The last Mexican president who had all the power Andrés Manuel López Obrador has today was Miguel de la Madrid in 1982. At that time, de la Madrid won the elections with 71% of the votes. The relative majority in the lower house with 69.3% of the vote and the Senate with 65% of the vote, equivalent to 298 representatives and 64 senators.
Let’s fast-forward to the 2018 elections with López Obrador, who won the elections with 53.19% of the votes and, of course, the majority in the lower house and the Senate.
López Obrador has been the president with the most political support since that distant 1982. The “Peje” as he is known in Mexico, gained the support of the political parties, businessmen, unions, and an important number of the population (although every day is less) and also the support and sympathy of the U.S. government and Donald Trump, who affectionately calls him “Juan Trump”… However, every day he goes from bad to worse.
In the months that he has been in office, he has shown over and over and over again that he cannot govern because he does not know how he does not have the knowledge. AMLO has shown that historically he had been an “exceptional candidate” and now a lousy president.
His arrogance has been enormous. Not once has he rectified along the way. He has canceled major infrastructure works, major sources of employment, being the Constellation beer plant in Mexicali the newest. AMLO has canceled health programs, medicines contracts which caused enormous shortages resulting in deaths.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador will never admit to being the culprit of the disaster that is coming upon us because he has no self-criticism, and the dangerous thing about it is that when pride, lack of self-criticism, lack of counterweights come together, it is only a matter of time before the arrival of that bad advisor and old acquaintance, to so many in Latin America called “authoritarianism”. Which is when a political regime is based on absolute submission to an authority, from which tyranny emanates. A form of government in which the ruler has total and absolute power.
Will AMLO resist the temptation of authoritarianism and tyranny, in the face of his inability to correct? Let us see what his actions have told us.
- In the purest Castro-Chavista style, a couple of weeks ago, he spoke of “coup d ‘état” against him and congratulated the Army for not letting itself be seduced by such. What coup d’etat? We all asked. As a “reward” to the armed forces, on Sunday, March 22, he reported that the Ministry of Finance will give additional resources to the Ministry of National Defense to control and operate ten hospitals. Similarly, he has offered the Army and Navy to commercially exploit the airport in Santa Lucia. With that, AMLO is opening the door to the armed forces to displace civil society and business people. Now the Mexican Army will be a financial, health, tourism, security, fuel, and transportation entrepreneur. Completely the same as Cuba and Venezuela have done. Excuse me, but it’s simply not credible. One of the Army’s harshest critics – and not seldom denigrated them – was always López Obrador.
- Lopez Obrador is falling, and with him, the country can be dragged into authoritarianism and tyranny. There have been many tests and alerts. The most recent was how MORENA legislators took advantage of the social isolation and “safe distance” and sat in the lower house alone with their allied parties to impose their agenda for re-election of legislators with zero votes against.
- Those who doubt that authoritarianism and tyranny are an intrinsic part of the National Renegation Movement -MORENA- and López Obrador, I remind you of the excessive and extremely public love of its members for figures such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Hugo Chávez. Like the Venezuelan dictator, AMLO’s cancellations “because I say so” include the new airport, 150 social programs of previous governments, the Popular Health Insurance and of course, how can we forget the fifteen constitutional reforms and a new Federal Criminal Code that annulled individual guarantees before the State? This laws propossed by AMLO’s legislators was not for criminals but for “rapacious businessmen”, “conservative” opponents, “fifí” journalists, or anyone who provoked the suspicion of the government including in it an element already considered unconstitutional since 2005 by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation… The hold of a suspect without a court order for an indefinite amount of time.
A project worthy of a dictatorship. Actions speak louder than words.
Not enough money
Remember the 300 billion pesos this administration received from the previous one? It was for use in emergencies, like the current one. Except that it was spent on:
-Scholarships for students
-Support for ninis (young people who don’t work nor study)
-Support for the elderly
-Pensions for people with disabilities
-Rural support
-Urban development, and housing, among others.
All these people who receive the money, have one thing in common… they all vote.
Add to the amounts spent, the money squandered in paying for the new airport not to be built -not counting the four and a half-billion dollars to foreigners holding long-term bonds that still have to be paid- the injection of money to Pemex, the Tren Maya, the refinery in Dos Bocas, Santa Lucia and now that they have canceled the construction of the brewery in Mexicali, a lawsuit against the government for a compensation of one and a half-billion dollars.
The math just doesn’t add up.
The coming dystopia
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong,” one of Murphy’s famous laws dictates. If the covid-19 surpasses the health services and the economy falls that minus 4 percent, as some analysts predict, there will be massive bankruptcies of small and medium companies which represent 80 percent of Mexico’s job generation. 800 thousand formal jobs will be lost plus the current one million 942 thousand people who are unemployed at this time. It will be a very high number of unemployed, people who will look for ways to feed their families “yes or yes” and that could lead to possible social upheavals in the Mexican republic.
It’s not about being fatalistic… it’s about not getting there, but like saint Augustine of Hippo said: “humanum errare est diabolicum est perseverare” To err is human, but it is diabolical to remain in error because of pride.
José E. Urioste Palomeque
For The Yucatan Times / Times Media Mexico
Marzo 26 de 2020
Mérida Yucatan, México
