Source: Los Angeles Times.
Media outlets and political commentators repeatedly highlight the concentration of personal power by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Yet the current catastrophes of governance in the country cannot be understood by power alone, as these also stem from the lack thereof. Weak governments under powerful men create dangerous places. The paradox of personal power is that it exacerbates feebleness everywhere else.
The strongman and authoritarian explanation for Mexico’s democratic backsliding is insufficient, and even misleading, to understand the country’s governance debacle. The centralization of power and the threats to Mexico’s constitutional system are real, but power is a deceptive word to describe the daily life of most citizens. The causes and explanations of how Mexico has regressed to a far more dysfunctional country lie in the somewhat hidden, not-so-thrilling everyday representations of weakness and impotence—the day-to-day stories of stranded and neglected citizens trying to survive government corruption and incompetence. The challenge of being treated as citizens, not thanks to but despite the government, reveals Mexico’s dysfunction.
The centralization of power is a process well underway; nonetheless, what defines the reality of most Mexicans is the impossibility of obtaining permits, scholarships, and medicines, as well as the danger of using a highway, lower salaries, extortion of businesses, out-of-stock drugstores, harassed judges, and long power outages. No one questions that democracy and the rule of law are destroyed by the institutional dismantling that demagogues so vehemently pursue. However, the governance coup de grace also happens in government offices with lower budgets—without equipment or electricity in some cases, in public schools without teachers, and in the never-ending queues to access public hospitals. The distinctive feature of this ‘administration’ is weakness and chaos—the destruction of its bureaucracy has opened a vacuum which AMLO has filled with threats, promises, and the projection of personal power.
After his victory in 2018, AMLO immediately embarked on a trek to prove not just how powerful he was, but how powerful he thought he deserved to be. The first sign of the president’s disturbing pattern of dangerous grandstanding was his cancellation of the partially-built USD 13.3 billion international airport—the most significant infrastructure project Mexico had planned in decades—scaring off new investments and businesses. The president has the power to build a useless railroad across the Yucatan jungle in violation of environmental laws, yet he is incapable of seeing viable alternative development projects. He is powerful enough to cancel permits for private investments in clean energies but unable and unwilling to attract the much-needed benefits of nearshoring.
Concerning foreign policy, the president has the power to pursue and treat migrants as criminals, but he is incapable of establishing a mildly coherent foreign policy. Mexico’s international reputation has been diminished to a galling defender of authoritarian regimes. Most notably, in June 2022, AMLO boycotted the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles to protest the exclusion of the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan dictatorships, adding another gesture of goodwill toward the Cuban regime. In May, AMLO was declared persona non grata by the Peruvian Congress for defending former president Pedro Castillo’s coup. He also criticized the European Parliament for supporting Volodymyr Zelensky for the Nobel Peace Prize and condemned sending weapons to help Ukraine and imposing economic sanctions against Russia. Under AMLO, Mexico has become a geopolitical lightweight with a derisory and often minuscule role in regional politics, let alone global trends and challenges.
Through unconstitutional executive agreements, AMLO attempted to hide the information related to how the armed forces are spending public budgets on his infrastructure projects. He has enough power to appoint military personnel to replace a professional civil bureaucracy. Still, he is unable and unwilling to build a single capable civil police organization or maintain the historically healthy dividing line between the armed forces and civilian politics. Mexican sociologist Fernando Escalante summed up what AMLO’s military policies mean best: “[t]he military deployments are not a sign of state capacity, but of weakness or an absent state.” In the ongoing vicious cycle, the president destroys institutions in exchange for personal power, gradually leaning himself into the informal power realm and further away from the institutional framework of the presidency.
The arrangements between the president and the Mexican army increasingly depart from the constitutional layout, debauching an institutional relationship into a marriage of convenience and an impunity alliance. Likewise, organized crime was a defining factor in the mid-term local elections, tilting several polls in favor of the president’s party. It is clear which party criminals support, but these illegal alliances do not represent true power. How de facto and local powers will evolve, accommodate, and exploit these murky waters is unclear. For the time being, the swathe of gray zones between the state and illegality is broader than ever. For the time being, organized crime is living a long and merry spring as their ambitions and cruelty face so few and meek constraints.
Government weakness and ineptitude is a steep, slippery slope towards cruelty for those who need the state the most. We can continue to amaze ourselves with the accumulation of power by a single man, but Mexico’s tragedy is best characterized by the powerlessness and vulnerability of everyone else. Journalist David Frum recently noted how we “should fear that the ultimate winner in Mexico will be autocracy –or even worse, chaos.” Mexico’s grim future looks somewhat far from a textbook authoritarian model. What we have is an illiberal and incompetent center surrounded by a sea of chaos and anarchy.
Growing regions of Mexico have no government presence, while migrants in detention centers burn to death because guards simply do not bother to open the doors during a fire. We witness events like the construction of an expensive and useless airport, farmers dividing their working hours between farming and defending their lands from racketeering, and soldiers firing against civilian teenagers for driving through a checkpoint and then executing the survivors to hide their crime. Citizens must stand abuses and crimes such as the construction of an expensive refinery unable to refine oil; the collapse of the capital city’s subway, killing 27 passengers; the military being subdued and humiliated by a drug cartel after capturing one of its leaders, and then having to release him by orders of the president. These are no signs of power.
In one of his nineteenth-century stories, Alexandre Dumas wrote that “the pride of those who cannot edify lies in destruction.” The president’s talent is his capacity for demolition. This government is incapable of building anything—but, more importantly—it is unwilling and unfit to work with anything created in the past. We must speak of criminal self-assurance, disorder, violence, and less about power. In a country where the mothers of thousands of disappeared and missing persons search for their loved ones with sticks and shovels in mass graves, it is profoundly deceiving to make sense of this catastrophe in terms of sway and authority.
To understand Mexico’s tragedy, beware of the strongman theory. This decay is the result of a man with just enough power to make everything else frail. The national calamity is not the result of a powerful or overbearing government but that of the bleak and callous scheming of an erratic personality’s effort to shatter everything in his path toward nowhere. What we have are authoritarian strikes—in no man’s land.
Emiliano Polo is a graduate student of global affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His research focuses on applied history and Latin American politics. He currently works in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
