Mexico’s Postmodern Populism

by Angel Jaramillo Torres

O n June 3, 2018, a day after the announcement of his victory,

Mexico’s president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador
(AMLO) addressed thousands of his followers at the flagship Azteca
Stadium in Mexico City. As he was outlining the main features of his
future government, his supporters were chanting the chorus of the
day, “It’s an honor supporting Obrador.”
AMLO’s campaign emphasized a populist message aimed suc-
cessfully at convincing a bulk of the electorate that Mexico must
change direction away from globalization-oriented policies to a
nationalist economic agenda. But a case can be made that the election
was largely determined by a “punishment vote” against the last few
administrations rather than as a vote of confidence in AMLO. Either
way, there is no doubt that the newly elected government has a
unique opportunity to critically overhaul the Mexican political
regime. For many of AMLO’s partisans, his arrival will bring to
power a left-wing government poised to achieve social justice for all
those who have been left behind. On the other hand, AMLO may
represent a postmodern populist, for whom the old distinctions
between Right and Left, and their preferred agendas, have little
value. While seemingly astute enough to have read correctly the
spirit of the times, AMLO’s future plans remain ambiguous.

Angel Jaramillo Torres is a professor at the Autonomous University of Puebla.

He is the author of Leo Strauss on Nietzsche’s Tharsymachean-Dionysian
Socrates: Philosophy, Politics, Science, and Religion in the Modern Age
(Common Ground) and co-editor of the two-volume series Trump and
Political Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan), both published in 2018.

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 Mexico’s Postmodern Populism

THE CONTENDERS

Since the end of the one-party regime headed by the Partido Revolu-
cionario Institucional (PRI) in the year 2000, Mexico’s political land-
scape has been dominated by three major parties, with the PRI in the
center, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) on the right, and the
Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) on the left.
This time around was no exception. The main contenders were
José Antonio Meade, representing the PRI and its coalition Todos
por México (“Everyone for Mexico”), Ricardo Anaya from the
PAN, with its coalition México al Frente (“Mexico Forward”), and
López Obrador from the newly founded Movimiento de Reno-
vación Nacional (MORENA), and its coalition Juntos Haremos
Historia (“Together we will make history”).
José Antonio Meade was mainly known as a competent adminis-
trator with a penchant for using technocratic language that he picked
up during his years at Yale. The talk of the town was that he has
never seen an econometric model he didn’t like. He could boast of
considerable experience working in important cabinet positions—
Hacienda (an immensely powerful department where economic
policy is designed), Energy, and Foreign Relations—and he was seen
by financial analysts and investors as the best qualified. On the
downside, he never garnered the support of the PRI grass roots
because he was not a party member. Mindful of the erosion of the
PRI’s credibility, outgoing president Enrique Peña Nieto decided to
choose Meade due to the sorry political situation of his government;
as the elections approached fewer than three in ten Mexicans ap-
proved of his administration’s performance. Among the reasons for
Peña Nieto’s remarkable unpopularity were widespread corruption,
high levels of violence and insecurity, and the failure of his economic
reforms to generate growth.
The PAN’s Ricardo Anaya, the youngest of the three contenders,
attempted to reach out to the young and the urban elites. But his
campaign misread the state of mind of the Mexican people as a
whole. From the start, he seemed aloof and showed little genuine
interest in the population. In the language of Peter Thiel, he was
offering bits when the Mexican people demanded atoms. He did not
realize that the election was about the present rather than about the
future. Anaya’s chances were further diminished when, as the

