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This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Is Mexico slipping into autocracy?

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast was recorded in Mexico City on the eve of a mass demonstration in defence of the country’s democracy. The protests were sparked by electoral reforms proposed by the country’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who’s often known as Amlo. One of the president’s most articulate critics is my guest on this week’s podcast. She’s the political scientist Professor Denise Dresser. So how real is the danger to democracy in Mexico?

News clip
Tens of thousands of people filled Mexico City’s vast main plaza, dressed in the colours of the National Electoral Institute and holding anti-government placards to rally behind the catchcry “Don’t touch my vote”. (Woman speaking in Spanish) I’m here because I want a country of clear rules with transparency and with democracy, of course.

Gideon Rachman
On February 26th, many thousands of people gathered in the central square of Mexico City to protest against Amlo’s plans to slash the budget for Mexico’s electoral commission. President López Obrador is a man with his own unique style. He starts every working day with a press conference, which usually runs at least two hours, in which he holds forth about the world and denounces his critics.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador
(Speaking in Spanish)

Gideon Rachman
What happens in Mexico matters a lot to the rest of the world. Mexico is a member of the G20 group of leading economies. It’s the second most populous country in Latin America after Brazil. It’s the centre for the world’s automobile trade, but also for the world’s drugs trade. Some regard Amlo’s antics as little more than the theatrical politics of a natural populist. Others see his presidency in a much darker light. Denise Dresser has argued that Mexico is a dying democracy. So I began our conversation in Mexico City by asking Professor Dresser to justify that idea.

Denise Dresser
Well, Mexico became famous in the year 2000 for voting out a ruling party after 70 years of dominant party rule — the former ruling party infamously remembered as the Revolutionary Institutional party, which had been in office for a very long time. Mexico had a voted transition. We had, I’d say, 25, 30 years of competitive elections, and we kicked the PRI out of office. The National Action Party was in power for 12 years, then the PRI came back and then finally a leftwing party was voted into power in 2018. And we thought that all of that boded well for the country because we’d had a democratic transition.

But then we elected someone who got into office, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and he decried the past, said that there hadn’t really been a democratic transition, that democracy became real when he was elected and that the country had to do away with all of those neoliberal electoral trappings and inaugurate what he called a real, a true democracy. And what he’s done, it’s tantamount to dismantling checks and balances, concentrating power in his own hands, trying to basically destroy what was the autonomous electoral institution that led to competitive elections, empowering the military, ruling in a very arbitrary discretionary fashion. When I say empowering the military, 246 activities that used to be in the hands of civilians are now in the hands of the military, which had never happened in Mexico’s history. So when you put this all together, the story is actually a very troubling story because it means a regression. It means going back to the past when there was essentially one big dominant party and other small parties that could never win. And what we called an imperial president that ruled in an unaccountable fashion with very few checks and balances, and those that we managed to construct since 2000 up until now are basically being dismantled, colonised, destroyed, ignored.

Gideon Rachman
But Amlo’s defenders, I guess, would say, well, you know, he is gonna step down. He’s gonna respect the one term, as far as we know, and he’s very popular. So it’s overblown to say he’s dismantling Mexican democracy.

Denise Dresser
I think that’s a self-serving and naive view. When people say that, what they’re really saying is because this guy is going to leave office, that means that democracy will remain. Well, he may leave office, but he’s going to do something that Mexico hadn’t witnessed in 30 years, which is he’s going to handpick his successor. There will be no Democratic primary and that person will go on to win, because once you’ve changed the rules of the game in such a way that there’s no longer a level playing field, well, you can have what we had in the past. Under the PRI, we had elections every six years that the same party always won. We didn’t have checks and balances. We had a president who governed on a whim. We had arbitrary rule. And that’s what we’ll be going back to. And in terms of popularity, popularity is not the same as legitimacy. Popularity is not the same as accountability. Being popular does not mean that you’re democratic. And López Obrador is very popular because he holds a morning press conference that can last anywhere between two and three hours.

Gideon Rachman
That’s every day.

Denise Dresser
Every day. And he disseminates a narrative. The “fourth transformation”, as he calls it, is anti-elite. It’s for the people. It’s against the establishment. It is against the ruling classes that were oligarchical and insensitive. And he is a man of the true people. And in a very unjust, unequal country that Mexico is and has been, electoral democracy doesn’t mean very much to millions who are now receiving subsidies, dole outs, a vast array of government programmes designed to basically distribute cash to the marginalised, the impoverished . . . 

