Mexico’s Polarizing President Presides Over Rising Violence, Flailing Economy
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador remains popular despite cartel crime and weak growth
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador greets supporters in the southern state of Oaxaca. PRESS OFFICE
David Luhnow and José de Córdoba
Dec. 7, 2019 12:15 am ET
MEXICO CITY—On Dec. 1, tens of thousands of people gathered in Mexico City’s gritty central square to celebrate Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s first year in office. His supporters chanted “It’s an honor to support Obrador.”
A few blocks away, thousands of protesters marched along the city’s elegant Reforma boulevard to rail against the president. Their chant was different: “It’s a horror to support Obrador.”
Since taking power, the silver-haired populist has polarized Mexico more than any president in recent memory. A majority see him as their first honest leader in decades, a man of the people and champion of the forgotten poor. For a growing minority, the president is a dangerous authoritarian who is consolidating power and failing to address the country’s basic problems like out-of-control crime and weak economic growth.
Stalling Out
Annual change in GDP
Source: International Monetary Fund
Note: 2019 data are estimates.
%
Mexico
U.S.
2009
’10
’11
’12
’13
’14
’15
’16
’17
’18
’19
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
His first year wasn’t an optimistic harbinger of his remaining five years in power. Mexico’s economy hasn’t grown at all this year, its worst performance in a decade. Even as the U.S. economy chugs along, Mexican businesses have slowed investment, spooked by the president’s governing style and economic decisions like suspending the country’s historic opening to private investment in the energy industry. At the same time, the window may be closing for ratification of a renegotiated free-trade pact among Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.
Crime has hit record highs, with murders climbing another 2.2% during the first 10 months of the year compared with last year’s record tally of 36,685 slayings. More than ever, parts of Mexico appear ungovernable as powerful crime syndicates take on the government. In October, the Sinaloa cartel overran the northern city of Culiacán in a successful attempt to force the army to liberate a captured drug lord.
President Trump had been expected to designate Mexico’s drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, putting them on a par with groups like Islamic State and al Qaeda. On Friday night, he said he would “temporarily hold off” on that move at the request of Mr. López Obrador.
Mr. Trump, in tweets, said the two nations would “step up our joint efforts to deal decisively with these vicious and ever-growing organizations!” He said “all necessary work” had been completed to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations.
A series of recent clashes between cartel gunmen and security forces as well as massacres of civilians in Mexico has captured global attention. Last month, presumed gunmen from a cartel killed three mothers and six of their children, all U.S. citizens living in a fundamentalist Mormon community in the northern state of Chihuahua.
Men carry the remains of Dawna Ray Langford and her sons Trevor and Rogan, who were killed by unknown assailants in November. PHOTO: CARLOS JASSO/REUTERS
Rafael Chávez, a burly construction worker who runs a business remodeling homes, voted for Mr. López Obrador last year on the politician’s promises he would “transform” the country. But a sharp slowdown in construction has forced Mr. Chávez to cut the size of his crews to 12 from an average of 30.
“I had the hope he was going to be able to conjure a change,” says Mr. Chávez. But with crime growing and a weak economy, he says, it seems “everything is falling apart.”
Since taking power, the man who once said “to hell with your institutions” has become the most powerful president in decades, with a big majority in both chambers of congress. He has attacked many of the country’s fragile institutions like courts, the central bank, and regulators as part of a “mafia of power” against him. And his party is now trying to oust the non-partisan head of the agency that oversees elections in time for the 2022 midterms.
“It’s not yellow flashing lights—they are glowing red,” says Enrique Krauze, one of the country’s leading historians. Mr. López Obrador’s government appears to be “on the road to becoming a populist dictatorship.”
Despite the shaky first year, the veteran politician and baseball fan remains Mexico’s most popular leader in decades, with different recent polls showing an approval rating between 60% and 70%. Those are enviable numbers at a time when some leaders in Latin America have approval ratings in the single digits and others face violent street protests.
“It’s a paradox,” says Héctor Aguilar Camín, a leading Mexican writer. “It’s a president who has high credibility and very poor results.”
