Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:00]
A
Dan I'm Dan Kurtz Phelan, and this is the Foreign affairs interview.
- [00:06]
B
The central point of focus and of attention should be not only why she won, and there are a number of reasons, but the consequences of her victory.
- [00:20]
A
Earlier this month, Claudia Sheinbaum won a sweeping victory in Mexico's presidential election. Although a lot of the coverage framed the results as a win for women and progressive politics, the story is far more complicated. Mexico's democracy is in trouble, warns Denise Dresser, a political analyst in Mexico. For years, Dresser has watched Chaimbaum's party and its previous leader, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, govern through polarization and the erosion of democratic institutions, even as the country struggles with violence, corruption and persistent inequality. There is a chance Cheimbaum charts a different course. But if not, Dresser worries Mexico could face an autocratic future. Denise Dresser, thank you so much for joining me today and for the series of really trenchant pieces you've done on Mexico and the state of Mexican democracy for foreign affairs over the last several years.
- [01:18]
B
Thank you for the invitation.
- [01:20]
A
We are having this conversation just over a week after Mexico's presidential election. Claudia Scheinbaum was expected to win, given that she is the successor to the quite popular incumbent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as amlo, and she is in his party, Morena. But I think most observers seem to be surprised by just how commandingly she won with more than 30 point lead over her next strongest challenger. Her party won a super majority in the lower house of Congress and nearly did in the Senate. So it really is quite a staggering victory. In as you watch the campaign and the results of the election, what to your mind accounts for just the extent of that victory that she won?
- [02:01]
B
Well, first of all, I was not shocked by her victory. Serious analysts understood that it was very hard for the opposition to win in an environment where the playing field was no longer level, where the opposition carried the stigma of past governance and was not viewed as a truly competitive, attractive alternative. I was shocked by the magnitude of her victory. It was a landslide that we have not witnessed since Mexico transitioned to electoral democracy in the year 2000. She won with 35 million votes, over 30% above the opposition coalition. So this gives her a mandate and it gives her a level of power that even Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, her predecessor, did not have. And I think that much of the American media, its take has been wrong because so much of the coverage has centered on the fact that she's a woman, the fact that she's Jewish, the central of point of focus and of attention should be not only why she won, and there are a number of reasons, but the consequences of her victory. Why she won, I think is a combination of several factors, which is the governments of the past, the divided and discredited opposition that never did a mea culpa and never assumed the mistakes that the pastor offered to correct them. But I think the reasons behind her victory are more complex. One has to do with a very popular president. I always argued over the past six years that the so called fourth transformation wasn't just a government. It was also a narrative, a very seductive narrative, A narrative that is popular throughout the world and that accompanies many examples of backsliding and in other places. Hungary, Poland, until recently, India, El Salvador, Nicaragua is the most extreme cases. But it's the narrative of the people versus the elites, the people versus the bested interests, the people versus the oligarchy, the people versus the traditional establishment parties, the people against liberal democracy that never did anything for them. And one of the changes that we did see under Lopez Obrador's government was his government enacted a series of social programs that are based largely on cash disbursements, pension programs for the elderly, scholarships for the young, and a series of supportive programs for people in the rural countryside. And what was noticeable about these programs is the cash aspect of them, which is somewhat contradictory insofar as the narrative of Lopez Obrador being a leftist, because this is another thing that I think most mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere got wrong. I don't believe that Lopez Obrador is a leftist. In many ways, his program has been an extension or a strengthening of neoliberal approaches to social policy. And cash transfers are the most clear example of this. Cash transfers are something that, for example, the Republican Party would dream of having while dismantling the social safety nets of the state, which is basically what Lopez Obrador did. And for many of Mexico's poor, and we're talking about what has been a permanent subclass of over 50 million million people suddenly becoming important in the narrative, suddenly feeling represented by a president who talked to them, who looked like them, who ate like them, who gave them dignity, and who constructed identity politics in Mexico in a way that we'd never seen them in the past, plus cash disbursements that filled up a void that a very inefficient state had not failed in the past. If institutions never worked for you under democracy, and suddenly you got a pension for your elderly parent, and that pension had distributive effects throughout the whole family, then, of course, why not vote for the party that for the first time seemed to be caring about you and paying attention to, to you?
