart from one visit to the White House, he tends to despatch Marcelo Ebrard, his foreign minister, to international engagements. However, the policy that most notably stems from ALMO’s pursuit of independence relates to petroleum. Petroleum has been drilled in Mexico from at least the early 20th century, and in 1938 President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the industry in the teeth of opposition from the USA and the UK. But it was in the 1970s that large reserves were found off the Gulf Coast. PRI politicians believed that they ruled a country that would become a member of the club of rich oil nations, but things did not quite turn out that way. For example, Mexico exports crude oil to the USA but then imports gasoline because it lacks sufficient refining capacity. One of AMLO’s first acts was to commission a new refinery, Dos Bocas, in his home state of Tabasco. On the meagre evidence of my conversations, this element of AMLO’s policy is popular with Mexicans who are not otherwise devotees of the President. It taps into deep feelings of independence from foreign powers who have so often bullied Mexico in the past.
To an outsider, this large bet on a technology whose medium-to-long-term future looks uncertain, to say the least, if other countries seriously pursue decarbonization, does not entirely make sense. But to many Mexicans, for whom oil is the very symbol of independence for a country much pushed around in its 200 years as an independent nation, energy independence is a very alluring prospect. The trucks of PEMEX, the state-owned oil company, carry the slogan “por el rescate de la soberanía” (rescuing sovereignty).
Moreover, a future based on oil seems to be pretty much the entire energy policy of AMLO’s government. I asked a friend in Mexico City why I saw no electric cars here: simple, he replied, no charging points. He added that the new Tren Maya (see below) will run on diesel engines, not electric, and that construction has destroyed large swathes of virgin forest. One loyalist whom I asked about the apparent lack of interest in renewable energy assured me that I was mistaken and mentioned five areas that are the focus of renewables, such a geothermal. I was not convinced of his argument: after all, AMLO has prevented renewable energy companies from entering the electricity market in order to protect the Comisión Federal de la Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission) from competition. In essence, a regime for which petroleum is the very expression of Mexican independence does not really seem to think the country needs anything else.
In some respects, AMLO’s attitude to the private sector bears comparison with that of Echeverría, who had particularly frosty relations with big business, most notably with the wealthy industrialists of Monterrey in northern Mexico. While some of Echeverría’s hostility was as much rhetorical as practical, AMLO is instinctively distrustful of the business sector. Soon after he came into office, he cancelled the construction of a new, half-finished, international airport, and incurred a compensation bill of some US$93 billion, perhaps more. The former airport is now to become an ecological park, and a new airport, converted from a Mexican air force base by the army, has been opened to supplement the current airport in Mexico City.
This brings us to the role of the army in AMLO’s Mexico. An important element of AMLO’s appeal in 2018 was his promise to tackle the violence of organized crime. His policy was “abrazos no balazos”: embrace the criminals rather than shoot them. His argument was that, if poor young Mexicans were given alternatives to organized crime, they would prefer a life of honest labour. He also disbanded the Federal Police and merged them with elements of the military to form the National Guard, which patrols the streets and is supposed to tackle organized crime. More recently, he has brought all police forces under the control of the Ministry of National Defence and ordered the army to secure the streets of the nation. He recently divided the three main opposition parties by proposing a law that authorized the army to provide internal security for the next six years. AMLO’s opponents argue that this is unconstitutional, but the President shows no interest in constitutional or other provisions that might constrain him.
