MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s drug war has burst into flames again, the economy is flat, the health care system is creaking and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — facing the wrath of U.S. President Donald Trump — has cracked down on Central American migrants harder than ever.
Yet
López Obrador, once known for being angry and irascible after years of losing
presidential bids, almost never loses his smile at the news conferences he has
held almost every morning since taking office Dec. 1. He is scheduled to give
his first state of the union address Sunday.
In some
ways, it is a Teflon presidency: Little sticks to Lopez Obrador because he is
so quick to smile and say “peace and love” to adversaries. It doesn’t hurt that
the opposition is so discredited, disheartened and disorganized that on most
major issues its voice isn’t even heard over Lopez Obrador’s daily din.
But
despite his cheery phrases — “hugs not bullets” as a way to fight drug cartel
violence — a grim reality is sinking in, as with the killing of 28 people in a
fire attack this week on a nightclub in the southern Mexico oil town of
Coatzacoalcos.
Lenit
Enriquez Orozco, who has led a group of relatives of the disappeared in Coatzacoalcos
after her own brother vanished in 2015, said this week that the drug cartels
“are feeling very empowered.”
“Lopez
Obrador says the people are happy, but this is not what you would call being
happy,” she said, motioning to the grieving families of the nightclub victims.
The
president has been adept at shunting blame onto subordinates. When an assistant
interior secretary went on a tour to meet with vigilantes — many of whom are
linked to drug gangs — Lopez Obrador said he disapproved of the visits, despite
the fact he has endorsed ideas like dialogue and amnesties for some.
His
government is willing to declare victory and walk away from some problems. He
launched his administration with an offensive against fuel thefts and declared
the problem 95% eradicated, despite the fact the number of illegal pipeline
taps has remained steady and the amount of legal gasoline sold has not
increased, something that would be expected if the black market disappeared.
López
Obrador has also managed to make the news largely about himself — using his
daily news conferences much as Trump relies on Twitter.
There is
one central message to López Obrador’s first nine months in office: He is close
to the people, and listening.
His
morning news conferences are usually followed by afternoon visits to small-town
hospitals, with television cutaways to adoring crowds or videos showing him
eating at local restaurants.
“We have
a lot of confidence in this man,” said Eduardo Calvillo, who runs a market
stall in a low-income Mexico City neighborhood where Calvillo says new
streetlights and more police patrols have appeared since López Obrador and a
closely allied mayor took office. “This is a man who gets down to see where the
problems and the conflicts are, and tries to think of some solution.”
Fernando
Hernández, a Mexico City property developer, understands the class divisions,
anger at corruption and need for change that drove López Obrador’s election
victory. He is originally from López Obrador’s home state of Tabasco. But, he
said, “I really thought there was going to be more coherence in the change, it
would be more educated, more capable.”
Instead,
he said, López Obrador has been loath to listen to criticism, suggestions or
the advice of experts.
The
president often says “I have other facts” when asked to explain discrepancies.
López Obrador is obstinate, and he hates to spend money, sharply cutting
government spending and salaries in a way few more conservative governments
could get away with.
The cuts
briefly left the parents of children with cancer without their chemotherapy
treatments, prompting them to demonstrate at the Mexico City airport.
“What I
am seeing is budget cutting done with a machete,” Hernández said. “Public
health care has been devastated by the cutbacks.”
“He is
very obstinate, very good at what he does. He’s a great politician, but he needs
to focus more on what people tell him.”
López
Obrador would gladly be judged on his main campaign promise — fighting
corruption — but even there, despite his squeaky-clean personal reputation, the
level of no-bid contracts handed out in the first nine months of the
administration is about the same as under his predecessors, said Ricardo
Alvarado, a researcher for the civic group Mexicans Against Corruption.
López
Obrador dismisses many non-governmental groups like Alvarado’s as fronts for
conservatives and business interests. Indeed, Mexicans Against Corruption has
launched a dozens of legal challenges to one of López Obrador’s pet projects —
converting an air force base into a new Mexico City airport — in part because
the president canceled a partly built, more expensive airport project that
business groups say made more sense.
“This is
a political stance, and part of what got him the presidency, which is to rule
out any project that isn’t his,” Alvarado said.
Like
Trump and his border wall, Lopez Obrador is obsessed with his own big
infrastructure project — a train making a tourist circuit around the Yucatan
peninsula that most experts say makes little environmental or financial sense.
Another
of the president’s pet projects is the newly created National Guard, a
military-dominated amalgam of soldiers and civilian police that he hopes can
take on the drug cartels and common crime.
Human
rights groups worry the Mexican military, which has been implicated in rights
abuses in the past, will now be given free rein.
“This
has been an administration that has had two sides, and swung back and forth” on
human rights, said Santiago Aguirre, the head of the Miguel Agustín Pro Human
Rights Center.
On one
hand, Lopez Obrador has tried to free “political prisoners” and taken more
seriously the search for the country’s 40,000 missing people, but on the other
it has loosened civilian oversight of law enforcement.
More
than anything else, experts are worried that the anti-crime strategy won’t work
and that Lopez Obrador — like the two presidents before him — will go down in
history as someone who couldn’t win against Mexico’s drug cartels.
“The underlying
problem is that his strategy is to put boots on the ground, cover territory ...
but there isn’t enough to go around,” said Mexico security analyst Alejandro
Hope.
Hope
said that even if the National Guard achieves recruiting goals, it would only
have one officer for every 1,000 inhabitants of Mexico next year. “That isn’t
even nearly enough,” he said.
For many
Mexicans, it is Lopez Obrador’s fascination with the past that limits him. He
likes the old bulwarks of Mexico: the slumping oil industry, the army and
small-scale agriculture. Lopez Obrador’s fascination with history led him to
call his government “the fourth transformation,” comparing it to the 1810
independence uprising, 1857 Liberal movement and 1910 revolution.
The
problem for a country that desperately needs new solutions to problems like
crime is “there is nothing particularly transformative about the fourth
transformation,” Hope said.