- [06:51]
A
So there's a ton to pick up on on that, but it's worth kind of lingering on the historical context a little bit. When one party rule ended In Mexico in 2000, it was seen as this incredible step forward. But as you've noted in a number of the pieces you've written for Foreign affairs and in your work even preceding that, that democratic transition didn't exactly turn out to be as successful as people would have hoped when the pre was first voted out in 2000. So as you look back at that transition, what exactly went wrong? What did the political system fail to do that helped pave the way for Lopez obrador's election in 2018?
- [07:30]
B
The central issue that it didn't address and that paved the way for Lopez Obrador was not taking on inequality, not taking on concentration of wealth, having minimalist social programs, and assuming that Mexico was going to have a permanent subclass until it started to grow quickly, something that never happened in the years of the transition. Average growth was between 1.5 and 2% a year. And so you had a pie that wasn't growing very quickly, and it was very badly distributed. And this is something that Lopez Obrador picked up on, and it's an argument that he's been making over the years. But I'd say the tipping point that led the government of the transition to be voted out in 2018 came in the presidency of Enrique Pena Nieto 2012-2018, that was plagued by scandals of corruption, massive corruption. It was plagued by the killing of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa, just the persistence of crony capitalism. There was a massive punishment vote against the pri, and Lopez Obrador swept into office. And one of the things he did, and I think that explains also why Claudia won, is he shifted the center of access of Mexican politics towards the left. The cultural victory of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was to shift public debate in favor of issues like inequality, poverty, concentration of wealth, the privileges of the elite. And that, as I said, is a very seductive narrative now, and at a very true one. I think his diagnosis has always been correct. What has been appalling to witness as someone who voted for him, for example, as I did in 2018, is to see the dissonance between the correct diagnosis of Mexico's ills and then the absolutely incorrect policy positions taken. Because what he decided to do was to resurrect dominant party rule. But now with his party, I'm going to create a situation where once again, my party kind of competes but never loses and the opposition kind of competes but never wins. So early on, he started to change the rules of the game. This is something we saw with Orban in Hungary. It's something we've seen with Netanyahu in Israel. And that's why my argument now for several years is you need to incorporate Mexico into the countries that are facing a process of democratic backsliding. Because what Lopez Obrador has been doing is very similar to what we've seen seen in other latitudes where you have leaders that government by polarizing the electorate.
- [10:40]
A
So you noted that his promises to make progress against inequality and corruption, to kind of scourges of those decades after the transition in 2000 in Mexico were so central to Lopez Obrador's initial campaign and to the messaging during his presidency. Did he make progress on either one of those? Does he have anything to show for that focus as you look at his six years in power? As we head into the next transition,
- [11:07]
B
we did see some concrete advances in a very specific area that have to do with poverty by income. Five million people were lifted out of poverty through social transfers, cash transfers, also the rise of the minimum wage, which was a significant achievement of his administration. Yet at the same time, while you could applaud him for that, he cut spending in health and in education, tried to centralize the health system in a way that created a massive, massive lack of supply of medicines throughout the country. And he paradoxically created a situation where people have more income, but because of the essential collapse of the health system, in the past, you had 20 million people without basic access to health care. Now you have 50 million in total. Because he did away with a series of programs like the the Seguro Popular Popular that provided health care to people who are not in the formal economy. So the poor by income who were lifted to another strata now have to pay for private health care. And extreme poverty actually grew, which underscores the clientele's nature of some of the social programs, because if they had been truly universal, you would have seen many of the extreme poor lifted from that. But the extreme poor live in rural areas where it's very hard to give them cash disbursements. And on the other hand, while you saw this reduction in poverty by income, you also saw a rise in concentration of wealth. This has been six years in which Mexican oligarchs have been jumping for Joy because instead of taking one of the sources of inequality head on, and I'd say the source of that historically has been crony capitalism and corruption. Lopez Obrador allowed crony capitalism to continue, but with his cronies or with new cronies that he incorporated into his close circle. For