The results of the militarization of policing and the direct involvement of an army not trained to police a civilian population are not encouraging. Violent crime has not decreased. Rather, according to published statistics it has increased. A friend from a small town a short drive out of Mexico City told me that, while there is no violent crime where he lives, it is common knowledge that local businesses pay extorsion levies to criminals, many of whom are known to live from such rackets. When we visited the dog hotel in the Pitillal district of Puerto Vallarta where Chris had lodged his dog Winston while we were in Bucerías (the apartment owner does not permit pets), I spotted a sign on a beer shop across the street. It read: “Vigilant neighbours united against crime. If we capture a thief, we will beat the s**t out of him.” The British Foreign Office writes the following concerning the state of Guerrero where I travelled as a young student (my emphasis):
The interior of the state is dangerous. State security forces have scant presence. Control is often in the hands of organised crime groups and local ‘self-defence’ organisations. Foreigners’ presence in rural Guerrero is likely to be regarded with high levels of suspicion by omnipresent organised crime and local self-defence groups, and the possibility of misunderstanding and ensuing violence is high.
An archaeologist friend who has worked in Guerrero for decades, told me that he only dares go there now with a local friend (even to the state capital), since any outsider is viewed with suspicion and is therefore vulnerable. Guerrero is an extreme case, but it is not unique. The British government’s verdict on Michoacán is similar: “some areas are totally lacking state control and do not have a security presence.” A friend in Michoacán tells me that the west of the state and adjoining areas of Jalisco are now known as “the corridor of death”.
No president could solve the problems of Guerrero, or of other parts of the country plagued with crime, in a six-year term. Moreover, Mexico’s government is not solely responsible for the increase in organized crime. The consumption of drugs in the USA has funded the growth of crime south of the border, and lax American gun laws have facilitated the illegal export to Mexico of powerful weapons that are illegal under Mexican law. The American love affair with automatic weapons is responsible for the deaths of many innocent Americans, but equally for the murder of America’s neighbours. However, there is little evidence to suggest that AMLO’s handing of a security role to the army, combined with “abrazos no balazos”, is improving matters.
AMLO has been remarkably indifferent to one of the most appalling aspects of violent crime: violence against women, and in particular the murder of women. Mexico has even coined the Spanish-language term now widely used for this form of gender violence (feminicidio). Violence against women is widespread, rarely investigated by the police, and in most cases a crime that men can commit with impunity. Moreover, this particular violent crime cannot be attributed to the existence of powerfully armed organized crime groups. This is predominantly a crime committed by individual men for individual motives. AMLO has dismissed demonstrations against feminicidio as politically motivated by his “neoliberal” enemies. Since the government tends to pay attention to issues only if AMLO decrees them worthy of government action, gender violence is more or less ignored. Such violence existed before AMLO took office, and occurred in the Mexico I knew 50 years ago, but the scale of the crime has increased, facilitated by official inaction.
Moreover, the role of the army has been expanded beyond policing. The military is being turned into a business enterprise that will manage projects close to the President’s heart. The army has built the new airport (Aeropuerto Internacional Felipe Ángeles), which a friend reports to be very well built and organized but with very few people (because few airlines want to fly passengers to an airport a long way north of Mexico City with poor transport links to the capital). The army is also building the Tren Maya, a railway that will start at Palenque, one of the great ancient Mayan cities, passing through the president’s home state, Tabasco, and then running through cities and archaeological sites in Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo. Another train line is planned to cross the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, linking the ports of Salina Cruz on the Pacific Coast and Coatzacoalcos on the Gulf. AMLO’s stated goal here is to replace the Panama Canal as the preferred transhipment route between China and Europe.
This reliance on the army is a huge departure from the norm. There was a time when historians argued that post-revolutionary Mexico had found a novel formula to keep the military out of politics, unlike many other Latin American countries that suffered brutal military dictatorships. In fact, the army was more important for political control of the country than historians thought: the 1968 suppression of protests and in the 1970s the dirty war in Guerrero and elsewhere proved that. But formally to hand the army responsibility for civil law and order and for large business enterprises is another matter. What will happen if the generals rather like their lucrative roles and dislike giving them up?