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campaigns kicked off, Peña Nieto’s administration waged an all-out

attack linking him to a fishy real estate operation that he allegedly
benefited from financially. Although the allegations were never
proved, Anaya never recovered from it.
AMLO, by contrast, has been a fixture of Mexican politics since
2000, when he became the first elected head of the government of
Mexico City. He competed for the presidency in 2006 and 2012,
garnering so much enthusiasm that he became the almost natural
presidential candidate of the Left.
AMLO came of age under the wing of the PRI which governed
Mexico from the times of Plutarco Elías Calles in the 1920s
(although at first under a different party name). A bona fide priista,
AMLO remained loyal to the party even after a group of high-
profile members, unhappy at being pushed aside by the neoliberals,
abandoned the party to found the social-democratic PRD. Later,
persuaded by his peers from the Left and convinced that he would
not have a chance to rise within the PRI, AMLO eventually joined
the PRD. Once there he adopted a populist style undoubtedly
tailored to garner the support of those left behind.
No sooner had the 2012 election ended than, having established
himself as the embodiment of the demand for justice for the down-
trodden, AMLO started to travel across Mexico, visiting every single
district in the country. As the image of the Peña administration was
going south, AMLO’s popularity began to skyrocket. His most con-
sequential decision was to found a new political organization, which
he shrewdly named MORENA, as the Virgin of Guadalupe is known
among many Catholic Mexicans. Now, at age 64, the time has finally
come for him to take the wheel of the Mexican government.

THE ELECTION

The outcome exceeded the expectations of AMLO and his newly

founded party. Polls on the eve of the election indicated that he
would win by a margin of around 15 percentage points, but he
wound up winning by almost 30 points, an outstanding performance
by all accounts. Well behind was Anaya, winding up in second place
with 22.3 percent, and the PRI, in what was the worst performance
in its history, collecting a mere 16.4 percent.

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The biggest loser by any measure was the PRI, for its number of
congressmen shrank dramatically, and perhaps more important, it
will now be entitled to only a tiny portion of the resources it
previously received from the federal electoral authority when it was
the largest party. Moreover, the PRI will now control only twelve
governorships and no longer holds the majority in many state
legislatures. The catastrophe was so great that the president of the
PRI, Claudia Ruiz Massieu, suggested that it would be better for the
party to change its name.
As for the second-largest party in Mexico, the PAN, its influence
has also been greatly diminished. Not only has its presidential
candidate suffered a humiliating defeat, but the party was left deeply
divided and weakened as a result. Even if they wished to, the PRI
and PAN combined could not pose a real challenge to MORENA, at
least in the short term.
AMLO was victorious across the board. His victory has been
described by many pundits as a political tsunami. His voters includ-
ed the wealthy and the poor, the highly educated and those without
schooling, the old and the young, and rural and urban people alike.
How did this happen? One commonly heard explanation is that,
unlike in his previous campaigns, this time public relations wizards
took charge of AMLO’s messaging and skillfully used social media.
Another reason has to do with the fact that AMLO has been
campaigning since 2006, becoming Mexico’s best-known politician.
But the most important reason is that, whereas in 2006 and 2012
voters might have seen the election as a referendum on AMLO, in
2018 voters saw the election as a referendum on the PRI. A case can
certainly be made that AMLO’s victory was not of his own making.
The Mexican ancien régime seems to be entering an advanced stage
of decay. Peña Nieto’s administration was marred by outstanding
levels of self-dealing, permitting or even promoting a series of
governors who engaged in wholesale corruption, remarkable even
by the PRI’s historical standards.
Furthermore, although President Peña Nieto succeeded early in
his administration in garnering support for his “structural re-
forms”—supposedly necessary to get Mexico on track to broad-
based economic prosperity—he was in the end unable to close the
deal. Had these reforms succeeded, private investment in the energy
sector would likely have increased oil production to levels reminis-
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Angel Jaramillo Torres