Gideon Rachman
That Amlo set up.

Denise Dresser
 . . . that he has set up and who, people who feel for the first time that they’re truly represented, that he’s giving voice to them and to their grievances. And Mexico is on a par or similar to other countries that are experiencing what we call democratic backsliding, where what we once defended and fought for in the 1990s is being dismantled by someone who says, “That wasn’t democracy. Democracy is me and I’m the people”.

Gideon Rachman
And yet, I suppose, you know, again, playing devil’s advocate, or perhaps Amlo’s advocate, he would say, well, you know, if you are one of these poor people, the composition of the electoral commission is so abstract, it doesn’t really matter to you. What matters to you is I put money in your pockets, I’ve redistributed cash and that is maybe not formally democratic, but it’s in the interest of the majority of Mexicans. And people like Denise Dresser may not like it, but I’m popular.

Denise Dresser
Well, yes, but he’s popular insofar as he creates a very successful narrative. And that narrative is based on dividing the population between the elites and the people, the good and the bad. Every morning press conference is staged to identify the enemies of the people and decry them, whether they’re critics, journalists, businessmen, scientists — those that he identifies as the elites.

And one could argue that OK, it’s all right to sacrifice electoral democracy and competition among parties if you’re actually benefiting the vast majority of the people. I wouldn’t support that argument, but you could make it.

However, the data, the real data out there in terms of what he’s done to improve the lot of his electoral base contradicts everything he stands for. All of the data that’s coming out in terms of concentration of wealth and whether the lot of the poor has improved shows that he isn’t the grand saviour that he pretends that he is and markets himself to be. The lot of the poor has become worse, substantially worse. Mexico today has 3.8mn new poor. And you could say, well, this is partially because of the Covid pandemic. Well, that’s true, but because Amlo, paradoxically a leader of the left, he describes himself as a member of the left, did not implement any kind of measures to protect poor people or businesses in the midst of the pandemic. He didn’t use a face mask. He was pretty much like Trump or Bolsonaro in terms of minimising the impact of the pandemic. And Mexico had one of the highest rates of Covid mortality — 600,000 deaths in the pandemic, which could have been avoided had there been different government policies.

And in terms of concentration of wealth, Mexico, I’d say one of its big burdens historically has been crony capitalism. And that, I’d say, is the main reason why we haven’t prospered for many years. And the problem is that crony capitalism is alive and well, except those cronies are now his cronies, the 15 wealthiest Mexicans, the same 15 wealthiest Mexicans. They’re a lot improved substantially under his administration. They’re now worth 30 per cent more than they were worth before the beginning of this administration. So to say that this has been the best government for the dispossessed and the marginalised people of Mexico, I think it’s a myth. It’s a very effective myth, but it’s contradicted by the data. And when the president is confronted by the data that’s even coming out of official sources, he will always say, “Yo tengo otros datos (I have other data. I have my own data)”.

Gideon Rachman
Right. And yet for you, this must be almost a personal disillusionment because you knew him quite well and you voted for him.

Denise Dresser
I voted for him three times. And I think people could call me either stupid or naive, But there were specific reasons to vote for him in the past three presidential elections, and the last time I did so, it was with enormous ambivalence. But I thought that he had tempered himself, had become more moderate. He surrounded himself by pragmatists who vowed that he was going to govern like a social democrat and rein himself in. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. He won by a landslide. And I think that landslide empowered him to create a mandate that the polls did not give him. And because he also won a majority in Congress, it gave him the political and institutional capacity to govern like an imperial president.

Gideon Rachman
And I mean, you said that he attacks his critics by name quite frequently. You were perhaps too modest or too discreet to mention that you are one of the people he attacks most frequently.

Denise Dresser
I think in part because I voted for him. And he views this as a sort of personal vendetta or that I have been a traitor to his cause. But I’ve been mentioned 86 times in the morning press conference. He erects a straw woman. He calls me a conservative or he calls me a traitor to the country, or that I’m not one of the people or that I’m against the fourth transformation because I used to have privileges and now I’ve lost those privileges. It’s all part of a very successful narrative, even though I think that I remain true, as many of his critics do, to democracy, social justice, transparency, accountability, which were the causes of the left 20 years ago. They’re no longer his causes, but they’re still ours.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And can you explain to me or give me a sense of what the consequences for you are, having followed similar-ish stories in places like India and Turkey? You know, I have friends who’ve lost their job, friends who are in prison. You thankfully, are still in your job, but you face the kind of level of personal vitriol, I guess, on social media and things which must make life pretty unpleasant in some way.

