A New Hope For Mexico

August 1, 2018
"Confronted with Trump's orders to persecute migrants, we must join together to denounce his human rights violations": Mexico's president-elect delivers a few choice words for his counterpart north of the border.In this collection of campaign-trail speeches and articles, leftist politician López Obrador offers a program for--well, making Mexico great again, inasmuch as a long reign of neoliberalism has left it "one of the poorest countries on the continent." One of the effects is that Mexico's rural poor have had to look to the north for jobs, which in turn has occasioned the rise of nativist politics in the U.S. When candidate Trump thundered that Mexico wasn't "sending their best," the author gained a convenient foil, accusing Trump of ignorance and demagoguery. "Mexico does not 'send' anyone to the United States," he writes, adding that the Mexican and U.S. economies are so closely bound that protectionist policies will only harm American consumers, to say nothing of the elites who supported Trump. On a more purely domestic note, López Obrador holds that corruption is "Mexico's central problem" and pledges to uproot it. Moreover, he adds by way of a promise that he must now fulfill, by 2024--the end of his six-year term--a less corrupt Mexico will have posted a 6 percent growth rate, while "we will have created a new way of thinking, a revolution in conscience that will prevent avarice, corruption, and greed from prevailing over truth, morality, and fraternity." The high-flown rhetoric notwithstanding--and a cynic might observe that such fine words have been heard before from a governing class that the author calls "a gang of plunderers"--López Obrador gets down to cases with table-heavy pieces showing how former presidents soak the system with fat pensions and protections, how net migration flows have operated in the last 50 years, and the like.A book of promises and projections that, now that López Obrador has proved victorious, becomes a checklist for action.

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