cent of times past, when Mexico was one of the world leaders in
energy exports. But these hopes were never realized. Moreover, Peña
Nieto’s administration unsuccessfully undertook a modernization of
the education system, attempting to introduce more meritocratic
evaluation, with the goal of reducing the power of the formidable
Mexican teachers’ union. AMLO, however, rejected such a reform
on the grounds that its intention was punitive rather than rehabilita-
tive. In the end, Peña Nieto failed to convince most Mexicans that
his education reform would bring Mexican children into the twenty-
first century.
Peña Nieto’s attempts to grapple with the challenges posed by
drug-trafficking cartels also failed. This problem can be traced back
to the strategy devised by President Felipe Calderón, who, after his
election in 2006, decided to attack head-on the power of the cartels
that had robbed the Mexican state of its monopoly on legitimate
violence in some areas of its territory. The strategy backfired, giving
rise to high levels of violence across northern and central Mexico as
the cartels dug in and reconstituted themselves. Notwithstanding
Calderón’s obviously flawed policy for confronting the drug traf-
fickers, Peña Nieto failed to change gears and doubled down on
Calderon’s brutal yet ineffective strategy. As bodies piled up and
thousands of victims began to raise their voices, it became apparent
that Peña Nieto presided over one of the bloodiest eras in Mexican
history since the Revolution.
As if that were not enough, the scandal of Ayotzinapa also took
place on Peña Nieto’s watch. Under circumstances never entirely
explained, forty-three students simply disappeared from the face of
the earth in the state of Guerrero. The issue remained in the
headlines and became a topic of international concern for years. In a
word, the highly visible failures of Peña Nieto and his team should
not be overlooked as an explanation of the election outcome.

THE PRESENT CHALLENGES

After a dramatic triumph, MORENA will have an overwhelming

capacity to carry out its political project. Although a few seats shy of
the Congressional supermajority needed to change the constitution,
MORENA only needs the support of one party to undertake a far-
reaching overhaul of Mexican law. In a Machiavellian maneuver,

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AMLO, while president-elect, signaled to MORENA’s congressmen

to allow a senator-elect from the Green Party (formerly staunch
allies of the PRI) to finish his term as governor of the state of
Chiapas in return for the support of a handful Green Party con-
gressmen. This move gives MORENA the supermajority needed to
change the constitution.
But serious questions concerning the cogency and intelligibility
of MORENA’s project remain. In some sense, AMLO’s dilemma is
well-known and seems reminiscent of Trump’s. An authentic out-
sider, MORENA is a collection of disparate groups encompassing
former PRI and PAN members, Hugo Chávez-loving socialists,
conservative Catholics, and modern entrepreneurs with almost
nothing in common except their ambition and loyalty to the strong-
man. The lack of a clear-cut project for overhauling the government
is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the new administration.
From the outset, AMLO will confront two main problems: one
political and one economic.
With regard to politics, it would be wrong to argue that Mexico is
suffering from political gridlock; if anything, it is the opposite.
Congress has passed many laws, although more than a few of them
wound up making little sense. Moreover, according to Integralia, a
think tank, Mexico’s Congress has more committees than any other
in the world, a kind of legislative hyper-bureaucratization. Stream-
lining executive and legislative government seems sensible in the face
of such hypertrophy, and that may be AMLO’s intention.
With respect to economics, despite the firm consensus among
Mexican elites on the desirability of globalization, AMLO’s triumph
shows that many Mexicans count themselves among its discontents.
Although Mexican public officials peppered their speeches with
flashy language boasting that no other country has signed as many
trade agreements as Mexico, the public benefits of these agreements
are doubtful. When it comes to economic performance, Mexico’s
results, while not a wholesale failure, by all accounts have been
mediocre. Since NAFTA was signed in 1992, the country has not
achieved more than 3 percent annual economic growth. Steeped in
neoliberal economics, every single administration since the arrival of
Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1988 has supported the “Washington
consensus” that recommends integration into the global economy,
dependency on international investment, and conformity to the
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doctrine of the free market. And although the application of these

policies has ensured low inflation rates and fiscal discipline, prosper-
ity has not reached most of the population. Adding insult to injury,
the most affluent Mexicans are perceived to have taken advantage of
a series of loopholes and self-serving policies to get ahead at the
expense of the underdogs. For many, Mexico seems to validate Gore
Vidal’s assertion that there are societies which offer the free market
to the poor and socialism to the wealthy.

