A new president and a grim legacy for Mexico
Enrique Krauze
MEXICO CITY – Mexico has just inaugurated a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman to hold the post. But her term begins under the long shadow of her predecessor, and patron, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose influence is unlikely to wane anytime soon.
In June 2006, a month before Mexico’s national elections that year, I wrote an essay on the candidacy of López Obrador (or AMLO as he is commonly known) titled “El mesías tropical” (“The Tropical Messiah”). It was, above all, a psychological portrait of a man with a genuine calling to serve that was offset by an insatiable appetite for power.
I highlighted AMLO’s intemperate character, his complete disinterest in the outside world, his ignorance of economics and business, his contempt for the law, his ideological dogmatism, and his political authoritarianism. He had no ties with Mexico’s liberal democratic tradition, nor with its socialist one. He was a tyrannical, self-obsessed figure.
I ended the essay by pointing out the dangerous convergence of two of AMLO’s obsessions: equating himself (quite seriously) with Jesus Christ and flaunting the unbridled “tropical” nature of power in Tabasco, his home state in southeast Mexico. His eventual triumph seemed imminent to me, and so I warned: “Mexico will lose irretrievable years.”
AMLO lost that election and the next one, in 2012. But he won in 2018 and governed for six years, until September 30, leaving a destructive legacy – although many in Mexico might not see it that........
© The Korea Times
visit website