example, the fortune of Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico. Along with Herman Larrea, his Fortune grew by 70% in the last four years. He was the beneficiary of 2,500 contracts given by direct adjudication. In other words, non competitive bids. And the fact that Lopez Obrador does not believe in regulation, which runs contrary to what a leftist government would have done, a leftist government with his kind of support six years ago would have started by taxing the rich, would have started with a fiscal reform that took on the concentration of wealth, would have pushed for robust regulation. But instead what he's done is to weaken any form of regulation that has benefited the cronies. And now he's pushing for plan C that entails the elimination of all forms of regulation so that we go back to a system where the cronies and the oligarchs have to go to the national palace and cut out a personal deal for their sectors. And another thing I'd like to point out, and he received no punishment vote for this. Nor did Claudia. Was what happened to Mexico during the pandemic? Mexico is officially listed in most scientific publications of prestige, including the Lancet, as one of the countries that worst handled the pandemic because Lopez Obrador did not believe that it was serious, compared it to influenza. Kept coming out in the morning press conference and minimizing what was happening and saying, embrace each other, believe in Jesus, believe in the power of the family. He did not implement a national mask mandate. He never used a mask. Mexico lagged behind in terms of access to vaccines and never did contact tracing, never did any kind of testing for foreigners who flew into Mexico because it was the one place that wasn't doing testing. So 800,000 people died, over 300,000 excess mortality deaths. But there was no punishment folk for this because Lopez Obrador is a master of narrative and he managed to convince Mexico's population that this was a global phenomenon. There's nothing they could have done better. Claudia, during the debates, the presidential debates came out and said that Mexico City had fared very well when it was actually the city that had the largest percentage of deaths vis a vis population. I frequently say that in a normal democracy, Claudia Schambaum wouldn't even be able to run for mayor because she distributed 280,000 kits with ivermectin as part of her policy to combat Covid. And as you know, Ivermectin is not a substance that was ever approved to cure Covid. So one of the things that the US Media has also underscored is that Claudia will be different to Lopez Obrador because she is a scientist. She has a PhD in environmental engineering, and I have always questioned that take on Claudia Scheinbaum because of the way she handled the pandemic.
- [17:15]
A
We'll be back after a short break.
- [17:20]
C
Roman and Littlefield recently published Elections in Latin America Campaigns, Voters and Institutions by Kevin Pallister. Through a wide ranging synthesis of scholarly literature and sources, Pallister provides an accessible and analytical overview of elections throughout Latin America, including formal electoral institutions, informal practices, and the behavior of voters and candidates. From the legal rules of the game to the final counting of the votes, this book provides an even handed discussion of election complexities such as electoral integrity, gender quotas, the role of social media, corruption in campaign finance, and how elections can be instruments of both democracy and autocracy. Purchase this book and many others@roman.com that's r o w m a n.com or from your favorite online bookseller.
- [18:18]
A
And now back to my conversation with Denise Dresser. One of the other major failings of the post transition governments has of course been the security situation, which has gotten progressively worse over the decades. And the kind of death toll and extent of cartel control of not just the drug trade but also other industries at this point has only grown over time. How did that change? How did that landscape change under Lopez Obrador? And is there anything in Shane Bomb's record or rhetoric that suggests she will take a different approach than Lopez Obrador
- [18:53]
B
has in terms of insecurity? One of the issues in which the governments of the transition also failed was dealing with rising levels of homicide, of infiltration of governments by organized crime, the growing presence of drug cartels in major states, and the alarming rise in the rate of homicides. Femicides and the governments of the transition were too busy worrying about changing the electoral rules of the game and having access for the first time to distribution of the spoils. And the only effort that we saw on the part of one of the governments of the transition was Felipe Calderon 2006-2012 and he made a very bad policy choice which was to try and use the military to combat growing insecurity. The Mexican military historically has been a very Small force. It was always placed under civilian rule. Mexico did not have a military of the sort that you saw in Argentina and Brazil and Chile and Uruguay and Paraguay. It was small, it never had economic resources, it never had power. It was used basically to carry out vaccination campaigns or when there were