A HISTORY OF SIMULATED DEMOCRACY

Mexico’s political troubles cannot be separated from its history.

Unlike the United States, a country that has had organized, uninter-
rupted federal elections since 1788, even during the Civil War,
Mexico for most of its history has not enjoyed political stability. The
nineteenth century in Mexico was a Hobbesian spectacle in which
the two groups struggling for power—liberals and conservatives—
seemed to be practicing politics in a state of nature.
According to the historian Enrique Krauze, Mexico has only
enjoyed two liberal democratic moments: the brief period when
Francisco Madero governed (1911–1913), and the present day.
Liberal democracy is indeed an anomaly in Mexico’s modern politi-
cal history. Instead, in post-revolutionary Mexico, something akin
to political stability emerged from two different foci—the Constitu-
tion of 1917 and the uniparty system.
Taking our bearings from Leo Strauss, one could interpret
political culture through the lens of his “three waves of modernity.”
The United States is the result of the first wave of modernity
(liberalism), while Mexico is the result of a compromise between the
first and second waves. (Neither country has been hospitable to
fascism.) The Mexican compromise is reflected in the Constitution
of 1917, which is a hybrid that incorporates socialist prescriptions
into a liberal core—Rousseau correcting Locke without fully over-
coming him. This arrangement worked because it fit the desires of
many Mexicans to be part of the larger nation. The political culture
institutionalized by this system, however, was authoritarian and
clientelist. For most of the twentieth century, democracy in Mexico
was a simulation that relied upon a fiction, reminiscent of what the
political scientist Fernando Escalante called “imaginary citizens.”

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On the other hand, the PRI was born at a time when nationalist
parties with a monopolizing agenda had become fashionable in
Europe and elsewhere. Although the PRI was not fascist by any
stretch of the imagination, its creation was inspired by the same
motives as its cousins in Europe. Nevertheless, it could also be
argued that Mexico’s PRI bears a closer resemblance to a different
political landscape: corruption and clientelism under the PRI is
perhaps more reminiscent of how politics played out in eighteenth
century Britain under Whig leadership. In the case of Mexico, the
party was meant to represent the state and the Mexican society at
large. It was not just a party, but a way of life. Despite fostering a
merely simulated democracy and promoting political control over
the population, the PRI did significantly contribute to the political
stability of the country. As the political scientist Rafael Segovia has
argued, the PRI saved Mexico from two worse destinies—Marxist-
inspired, guerrilla-motivated military coups and right-wing military
dictatorships, fashionable during most of the twentieth century in
Latin America.
Despite its achievements, however, the era of the PRI seems to
have finally reached its end. The new political hegemon in Mexico is
now AMLO’s party, MORENA, and it has a great opportunity to
turn Mexico around.

AMLO’S MOMENT

Like Trump, AMLO does not acknowledge intellectual parents or

forerunners. He does, however, see himself as standing on the
shoulders of political giants. His heroes are three Mexican statesmen
who played critical roles in the construction of Mexico: Benito
Juárez, Francisco Madero, and Lázaro Cárdenas. An amateur his-
torian of Mexico, AMLO may have a sober vision of the current
moment. He has been careful not to alienate private corporations,
foreign investors, and entrepreneurs. His first message as president-
elect was meant to calm financial markets. Keenly aware of the
importance Mexicans attach to independent institutions such as the
Banco de México (Mexico’s central bank), the INE (the federal
electoral authority), and others, AMLO has cautiously abstained
from taking them on.

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Nevertheless, like Andrew Jackson, AMLO despises permanent

officeholders. What Trump calls the deep state, AMLO describes as
“la mafia del poder,” an elite group that allegedly exploits the masses
for its own benefit. But AMLO’s rhetoric in his struggle against the
Mexican bureaucracy is different than Trump’s. AMLO’s singular
political merchandise is honesty. If Trump boasts about his wealth,
AMLO broadcasts his humility. Whereas Trump recycled a Reagan
slogan (“Make America Great Again”), refashioning it in the gigan-
tist aesthetic of an ambitious real estate developer, AMLO’s idea of
Mexico’s “fourth transformation” takes its bearings from something
like a Whiggish interpretation of history.