The answer may lie in Mr. López Obrador’s masterful use of political symbols. He slashed his own salary and that of top bureaucrats, arguing that Mexico can’t have a rich government and poor citizens. The savings have gone partly to fund an expansion in cash transfer programs for the elderly, middle-school students and others.
The austerity is a welcome change in a country where many former presidents retired as multimillionaires. Enrique Peña Nieto, Mr. López Obrador’s predecessor, left office hounded by scandal and a record low 16% approval. The former president appears regularly in the pages of Mexico’s top society magazines, jet-setting on holidays around Europe with his new 31-year-old girlfriend, a model. Mr. Peña Nieto has long denied wrongdoing.
President López Obrador talks to a fellow passenger during a commercial flight in in Mexico in February. PHOTO: ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. López Obrador is the symbolic opposite. He put the country’s version of Air Force One, a Boeing 787, on the auction block and flies economy class, delighting fellow travelers. He disbanded the 8,000-strong elite presidential guard, saying the people would protect him. And he turned the sprawling and secretive presidential compound into a tourist attraction visited by millions. Rather than rest and play golf on the weekends, he visits the country’s poorest corners.
“This is one of the best things that has happened in all of my life,” said Omar Escovedo, 59, a retired state worker, during a recent visit by the president to the mostly indigenous hamlet of Amanalco near the capital. Over the past decade, the politician visited every county in Mexico—all 2,457.
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He has also proved adept at communication. In a country where presidents hardly ever held news conferences, he holds one nearly every morning that is carried live on radio, television and the internet to millions of his supporters.
There, Mr. López Obrador hammers home his vision of a country cleaved in two. His opponents are traitorous “conservatives”—a term from Mexico’s 19th century civil wars—and modern-day “neoliberals.” To him, these Mexicans are corrupt, beholden to foreign interests, and wealthy. Mr. López Obrador has even resurrected a 19th century word, “fifí,” meaning Frenchified and effete, to describe them.
On the other side are Mr. López Obrador and his supporters. These are the inheritors of Mexico’s 19th-century patriots and revolutionaries who seek to extinguish corruption and, through the hand of the state, produce well-being for all, especially the poor and the nation’s indigenous people.
“If you oppose López Obrador, then you are a traitor, corrupt, a coup monger,” says José Crespo, a political analyst at Mexico City’s CIDE university. “It’s a Manichaean use of history where on one side are the good Mexicans and on the other the very bad Mexicans.”
Crime is perhaps the president’s biggest vulnerability. A majority of Mexicans give him negative marks on crime, which they say is the country’s most pressing problem. A December poll by newspaper Reforma found 65% of Mexicans believe organized crime is stronger than the Mexican government. Just 29% said the government is stronger.
Soldiers stand guard in Villa Unión, a Mexican town near the border with the U.S., after a shootout with suspected cartel gunmen earlier this month. PHOTO: JULIO CESAR AGUILAR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
The crime wave has also hit Mexico City, which until recently had been relatively shielded from the carnage in the countryside. More than eight in 10 city residents say crime is their biggest problem, polls show. Just south of Mexico City, Catholic churches in parts of Morelos state have suspended Mass during evenings because parishioners are too frightened to attend, according to Ramón Castro, the bishop of Cuernavaca.
From the day he took power, the president declared an end to the country’s war on drugs, saying “you can’t fight fire with fire.” Mexico’s U.S.-trained Naval Marines, the force that killed or captured most top cartel leaders in the past decade, including Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, has been sidelined, say Naval officers. No major cartel figure has been arrested or killed this year.
The president disbanded the 40,000 strong Federal Police, built up under the previous two administrations in a bid to create a capable police force to pursue organized crime. In its place is a new National Guard, drawn mostly from the ranks of army and naval police. The Guard has 70,000 members and will grow to 140,000, the government says.
Critics say the Guard is a work in progress with no clear mission. So far, it has been deployed to stop Central American migrants from reaching the U.S., patrol Mexico City’s subway system, fight gasoline theft and deal with high-profile incidents such as massacres by organized crime. “It’s been a very reactive force, scattered, without a clear vision,” says Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexico City-based security analyst.
