Those of us who have observed the descent of Mexico under the regime of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) have long been accustomed to expecting the worst. But the governmental recklessness on display in this month of September, in the 30-day overlap between the outgoing AMLO presidency and the incoming MORENA legislative supermajority elected on June 2, marks something remarkable and grim: the end of Mexico’s post-1994 flourishing as a respected democracy and an ever-growing economic power.
The proximate cause of the diagnosis is well known. AMLO’s slow-rolling revenge campaign against every institution that ever told him “no” across his long career — from the media, to independent civil society, to the once-respected apparatus of Mexican election integrity, and beyond — has now landed on what may be his ultimate target. The independent Mexican judiciary, a co-equal branch of government, is after a contentious Sept. 10 vote in the national legislature, to be reduced to a plaything of electoral and party politics. The putative reform succeeded in the upper chamber by a single vote, thanks to corrupt deals with two “opposition” senators. The MORENA line is that this brings the law and judges closer to the people, but everyone understands the real purpose: to subordinate the judiciary to the ravenous appetite of MORENA’s party apparatus, and to subject the judiciary to the same regime of murder and fear that other Mexican elected officeholders face.
Mexico, already one of the most dangerous countries in the world for election candidates and journalists— thanks to the pervasive violence from both the state and cartels — now extends that violence to the final bastion of law and government hitherto insulated from it.
Alert observers of Latin America will note the parallels with the precipitous descent of Venezuela, another once prosperous and promising regional democracy now sunk into the abyss of socialist economics and leftist autocracy. Mexico is a long way from that end yet, but it is impossible to ignore the signs that it is on the Venezuelan path — especially after AMLO’s MORENA released its agenda for governance several weeks ago, explicitly praising that trajectory and promising to move Mexico steadily along it. Following the dismantling of the independent judiciary, MORENA’s ambitions include setting up Venezuelan-style “people’s councils,” emulating Bolivia’s division of the nation into “indigenous” communities, and aligning Mexico more closely with Russia and China, the latter intended to counterbalance U.S. influence.
It is a deranged agenda, and its victims will be entirely Mexicans — entrepreneurial, hardworking, and deserving of good governance as much as anyone — but MORENA, gripped by its own ideological fixations rooted in leftist rhetoric and Latin-American populist mythos, is hellbent upon it. Investors and well-wishers searching for a ray of hope have focused upon the ascent, on Oct. 1, of President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, who is generally regarded as a pragmatist in contrast to her messianic predecessor. However, the evidence for this is thin and largely rooted in wishful thinking rather than empiricism. Sheinbaum is wholly a political creation of AMLO, whose loyal deputy she has been for nearly three decades, and she is most likely the Dmitri Medvedev of Mexican politics, serving until the Vladimir Putin of that milieu can return in form as well as substance. She has been unreserved in her endorsement of AMLO’s radical restructuring of the Mexican state and society, including the judicial reform — and there is no evidence that she will depart from the announced MORENA agenda once in office.
Even once in office, there is doubt that Claudia Sheinbaum will exercise the full powers of the presidency. At the time of this writing, AMLO has announced that he is not moving out of the Palacio Nacional — the residence of Mexico’s Presidents — upon expiration of his term. Sheinbaum has acquiesced to her displacement, only noting that she expects to finally occupy the Presidential residence sometime in December.
All this portends a slowly accelerating disaster for Mexico and its long-suffering people. Having endured the horrors of a cartel war — perpetrated not least by a state often aligned with those cartels (including credible allegations of AMLO himself receiving payments from the Sinaloa Cartel) — they now face the chilling prospect that the Mexican economic model will now shudder to a halt. Since the inception of NAFTA (now USMCA) a generation ago, Mexico’s economic model has thrived by leveraging the unique combination of low labor costs and proximity to the massive U.S. market. Manufacturing and assembly within Mexico, especially in the nearshoring era, has depended on a basic rule of law and constancy in Mexican governance.
With that stability gone, so too is that economic model. States like my own Texas, or neighboring nations like Canada, will benefit in movement of operations elsewhere. The losers will be the Mexicans themselves, who enjoyed a single generation moving toward the community of developed democracies — and now slip toward a dark night of violence and autocracy at the hands of their regime, with no end in sight.