MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico enters into Sunday elections deeply divided: friends and relatives no longer talk about politics for fear of worsening insurmountable divisions, while drug cartels divided the country into a patchwork of warring fiefdoms. The atmosphere is literally heating up, amid an unusual heat wave, drought, pollution and political violence.
It is unclear whether Mexico’s next president will be able to control the underlying violence and polarization.
Soledad Echagoyen, a Mexico City doctor who supports President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party, says she can no longer talk about politics with her colleagues.
“In order not to lose friendships, we decided not to talk about politics six years ago, because we were arguing and the attacks started to get personal,” said Dr.
Being critical of the current administration doesn’t seem to be any easier.
“There is a lot of hate,” said Luis Ávalos, 21, a student from Mexico City. He said that some of his friends accuse him of “betraying the country” by not supporting López Obrador.
Opposition presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez focused his ire on López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” policy of not confronting drug cartels.
She faces the former mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum, who is running for López Obrador’s Morena party. Sheinbaum, who is leading the dispute, promised to continue all of López Obrador’s policies.
López Obrador himself likes to portray every issue as a struggle between the forces of “good people” and dark conservative conspiracies, and has done much to fan the flames of division and anger.
“More than an election, this is a referendum to choose the type of country we want,” López Obrador said recently. And it really is a referendum on him: he – like Donald Trump in the United States – is the central figure in the campaign.
In Mexico, as around the world, forces of angry and charismatic populism are fighting against a liberal democracy polarized in terms of income. Questions of national identity, the influence of foreigners and economic exclusion divided the country into belligerent camps.
“In this country, what is being built is not a sense of citizenship, but rather electoral bases,” said Gloria Alcocer, director of the civic magazine Voz y Voto, more or less “Voz e Voto”. López Obrador is prohibited by law from running for re-election for another six-year term.
The battle lines are drawn: the Morena Party, in power, already holds the governments of 23 of the country’s 32 states and is heading towards all of them. It already has a simple majority in both houses of Congress and wants a two-thirds majority to be able to change the Constitution at will.
It’s hard to describe how frightening this is for some Mexicans who have spent more than four decades trying to build a formal democracy, with checks and balances, surveillance agencies It is strict electoral rulesalmost all of which Morena said she would like to defund or eliminate if given the opportunity.
Like the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party – which held Mexico’s presidency uninterruptedly for a record 70 years – Morena did not hesitate to use government power to influence elections, distribute money or embark on large construction projects that may never actually be completed.
But it is also difficult to describe how attractive López Obrador’s policies have been. for many Mexicans who felt excluded less than 40 years of what he calls “neoliberal” and market-oriented administrations.
Under López Obrador, Mexico has more than doubled its still tragically low minimum wage (now about $15 a day, or about $2 an hour). While this won’t change anyone’s life — a Big Mac now costs about $5.19 in Mexico, compared to an average of $5.69 in the U.S. — it’s the underlying appeal of Morena’s platform that attracts many voters.
The implicit message to many Mexicans during market-oriented governments over the decades was that they were somehow wrong for not learning more English, for not working in manual labor rather than the technology economy, for receiving government subsidies, and for not living in a traditional culture dominated by the family. .
López Obrador has turned this narrative on its head: he intentionally mispronounces English sentences, glorifies manual labor, says subsidies are good, favors state-owned companies, and says Mexico is strong precisely because of its family values and indigenous culture: he even claimed these same values make Mexicans immune to drug addiction.
López Obrador says that fighting drug cartels – which have taken over large areas of Mexico, extorting protection money from all walks of life – is a foreign idea, imposed on Mexico by the United States. Instead, he opted for a “hugs, not bullets” approach and limited cooperation with U.S. authorities in fighting gangs.
Sheinbaum He is an academic who lacks López Obrador’s charisma, folksy style and mass appeal. She says her administration will follow the outgoing president’s policies, but with more data to back up his decisions.
Gálvez, a woman who went from a poor indigenous town to starting his own technology company, has been the wild card in the race: his frank, folksy approach has produced scathing one-liners and monumental gaffes. Both women are 61 years old. A third, little-known male candidate from a small party came in far behind the two women.
Sunday’s elections — which will also decide congressional seats and thousands of local offices — are different from those of the past in other ways.
Some 27 candidates – most running for mayor or city council – have been killed so far this year. While this number is not much higher than in some previous elections, what is unprecedented are the mass shootings: candidates used to be assassinated in direct attacks that killed only them, but now criminals began spraying entire campaign events with gunfire.
And, as international studies professor Carlos A. Pérez Ricart notes, “where there are no shootings it is because the (local government) institutions have already been dominated” by the cartels.
Mexico is also baking under a heat wave so intense that howler monkeys literally fell dead from the trees. Almost the entire country is experiencing some level of water scarcity and air pollution has been so severe in the capital that a fifth of cars have been banned from driving.
All of this doesn’t exactly help to calm tempers or attract people to reconciliation. In the current scenario, perhaps the only positive thing is that it does not look like the elections will be particularly close.
“This country would not be able to handle a narrow margin of victory,” Pérez Ricart said. “There is a lack of true Democrats on both sides.”
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