Deadly Trend
Homicides in Mexico
Source: Mexico's National Statistics Institute
2010
’12
’14
’16
’18
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
Analysts say that while Mexico has mostly relied on the armed forces to control organized crime, it has for years neglected a long-term fix: building professional police forces, especially at state and local levels, that can actually solve crimes like murder. Less than 13% of violent crimes end up with a suspect appearing before a judge, compared with 80% in the U.S., according to Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former member of Mexico’s intelligence agency.
By dismantling the Federal Police, the president went back to square one in creating a trained federal force. His government has also cut federal funding to train state and local police forces, according to government budget data.
Aside from the National Guard, the president is betting that reducing poverty will reduce crime. Some 800,000 youth have signed up to an apprentice program called “Youth Building a Future” that gives them a monthly stipend in exchange for learning a trade, a process that Mr. López Obrador hopes will keep them from becoming cannon fodder for gangs.
The president is also relying on the force of his personality to tamp down crime, calling on gang members to think of their mothers. “We’re calling on criminals to tone it down, that we all start to behave better. To hell with criminals. Fuchi, guácala,” he said, using colloquial terms that mean “gross, yuck.”
Last week, a small army of gunmen in a convoy of about 50 armored trucks, some mounted with .50 caliber rifles, attacked a small town in Coahuila, less than 40 miles from the Texas border, shooting up the town hall. At least 23 people, 17 of them presumed cartel members, were killed in a two-day running battle between security forces and gunmen, who wore helmets and military fatigues, and drove trucks emblazoned with the insignia of their self-styled “Northeast Cartel.”
On the economy, the outlook appears grim. Economists forecast just 1.2% growth next year—well below the president’s promises of 4% average annual growth and 6% growth by the end of his term.
Lack of Confidence
Mexico's gross fixed investment index
Source: Mexico's National Statistics Institute
Total
Construction
2016
’17
’18
’19
85
90
95
100
105
110
115
120
ConstructionxSept. 2019x93.4
Investment in machinery, equipment and construction fell 6.8% in September compared with a year ago, and is down 4.8% in the first nine months of this year, Mexico’s statistics agency said Friday.
Many blame the stagnation on the president’s decisions like canceling Mexico City’s partially built new airport, the country’s largest public-works project. Mr. López Obrador spiked the project after some $5 billion had already been spent, saying it was too extravagant. His finance minister later quit, saying economic decisions were being made on the basis of ideology.
The nationalist also reversed or suspended the economic overhauls—from ensuring public school teachers are tested for competence to opening the energy sector to private investment—carried out by Mr. Peña Nieto. Even auctions to attract private investment in renewable energies like wind farms have been scrapped.
Mexico’s stagnation marks the first time in two decades that Mexico’s economic cycle has diverged from the U.S., its northern neighbor and destination for 85% of its manufactured exports.
To spark economic growth, the president is betting on the resurrection of debt-ridden state oil firm Pemex, injecting it with new money and forcing it to build an $8 billion new refinery in his home state of Tabasco. But the oil industry accounts for under 4% of Mexico’s economic output.
His government closed down ProMexico, the country’s overseas investment offices. While he is supportive of the renegotiated free-trade deal with the U.S., he has yet to visit a single modern factory.
A refinery belonging to Pemex, the Mexican state oil firm. PHOTO: DANIEL BECERRIL/REUTERS
In July, on a visit to the countryside, he extolled the virtues of a primitive sugar-cane grinder powered by one mangy horse in a video he posted on his Twitter account which went viral. “This is an authentic people’s economy,” he said as the horse went around in a circle, grinding out the cane juice. “This is the economy we are promoting,” he said.
His austerity drive, while good for public finances, has forced thousands of top technocrats out of institutions like the central bank and finance ministry by slashing wages and cutting benefits like private health insurance.
“I’ve seen a year of destruction of institutions, of projects, of talents, of human capital,” says Valeria Moy, the director of “How are we doing, Mexico?” a Mexico City-based think tank. “This year, nothing has been built, and much has been destroyed.”
Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com and José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com
