The six-year term that concludes in Mexico has been peculiar like few others. The omnipresence of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has filled his mandate with symbols, with phrases, with trips, with harsh and instructive speeches “for the young”, with phobias and philias that, a few months after handing over the presidential sash, They continue to heat up the atmosphere among those who adore them, amlovers, and those who hate him. After an exchange of governments of the PRI and the PAN, the historical Mexican parties that were once enemies and today allies by necessity, the arrival of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) founded by the president was seen as the great novelty on the political scene. He was received with an incontestable success of votes and his popularity has not fallen throughout the six-year term. López Obrador, who has never abandoned the profile of a candidate, fills the space without leaving a corner for indifference.
The Mornings
One thing is undoubted: the Mexican president is in good physical condition. Despite his delicate coronary health, López Obrador has been on his feet day after day in the National Palace, enduring more than two hours in front of journalists (to whom he has not given interviews), in a room that requires wearing a coat in winter, he He put it on when the cold got worse. Las Mañaneras, as these appearances are called, has been the greatest symbol of this mandate; There has not been a day that his words and his photo did not occupy the best spaces in the press from early on. He has set the agenda. This propaganda and information space has infiltrated every home and has focused the message, often repeated at times. Everyone knows the president’s tastes, even in music, with which he sometimes delighted, in literature, his favorite characters and his “adversaries, not enemies,” whom he has crushed at will.
If a count were made by words, some of these would be in first place among those pronounced: neoliberal, Calderón, Juárez, Madero, Cárdenas, corruption or people. But he also put adjectives like fifí in everyone’s mouths, to insult the gentrifiers, or promoted expressions like “I get tired of the goose.” Las Mañaneras have had bitter, tragic moments, like when journalists conveyed their fear of losing their lives and the omen came true, and also tragicomic ones. And purely comics, of all genres. Populism takes shape every morning. And on weekends he traveled through all the States of the Republic, the traveling president has never stopped being one.
The sermons
The president has tried to be a moral figure. In a country that is eminently secular as well as religious, López Obrador has skipped inviolable precepts, such as showing his scapulars and praising the Virgin of Guadalupe. The figure of Jesus Christ as the leader of the poor has been brought up on countless occasions, also in Christmas speeches. The Obradorist speeches seemed more like sermons some days. Morality and values. He ordered the printing of the Moral Primer by the writer Alfonso Reyes, which dates back to 1944, to convince Mexicans, he said, that the country would not move forward without behavior worthy of catechism. That was the way to end corruption and violence. Loving each other, he said. The people of Mexico are rich in values, those of the family, those of good people, inherited from a pre-Hispanic past, I was saying. The president’s morality has given name to his own ideology, Mexican humanism, in which he fits before any other of his successors, Claudia Sheinbaum, for example. Humanism: “for the good of all, the poor first.” That has not only been a phrase shouted a thousand times, it has also been the great slogan of his campaign, which successfully summarized his political vision and made him president.
Enemies to go-go
But the Morenista leader has not been just a lamb in Jesus’ flock. His attacks on his opponents have taken up a good part of the speech. In the Judiciary they are “corrupt, organized white-collar criminals”; the intellectuals, “pimps”; journalists, “paid with money”; the middle class, “gentrifiers who have forgotten the people”; the feminists, the arm “of the right”; environmentalists, “false and blackmailers.” The National Autonomous University of Mexico, his home, “neoliberal.” The students of Ayotzinapa, “manipulated.” There is something for everyone. There are many bridges that the president has blown up in this six-year term without his popularity having suffered, but there is still no exact calculation of how much this attitude could cost his successor in votes. The scientific and academic world, the activists, the searching mothers, who were previously the pillars of his promises, have open wounds.
Social politics and violence
The social measures undertaken in this six-year term are the president’s trademark. Another of his symbols: school scholarships for the disabled, pensions for older adults who receive sitting in street tents with Mañanera on television. Minimum wages and the elimination of subcontracting (the outsourcing), as well as the labor reform, have been hallmarks of the president. All of this is part of his strategy summarized in one sentence: there cannot be a rich government with poor people. The conditions of poverty have moderated without experiencing an outstanding change, but they have tied ties between the population and the president that have sometimes forced him to get out of the car to greet a feverish crowd.
Another phrase has been much more controversial and has brought him more headaches: “Hugs, not bullets,” which condenses his strategy against organized crime, a failed strategy: crime is unleashed and leaves a balance of more than 30,000 deaths per year. anus. The great negative symbol of this six-year term has been violence. And of that, as of corruption or so many other things, López Obrador has accused the neoliberal periods that preceded him. The great mantra, neoliberalism.
May Spain ask for forgiveness
No sooner had the six-year term begun than the president emerged with one of his great symbols in foreign policy: that Spain, the Monarchy, in short, apologize for the abuses and excesses committed in the conquest of Mexico and the viceregal era. He himself has done it, on behalf of the Mexican governments, for the cruel sufferings to which certain indigenous peoples were subjected. The left hand that López Obrador has maintained with his great trading partner, the United States, whether Trump and his anti-migrant wall govern or Joe Biden, more restrained with Mexico, has not had a reflection with Spain, “brother peoples.” Although care has been taken to distinguish between the Spanish and their rulers with the King as head of state, the diplomatic dust was long and the tensions were high, until relations were “paused.”
The political move, like all those undertaken by Obrador, is not innocent: on the left there are many who resent the old Spanish yoke, against which they create their own pre-Hispanic identity, while the right still insists on describing Spain as “motherland” without ambiguity. Again, polarization. The president, who has practically not gone abroad except on rare occasions (the United States, Cuba, Chile, Colombia and a trip to Central America), has maintained a Latin American agenda with an abrupt end, the loss of diplomatic relations with Peru due to assault on the Mexican embassy in Lima. “Respect for the rights of others is peace,” another of the great adages, this one taken from Benito Juárez, has been a maxim of the president’s international policy, which he has not always respected.
and a coda
The figure of López Obrador, it was said, does not leave anyone indifferent. Although the six-year term has brought him an irrepressible hatred between his natural adversaries and those who have been adding to that animosity, few deny that he earned his presidency through effort, work and perseverance. Nor is his political personality in doubt, a fine strategist who equally hits the opposition as he leads his own with a firm hand. His words often require a second interpretation that he seeks in what he intends rather than in what he says. He doesn’t do a stitch without a thread, it is often said when he expresses his opinions. These elections, which will conclude with his mandate, have been viewed as a risky plebiscite against the great popular, or populist, leader, and that can be expensive. Some even maintain that he was the one who managed to divert the trajectory of the current opposition candidate, She led them. Whether or not it is true, this president will have two versions, the real one and the legendary one.
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