floods, national emergencies. And yet, because Mexico for much of its history has not had a functional, well funded, professional police force, Calderon decided to resort to the Mexican military. So he took them out of the barracks, started operating these joint efforts between the federal police and the military to take on cartels in Chihuahua and Baja California and Michoacan. And then what happened is that his successors, including Pena Nieto, tried to expand the role of the military, realizing that the problem was growing and they didn't have any other instruments to combat it with. And Esmanuel Lopez Sobrador, when he was a candidate in 2018, one of his campaign promises was, I'm going to return the military to the barracks. Militarization is dangerous, it's harmful, it's anti democratic. People like me voted for him on the basis of that campaign promise. Yet once in office, a month later, he changed his mind and and has governed co governed in tandem with the military, which is something unprecedented in Mexico's history. Today, the Mexican military controls over 200 activities that used to be in hands of civilians, such as the control of airspace, ports, immigration, many economic activities. They're the main builders in the country. And they operate in a context of absolute opacity because many of the activities that they are involved in have been reclassified as of national security, which means that they're not subjected to the national transparency Law and are not regulated by the Transparency Institute that Amlo anyway wants to do away with. And they have received that, we know, through the budget increasing, budget allocations. And they operate now as a kind of parallel, parallel government with their own interests, their own businesses. They now are operating and building hotels near the then Maya. They have their own airline, Mexicana de Aviacion, subsidized by the Mexican government. They control 18 airports, and they dedicate most of their time. One of the constitutional reforms that AMLO pushed forward in his initial years in office was the National Guard, whereby he reformed the Constitution so that the National Guard could operate in tandem with the military to take on violence, cartels, et cetera. In reality, the National Guard spends most of its time doing the dirty work of the United States government in terms of immigration. 92% of the activities of the National Guard are capturing, running after deporting, jailing immigrants because Mexico has become the de facto wall that tries to stop immigrants from crossing the border. In return for the Biden administration keeping silent on Mexico's democratic erosion, you referred
- [23:47]
A
to the primacy of migration in the US Mexico relationship, that in many ways, this has been the primary or even sole concern of the Biden administration, the Trump administration before that, as they've dealt with Lopez Obrador. How has that shaped the US Mexican relationship? And do you anticipate any change in that dynamic?
- [24:08]
B
Ever since Donald Trump became a candidate and was subsequently elected, the issue of immigration became central both to his candidacy and to the narrative that he used to polarize the electorate and to gain support for his candidacy and his presidency. It was the discourse of immigrants are dangerous, they're bad hombres, they're criminals, they are overrunning us, and we need to protect the country, make America great again, make America white again. And when Lopador was elected, he made a pact with Trump, a pact that entailed, I will try to control immigration as much as I can, I will put the National Guard at your service, I will stop and deport immigrants, and I will also take back the immigrants that you deport, which is something that Mexico had never done, which was de facto become a third safe country, which is where people are returned to while they process their asylum claims. And this has created a humanitarian crisis along the border and led to encampments of migrants that in the past were solely from Central America, but now come from Argentina, from Haiti, from Africa. You see encampments of Haitians in Mexico City, for example. The Mexican economy, with very slow growth, does not have the capacity to absorb this labor force or the capacity to care for them. Yet Mexico accepted this in return for the silence of Trump on democratic backsliding taking place in Mexico. Lopez Obrador even went to the extent of going to Washington when Trump was campaigning for re election, appearing in the Rose Garden next to Donald Trump, calling him the best president since Abraham Lincoln, and Trump, in return, praised him. We subsequently found out in interviews and books that have been written about Trump that he made fun of Mexico's Minister of Foreign affairs for caving in so quickly to Trump's demand that the National Guard in Mexico be used, used to detain migrants. Biden renewed that pact, not explicitly, but he's approached Lopez Obrador in the same way.
- [26:54]
A
If you were advising the US Government, if you were advising Washington on how to manage this dynamic, just given the political importance of the migration issue right now, is there a better way? Is there a better strategy diplomatically to approach this than the one that both Trump and Biden have adopted.