A recent article in El Universal (11 September 2022) is not encouraging. Since the formation of the National Guard in March 2019 There have been 8,656 complaints of extorsion, abuse of authority, assaults and other matters. The army itself examines all complaints against it. The journalists were able to examine the records of 1,303 complaints. All were dismissed by army investigators for lack of sufficient proof. This amounts to impunity on a large scale: other incidents did not result in complaints since to complain is a waste of time. However, AMLO seems to be convinced of the absolute honesty of the military. On 14 February 2022 he said to National Guard officers in Michoacán: “The most important thing is honesty, integrity, not to be tempted by corruption, that members of the National Guard can say “I am loyal to Mexico and am incorruptible and I would rather leave my children in poverty than in dishonour.” The history of Mexico’s military makes it most unlikely that it consists entirely of such paragons of virtue.
One wonders, moreover, whether army commanders might quite like their access to large contracts, and whether it might be unwise or even dangerous to curtail the army’s activities in future, especially if commanders find them pleasantly lucrative. This thought is especially troubling in the light of AMLO’s undermining of the institutions that, since 2000, have helped to ensure a degree of democracy that might not be perfect, but which is at least an improvement on the PRI’s controlled political system. AMLO has certainly attempted to influence the judiciary and to limit the ability of the Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE: the National Electoral Commission). A friend we met for lunch in Mexico City arrived at our table excited because she had passed a table at which Lorenzo Córdova Vianello was eating and had greeted him. Our friend’s husband added that they consider Córdova a hero for standing up to AMLO, who they consider a fascist.
AMLO’s hostility to journalists is well-known. I learned while I was in Mexico City that an international paper which publishes an edition in Mexico, and which had been critical of AMLO, was told that its advertising would suffer if it continued to question his policies. The owners complied. This brought to mind the case of Excélsior, the most independent paper in the 1970s. In this respect, AMLO is a return to an authoritarian past, not a harbinger of a bright new future, and his arm twisting is more direct than the more indirect methods of Echeverría.
Two of AMLO’s great themes, as already mentioned, are “abrazos y no balazos” and corruption. In AMLO’s world, opportunity for the young will incentivize them to take on honest work rather than involving themselves in organized crime. To his credit he has instituted some social programmes for the young to offer greater opportunity, although a determined lack of transparency prevents independent evaluation of the results. He also increased state pensions and required employers to enrol domestic servants in the social security system to give them access to healthcare. However, he has not increased the budget of the public health system correspondingly. AMLO insists that corruption will be defeated by his “republican austerity” and the unimpeachable honesty of his colleagues in MORENA. Corruption, he argues, was the sin of previous regimes, not of his. This is seductive rhetoric if one ignores facts and Mexican history. Only the credulous can really believe it. But as more than one friend has commented, nobody in his circle dares contradict AMLO. What he says must be done and must be right.
AMLO is not responsible for Mexico’s many problems and it would be unreasonable to expect any government to fundamentally transform a country as large and complex as Mexico in a single six-year term (Mexican presidents serve only one term), but one would hope to discern in AMLO’s policies firm directions that point towards sustained and verifiable improvements during the terms of subsequent presidents. While some positive steps have been taken, real progress remains in the realm of rhetoric rather than policy or accomplishment. To some extent, this reflects the rather depressing politics of our times: think of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin. Like them AMLO deploys rhetoric that inspires his followers, however much his detractors may despise him, like them he subverts norms and restraints on his powers. However, AMLO draws on decades old Mexican political practices and thinking that a PRI president would have recognized. However, while superficially a PRI president was, for six years, a king of all he surveyed, in practice the PRI coalition of interests (unions, peasant organizations, employers’ confederations) applied some brakes to a president’s power. AMLO, in contrast, won power with a sweeping majority and recognizes few if any constraints. He can do much good and can also do immense harm.