MEXICO’S FOURTH TRANSFORMATION

AMLO’s Franciscan virtue of humility is supposedly a lynchpin of

what he calls the fourth transformation of Mexico, the other three
being independence from Spain (1810–21), the Reform War (1857–
61), and the Revolution (1910–17). However effective this idea was
for gathering Mexicans around MORENA, the truth is that the fourth
transformation is a slogan searching for its content. Insofar as it is
discernible, the fourth transformation has at least four objectives:
(1) Fostering economic nationalism by moving away from the
focus on Mexico’s links to the global economy. On this topic, Trump
and AMLO’s concerns converge, and a new North American free
trade agreement has (however modestly) reflected a new nationalistic
consensus in each country. This approach also indicates that the
newly elected Mexican administration will undertake an energy
policy bent on reversing the previous administration’s strategy of
opening up the oil industry to foreign private investment.
(2) A focus on the moral regeneration of the Mexican polity
through calls to overcome an age-old culture of corruption. But while
AMLO was elected as the model of an honest man, his prescriptions
to rid his country from the shackles of lawlessness are nothing but
ambiguous. Hoping for a clean transfer of power, AMLO decided
not to prosecute Peña Nieto administration officials and governors
for alleged acts of corruption, with the Odebrecht case being the
most prominent.
(3) An overhaul of the federal bureaucracy intent on reducing
costs, while attempting to relocate most of the ministries from Mexico

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City to the several states. This is an unprecedented move in the

history of the nation, which, if successful, would fundamentally
modify the centralized make up of the country. AMLO is also
aiming at reducing the salaries of high-ranking and middle-ranking
public officials on the grounds that they are quickly corrupted and
maintain a high standard of living which is perceived as an affront to
hard-working Mexicans earning low wages.
(4) A massive transfer of resources (about 500 billion pesos) to the
downtrodden, especially to youth and the elderly. This is to be
accomplished through a system of subsidies and entitlements sup-
posedly funded by shifting resources away from the corrupt and
wealthy political class. Further state investment would be directed
toward a system of oil refineries and the construction of a trans-
isthmian canal in southeastern Mexico.
Whatever the fourth transformation turns out to be, however, it
will not embrace a European-style welfare state that plays a key role
in the economy. AMLO has not proposed any plan to accomplish
this, or to systematically introduce more progressive taxation and
redistribution. Insofar as one could pin down AMLO’s policies,
they do not lay out a social democratic agenda. But neither does his
refusal to raise taxes mean that he is engaging in supply-side
economics. AMLO is not Reagan. How then can his proposals be
described?

AMLO’S POSTMODERN POPULISM

André Breton called Mexico the chosen land of surrealism. And the
end of the technocratic political regime may be leading Mexico to
the renaissance of a baroque political culture: a communitarian
fervor pushed forward by a voluntaristic leader with no convincing
project as to where to go.
The 2018 presidential election might be the first in the history of
modern Mexico in which the chief divide was not that between the
Right and the Left but that between the establishment and those
who rejected it. Another important difference between the 2018
election and the two prior elections when AMLO was on the ballot
(2006 and 2012) was the international context. The most recent
Mexican election was part of a wave of populist political movements
all over the world. What Victor Orban calls “illiberal democracy”

