Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, AMLO, is A Man for the Ages

Every so often in a generation an individual comes along who stands apart, a leader, an intellectual, a visionary, someone who reaches into the hearts, minds and souls of all who hear him or who know him; such a person is one who uniquely stands alone, unlike others such as MLK or Gandhi. Mexico’s New President is one such individual, and is an example to the World!

It is undeniable; Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador loves Mexico! More to the point, he loves the people and it is in the service of the people that he has dedicated his time and presidency!

Unlike Mexico’s previous 3 presidents, AMLO, as he is affectionately called, hates corruption and has devoted his time and considerable resources to ridding the country of it, the rotten fruits of a decades-long Neoliberal campaign to loot the country of its natural resources.

To counter the expansive web of compromised “journalists” in the corporate media, with their lies, distortions and open propaganda, referred to by some as “the Fifi media”, he holds a 7:00 AM televised press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City.

None of the previous 3 presidents did this, nor were they inclined to do so. AMLO’s authentic love for the people drives him and thus, he is rightly referred to as El Tigre de Mexico (The Tiger of Mexico). López Obrador is a fierce defender of the poor and underrepresented, of uncorrupted democracy, a concept that is an anathema to the corrupt NeoLiberal agendas, policies and “reforms” of the previous 3 presidents, Enrique Peña Nieto, Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox Quesada. He bristles when speaking of the injustices perpetrated against the poor and, correctly, puts the blame squarely at the feet of these previous 3 corrupt administrations.

He sees how the NeoLiberal Economic Model has failed in Mexico since it was instituted 36 years ago and how small groups enriched themselves on the backs of the Mexican taxpayer, defunding educational and health programs, among others. Being a student of history, he openly talks about the so-called “structural reforms”, dictated from overseas, how they created a de-facto parallel government where the “government became an instrument of corporations, to serve their interests and that of the elite and not of the citizens”.

Its effects can be seen and are rather acute in the indigenous center and southeast regions of the country. It is there you will often find AMLO, or in beautiful Veracruz on the weekends, instituting aspects of his new BieneStar (“Well Being”) initiative. With this initiative he is injecting government subsidies for farmers into the regional economy, introducing scholarships along with reforestation and job-creation programs. Recently, he announced a new fiber-optic program to bring the Internet to the remaining 75% of the country that didn’t have it, a problem exacerbated by the refusal of private corporations, both national and foreign, to invest in the rest of the country, rather than just in the cities.

During an interview he clearly states that the government was taken, that it was “kidnapped” and that the corruption permeated to the highest-levels of government. When he speaks with financial rating agencies, he clearly tells them in rating a country using their Neoliberal models, their projections will be inaccurate since they don’t include the variable of corruption. Three months ago, during one of his press conferences, he addresses the financial rating agencies, explaining that their projections are inaccurate when based on the NeoLiberal model, that they are missing the variable of corruption in their calculations; he continues that “where there is no corruption, there can be growth” and he accepts the challenge to prove that he is correct. And today, he made that prediction come true: the Mexican Peso was the strongest among all world currencies.

AMLO was born in 1953 and witnessed the upheaval and turmoil of the 1960s and 70s, both in the US and in his beloved Mexico. Turmoil in Mexico and the heady days and parallel events in the US helped form his vision for the country. It was a time in the US when LBJ passed the 1965 Civil Rights Act and when democracy was a palpable aspiration. Democracy put a stop to the US involvement in Vietnam, forced the resignation of Richard Nixon and saw the codification of civil and voting rights into law.

Through much of the 20th century, Mexico was a nation situated at an uneasy nexus between authoritarianism and democracy. In the 1970s, when AMLO was barely in his 20s, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI) dominated the country’s government. The recently produced and award-winning film “Roma” reconstructs the 1970s childhood of filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, taking an accurate snapshot of Mexico City during the time period centered on 1968 when AMLO was 15 years old. It highlights the suffering of the people as seen through the eyes of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio).

As it had done since its founding in 1929, the PRI used a combination of political patronage, repression and electoral fraud to maintain its hold on power. The film accurately portrays a Mexico at a moment when the tensions created by this system had nearly reached a boiling point.

Violence in the countryside had been a regular practice of the regime for years. One of the lasting legacies of the PRI was the “Dirty War” against insurgents in rural Mexico during this time. According to an official report leaked in 2006, Mexican soldiers carried out a host of atrocities during the Dirty War campaign, perpetrating massacres, rapes and the destruction of entire villages in order to destroy any opposition or evidence.

The legacy of PRI corruption persists to this day and was the party of the outgoing president Enrique Peña Nieto. Prior to Pena-Nieto, the previous 2 presidents, Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox Quesada were members of the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional — National Action Party), a party similar to the PRI in almost every aspect, both right-wing and authoritarian.

One event that AMLO often speaks of and one that had a profound impact on him, one that has been seared into his psyche and soul, happened during the June 10, 1971 celebration of Corpus Christi in Mexico City. Known as La Masacre de Corpus Christi or the Corpus Christi Massacre, a large group of protesting students were attacked by the Halcones, or “Falcons,” a band of young government-trained paramilitaries, armed with knives and bamboo sticks, killed dozens of the young student activists. This was a pivotal scene, a transitional one in Roma, brilliantly directed by Cuarón and played by Yalitza. In 2019, from a now-closed government agency whose only purpose was to spy on political opposition, secret files were made public showing that the orders to commit these atrocities and assassinations came directly from the president.

As a response to the deeply corrupted PRI and PAN and to signal a permanent change in direction for politics in Mexico, and having the power to do it, Lopez Obrador established the Moreno Party, an organization that has AMLO as the Head of State and one that enjoys a majority in the Mexican congress.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is a man for the ages, a man of uncommon nobility and valor; history will smile on him, at a minimum, as the man who saved Latin America or, at most, as the man who changed the world, setting an example for it by establishing a true and lasting democracy, a concept first envisioned by Democritus 2400 years ago. If anyone deserves the Nobel Peace Prize it is he.