AMLO has undermined, but not yet destroyed, Mexico’s democratic processes that emerged from the defeat of the PRI. He has damaged constitutional and judicial checks on power. He has enormously expanded the role of the military in Mexican life, while doing little to address violent crime. Since he takes all the key decisions, it seems certain that he will anoint his chosen successor, and since the opposition is weak and divided his chosen one will probably become president in 2024. If AMLO is then the power behind the throne, presumably the next government will pursue similar policies. Despite the increased role of the military, I think it is most unlikely that the army would seek to seize power directly, but the generals will probably wield greater influence. If MORENA remains dominant and further undermines institutions intended to ensure a degree of democracy, Mexico may return to something resembling the managed democracy of the PRI, but perhaps more authoritarian and unipersonal. While previous militarized attempts to combat criminal cartels have failed, AMLO’s policy of non-intervention, or at least minimal intervention, does not seem to be a viable solution either. In the absence of a serious attempt to reduce organized crime and its accompanying violence it is likely that those parts of the national territory that are no longer controlled by the government will continue to be so, and control of additional regions may also be lost. And if I were able to come back in another 50 years, I expect that I would still find children begging at traffic lights and selling tourist souvenirs on the beaches.
But one thing has not changed, the hospitable and courteous character of the great majority of Mexicans, a certain formality and insistence on polite forms of address, which Spaniards tell me they find too servile, but which I find charming (especially since being older I tend to be the one to whom formal politesse is directed). Working-class Mexicans are hardworking and resourceful people. If they are poorly paid and less productive in comparison with their northern neighbours it is worth remembering that many workers north of the border are also Mexican. The difference is that, with some exceptions, businesses in the US are more capitalized and automated than those in Mexico. Many customers of Mexico’s largest mobile phone company, Telmex, owned by Carlos Slim Helú, Mexico’s richest man and one of the wealthiest in the world, top up their phones and resolve customer service problems in retail outlines or in one of Telmex’s many offices. In other words, it is economic for Mr Slim to employ low paid Mexican staff rather than to invest in greater automation as his counterparts in North America and Europe have done. A meagre share of the changes of the last 50 years has percolated down to the lives of many Mexicans. By and large they continue to live in a society in which the rich and powerful bend the law and politics to their benefit.
The ordinary Mexican is still obliged to fall back on hard work, family, and community resources. For a long time, one strategy has been to cross the border seeking work and a better life in the USA, but undocumented Mexicans live in constant fear of some minor misconduct bringing them to the attention of the authorities. Unwittingly exceeding the speed limit, carelessly jumping a red light, or annoying a co-worker who informs the authorities of your irregular immigration status can end in deportation and separation from your family. One person told us that she had lived in Sacramento for many years, having three children there, who were all therefore American citizens. She was deported, initially for a five-year term, later doubled by Mr Trump to ten, leaving her children with their father. She works and saves all year to pay half her children’s air fares for a longed-for annual visit (their father pays the other half). However, in 2021 two bouts of Covid severely reduced her income so the children have not visited her for more than a year. A man who drove us into Puerto Vallarta told us that he had crossed the border aged 15 initially to work in agriculture in California until a friend invited him to work in Tennessee in road and bridge construction. His children too were born American citizens and he too decided to leave them in America for a better life. His eldest son is now a welder in a car factory. The children speak their father’s tongue as their second language: the welder son learned to write it by copying the Bible in Spanish. A similar tale, aggravated by the pandemic, was that of a woman who worked in agriculture in northern California. When she returned to Mexico leaving her children in the USA, she trained to be a chef of Italian cuisine in a restaurant in Puerto Vallarta. The pandemic closed the restaurant and when it reopened her employers cut her salary: she decided that she would be better off driving tourists and fellow Mexicans around the towns of the Bahía de Banderas. Her children too live in the USA.
The Americans who voted for Mr Trump because he maliciously denounced Mexican immigrants as criminals and promised to keep them out of the USA (a promise as empty as AMLO’s “abrazos no balazos”) are happy to drive on roads and bridges built by Mexican labour or to eat potatoes graded and cleaned of stones by hand in northern California by a Mexican mother. However, at the same time they want those same people sent home and certainly kept well away from Americans who consume the fruits of Mexican hard work, Americans who are no more law abiding (perhaps sometimes less so) than the immigrants they despise.
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