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Angel Jaramillo Torres

and Steve Bannon calls “economic nationalism” has taken the West
by storm. Many other “nationalist” or “populist” leaders have come
on the scene as well—Vladimir Putin of Russia, Jarosław Kaczyński
of Poland, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan of Turkey, Matteo Salvini of Italy, and Jair Bolsonaro of
Brazil. Meanwhile, the Western world as a whole seems to be going
through one of its periodic phases of self-criticism. What people are
taking issue with is the Panglossian confidence of the Davos consen-
sus, the belief in the almost magical qualities of technology and
economic liberalism (nowadays jointly exemplified by the so-called
fourth industrial revolution) to transform or replace traditional
political action and sources of meaning. This consensus seems to
have reached a point of diminishing returns. Steven Pinker’s naïve
Enlightenment does not seem to touch the man and woman on the
street. This does not mean that these new movements are not playing
with fire, and they could certainly lead to a dead end. The lessons of
radical politics in the twentieth century should never be forgotten.
The current dilemma can be described thus: Can classical liberal
democracy be compatible with the means and ends of the new
populist movement, whether of the Right or Left? Whatever the
answer might be, Mexican politics can be said to be in sync with the
times.
Just recently, Steve Bannon, in an interview with the Economist,
named López Obrador as part of the populist movement he calls
economic nationalism. Although AMLO’s view of the world may be
much different than Bannon’s, he intuitively understands the im-
portance of Mexico’s turn to more nationalistic policies and away
from globalization. Tatiana Clouthier, AMLO’s charismatic spokes-
woman during the campaign, once tweeted that Mexicans should
start buying Mexican products rather than foreign ones. This re-
minds us of “Make America Great Again.” AMLO’s fourth trans-
formation can be interpreted as a moment of Mexican aloofness
from the world. What Octavio Paz identified in his Labyrinth of
Solitude as the temptation of the Mexicans to conceal themselves
from the world coincides with its northern neighbor’s moment of
turning inward.
If asked, AMLO would certainly deny any resemblance between
MORENA and right-wing populist movements. He and his followers

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would rather be seen as cousins of parties such as Syriza and

Podemos in Europe or the movement headed by Bernie Sanders in
the United States. Long-time defenders of AMLO have no doubt
that he is a man of the Left. And they are certainly correct up to a
point, for AMLO has never concealed his sympathy for the Cuban
revolution and the regime that has governed the island since 1959.
But outside this important point it is difficult to pin him down as a
full-fledged leftist. The joke may be on those who see AMLO as a
left-winger, for they may discover progressively the extent to which
he is another clever postmodern populist, who finds insignificant the
distinction between Left and Right. While the Left in Mexico is
generally secular, AMLO is never shy about his Protestant faith.
Although he is not a Catholic, he appears to understand the political
importance of Mexican Catholic fervor. One of MORENA’s allies is
the Partido Encuentro Social (Social Encounter Party, or PES), a
Christian conservative party, which opposes gay marriage and abor-
tion (the main causes of the cultural Left in Mexico, as in the United
States) and which will be influential in several committees in Con-
gress.
While the Left in Mexico is in the habit of displaying its idealism,
AMLO has demonstrated that he can be cynically pragmatic. Days
after the election, he sent a letter to Trump in which he told him that
he saw important similarities in their respective styles of leadership.
AMLO might not be wrong about that. There truly are significant
affinities between Trump and AMLO. They are not much interested
in what happens in the world at large, and both think their respec-
tive countries are in need of rejuvenation. As though Rousseau were
whispering in their ears, their rhetoric stresses the importance of the
sovereignty of the people.
Similarly, AMLO, like Trump, has engaged in fights against the
media, which both leaders regard as partisan and interested in frus-
trating their respective projects. While Trump calls the mainstream
media “fake,” AMLO calls the Mexican press “prensa fifi,” an
epithet signifying the elite social class whose interests the press
allegedly serves. One of the more striking resemblances between
AMLO and Trump is their unusual willingness to use the word
“love” in their political rhetoric, especially when describing their
relationship with their followers. Allan Bloom once called attention
to the absence of the term “love” in the American Constitution and
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Angel Jaramillo Torres