- [27:10]
B
The problem for Biden is that he's facing a very contested election in which immigration has become a central issue. Trump has made it the defining issue. So Biden has very little room to maneuver vis a vis Claudia Schimba. But I think that the message should be, okay, I'll keep silent until November, but if I win, and if you continue with this process, then there will be costs. And the costs will be implemented by my Department of Commerce, by my Department of Energy. The North American Free Trade Agreement, now known as the USMCA, is coming up for renegotiation in 2026. So it's not as if the US doesn't have instruments, cudgels, sticks and carrots that it could use vis a vis Claudia Schaimau. It does have them. The problem is that the US Is losing credibility as a government capable of using those instruments. And also we're facing a scenario where Trump could actually win. And if he did win, then Claudia would face a very difficult scenario in which Trump would try to extract even more concessions from the Mexican government than it has done up to now, also using free trade as an instrument to extract concessions. One of the things that Claudia and others have been arguing is this is a time of incredible opportunity for Mexico. Because of near shoring what's happening in the trade war between the United States and China, Mexico is poised to be the beneficiary of the changing terms of trade. The problem she faces is that if Trump wins, or even if Biden does, the US Is going to clamp down on the possibility of her interacting with China or at the same time, if she does not face some key issues that have nothing to do with democracy but are top of mind for Mexico now that have to do with the lack of water, climate change, and the lack of energy and electricity, Mexico is not going to be the great winner of near shoring and investment will go elsewhere. So I hope that she is thinking about this as she plans ahead. So the main question between now and October when she takes office is who's actually going to be governing Mexico and will he go off quietly into the dark night? He's been such a powerful force in terms of shaping the narrative, shaping how people feel about democracy. A recent Pew Research center poll on support for our democracy and authoritarianism came out and Mexico is among the middle income countries where support support for authoritarianism is at 71%. So Lopez Obrador's influence has Been not only in terms of winning his election, Claudia winning her election with his support, but also changing how Mexicans feel vis a vis authoritarianism and democracy. And that cultural effect, that effect in terms of our values as a country, our expectations as a country, our aspirations as a country, those changes, I think, constitute a major regression.
- [30:57]
A
You mentioned this complicated and interesting dynamic between the US and Mexico and China. How has Lopez Obrador managed these two important economic and political relationships for Mexico? And how do you expect Sheinbaum to manage that very, very tricky scenario?
- [31:15]
B
Well, as you know, China has been making major inroads in terms of investment all over Latin America. In the absence of the US's attention, it's filling a void. And China is investing heavily in Mexico. The Chinese car company BYD was thinking of setting up a factory in Mexico to export electric car cars to the United States. It's not clear whether or not that will happen. This will probably be subject to whatever pressures negotiations emerge as a result of the US election. In the meantime, AMLO's position towards the Chinese has been open arms, welcome because he's tried to position himself in terms of foreign policy as well as a counterweight to the American hegemony in Latin America. And he's also played the Russian card, I'd say ably and perniciously. The Russian Embassy in Mexico is now the largest it has outside of Washington. And the Russian Embassy in Mexico has become a main source of propaganda and disinformation and anti democratic messaging throughout the continent, Mexico included. Mexico never came out forcefully against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Lopez Obrador did not even call it an invasion. And Russia's military forces have marched in every military parade since. Lopez Obrador has been president and that in and of itself says a lot.
- [32:54]
A
Looking forward to how Shane Bomb's government might operate. She was of course, mayor of Mexico City, as you, as you've noted. Is there anything about her time as mayor that might indicate the ways in which she will govern differently than Lopez Ebordor did, even given the constraints that you've explained very, very well what might change about the nature of government given what you've seen about her time in office and other jobs?
- [33:19]
B
Well, she's temperamentally very different from him. She is not a charismatic leader. She does not have a populist, fiery, divisive rhetoric. She tried to emulate it during the campaign and even copied his accent from Tabasco, his native state, but it doesn't come easily to her. She's more of a technocrat. She constantly underscores that she makes policies on the basis of evidence of data. She created an agency for digital innovation in Mexico City. She promoted some small renewable energy projects. She was able to decrease the level of homicides, not by a lot but somewhat in Mexico City, but because she actually had a functional police force, she did not form part of the militarization of public security, that process that took place in many other states in Mexico. So what you could expect expect is perhaps someone who operates better in terms of designing and implementing policy, but not a substantial change in the policies themselves. So I think she might be a more technocratic version of authoritarian populism, but not devoid of the hegemonic impulses and the abuses of power that come along with having super majorities and little if no checks and balances.
- [34:57]
A
That is a good, if grim note to end on. Denise Dresser, thank you so much for joining me and for the series of pieces you've done for Foreign affairs around the election and also in the months and years before that.
- [35:08]
B
Thank you very much. I look forward to our collaboration and Mexico is in for some interesting and I'd say worrisome times.
- [35:24]
A
Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show@foreign affairs.com the Foreign affairs interview is produced by Kate Brannon, Julia Fleming dresser and Molly McEnany. Special thanks also to Grace Finlayson, Caitlin Joseph, Nora, Robert Revenaugh, Asher Ross, Gabrielle Sierra and Marcus Zacharia. Our theme music was written and performed by Robin Hilton. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every other Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.