the Declaration of Independence. He meant that the contractarian

liberalism of Hobbes and Locke relegates love to the private sphere.
Indeed, the return of eros to the public sphere might be the main
feature of the new populisms, regardless whether they are from the
Right or the Left. In the same spirit, Francis Fukuyama in his most
recent book, Identity, understands this new populist revival as the
mixture of two forms of thumos: isothumia and megalothumia. The
desire for a powerful, charismatic leader coincides with the aspira-
tions of peoples in various parts of the world.
But it is not just Mexico and the United States that are adopting a
more inward-looking posture; the entire world seems to have
renounced utopian universalism. Not only is China’s Maoism no
longer a political and economic ideal, it does not even work as a
slogan. It has truly been thrown into the dustbin of history. But
Deng Xiaoping did not replace ideological Communism with full-
fledged liberalism. Closing China off to modern ideological options,
he and his heirs have sought to recover Confucianism for the
twenty-first century. But so far neo-Confucianism, outside of Asia
at least, has not become an exportable model.
Likewise, Russian models are for Russian consumption and not
intended as a universal utopia. Marxism-Leninism is an option only
if one is enamored of lost causes. Putinism today can be aptly de-
scribed as authoritarianism with a nonhuman face. Alexander
Dugin’s version of Eurasianism, a geopolitical shift away from West-
ern-inspired globalization, is for Russians only. At the same time,
Nietzsche’s death of God has rendered almost impossible an all-out
return to the religious orthodoxy of yesteryear.
Meanwhile, the cosmopolitan, constitutional European project
supported by a Habermasian mindset is being attacked by conserva-
tive Brexit supporters, Orban-like “illiberal democrats,” and leftists
like Syriza. The postwar European project was never meant to cover
the earth. Its primary export product, the welfare state, was seen as a
second-best option from Latin America to Asia, and not as the
realization of a secular paradise.
Latin America has not yet found a viable road to fulfill the three-
pronged promises of modernity: libérte, égalite, and fraternité. Torn
between the Scylla of a bankrupted neo-Bolivarian dream that was
really a nightmare, and the Charybdis of Mauricio Macri’s irrespon-

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sible neoliberal policies, Latin America seems lost. Without a model

to turn to for inspiration, Mexico seems to be on the verge of forging
its own path out of full-fledged liberalism. AMLO’s intellectual
journey has taken place as though the world outside Mexican
borders does not exist, yet he seems to be a man for his age.
AMLO announced his cabinet many months before the election.
Although he made some changes, he retained most of the original
members. The one who, at the moment, seems poised to become
AMLO’s closest political adviser is the former mayor of Mexico
City, and currently minister of foreign relations, Marcelo Ebrard.
He might play Cardinal Richelieu to AMLO’s Charles XIII. Ebrard
met a few times with President Trump when AMLO was president-
elect and will dominate not only the international agenda but also
national politics as a result of his alliance with the leader of the
Chamber of Deputies, Mario Delgado. But Ebrard’s main challenge
will be to manage Mexico’s relations with the United States.
In 1984, the American journalist Alan Riding wrote Distant
Neighbors, a shrewd account of the state of affairs in U.S.-Mexico
bilateral relations. The book became a best seller in Mexico and was
understood as a call for a new diplomacy focused on getting the two
countries closer to each other. This outcome coincided with the
neoliberal dream, and was the anticipated result of globalization.
With AMLO and Trump in power, that dream now seems shattered.
But, paradoxically, it may be the shared rejection of a self-forgetting
globalism that allows for a new diplomacy grounded on the well-
being of each country’s own people. Two “postmodern-populist”
leaders, who may have more in common than either would be
willing to admit, will decide the outcome.
I recently visited Comala, the town the Mexican writer Juan
Rulfo made famous in his novel Pedro Páramo. Not far away from
the town proper, further into the wild, there is a place called la zona
mágica (“the magical area”). At some point on the highway, an
optical illusion makes drivers believe they are going uphill when in
fact the are driving down. Many voters around the world believe
they have experienced the same phenomenon in the politics of the
last few decades; others believe we are just entering such a zone now.
We can only hope that AMLO will avoid the dead-end road of the
demagogues, who sell only illusions, and that he will instead offer a
solid path towards prosperity for all Mexicans.
Winter 2018 69