Denise Dresser
Well, it’s not pleasant to wake up in the morning and see that you’re a trending topic in your country because the president has once again lambasted you in the press conference. It translates into having a bull’s eye put on your back. And when the president attacks a journalist or a critic or a thinker, he turns that person into free game in a country that is one of the most dangerous to be a journalist. Journalists here are assassinated almost on a weekly basis. So then you become a target for everybody else. And I think it’s extremely irresponsible on his part. But the real reason he does it is it’s a form of character assassination. Because if you’re a critic and he presents you as a traitor to the cause or says that you are disseminating fake news — and that’s a favourite phrase of his, it’s very Trumpian — then his followers will think that your criticism is fake news.

Gideon Rachman
And impute all sorts of motives to you that he (inaudible) . . . 

Denise Dresser
Exactly. And then he won’t face your argument on the merits. He will attack you for who you are. It is Mexican identity politics. And . . . 

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And of course, even if you’re not necessarily at risk of losing your job, it has an immense, intimidatory effect on a lot of people, I think.

Denise Dresser
Absolutely. And it means that you are yelled out in the street or that you’re chased in a public square or that you . . . 

Gideon Rachman
And all of that’s happened to you.

Denise Dresser
Yes. Or that you’re fearful of going to a march that you’ve gone to before because his sympathisers will tug at you and pull at you and force you out of the public space. I walked through downtown recently from one museum to the other. It’s the first time in my many decades of life in this country as a Mexican where I felt nervous. I’ve been confronted in supermarkets. I’ve had to run out in fear. The one consolation is that my children no longer live in Mexico and I have multiple jobs, so he can’t really force me out of one or the other. And none of those jobs entail any government resources. So financial independence gives you intellectual independence and integrity. But this is a presidency that exercises many levers of power, and one of them is shifting public opinion against you and making you a target and making you feel extremely vulnerable. And it inhibits freedom of expression in other people who don’t have my level of freedom.

Gideon Rachman
Indeed. And so how irreversible do you think the damage he’s done is? Because some say that the reform, as he would call it — you would call it the gutting of the electoral commission — might not go through. That the Supreme Court might block it. And I guess, you know, those who say, oh, it’s not that bad, say, well, you know, the very possibility that the Supreme Court might strike this down tells you there are still independent institutions in this country. It’s not a dictatorship.

Denise Dresser
I wouldn’t call it a dictatorship. I’d call it authoritarian populism. And I think that’s a very distinct category and one that is spreading throughout the world. And it has nothing to do with ideology. You can find these kind of authoritarian populists in the left and in the right. I’d say that those people who are not focusing and paying enough attention to Mexico and think there’s nothing to worry about are severely misguided, because if you’re paying attention, it’s not just the gutting of the electoral authorities. It’s not just changing the rules of the electoral game. It’s eliminating every check and balance that we had tried to construct over the past 30 years: the National Transparency Institute, regulatory bodies to combat crony capitalism, it’s the Human Rights Commission, even the Senate and Congress where he’s able to pressure opposition parties to change their vote and side with him. He cajoles, he blackmails, and this form of very polarising politics, this will be his legacy, along with the militarisation of Mexico.

Give me an example of any country in the world where so many civilian activities, such as running airports, public security — in other words, replacing the police — customs, the ports, are run by the military, including airspace, where that country remains a democracy. Giving so much power and so much leeway and so much financial gain to the military does not bode well for Mexican democracy in the future. He is endowing a force that has no accountability, that has no transparency, that is completely loyal to him and to the fourth transformation, as he calls his movement, and not to elected officials. If that doesn’t ring the alarm, then we don’t have a shared understanding of what basic democracy means.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And yet, you know, next door, he has the United States. President Biden has made the restoration of American democracy, but also the support of democracy worldwide, a key theme of his presidency. He was just in Ukraine. Why hasn’t the US sounded the alarm?

Denise Dresser
Because Mexico is the exception to Biden’s democracy and human rights agenda for very pragmatic reasons that have to do with immigration, immigration, immigration. Trump ran and won on the basis of a very xenophobic, anti-immigrant platform, anti-Mexico platform. And even though Trump may not be a presidential candidate, Trumpism is alive and well in the United States.

Gideon Rachman
I think he will be a presidential candidate (overlapping words).

Denise Dresser
Or someone else with his agenda might be, Ron DeSantis or any of those, and they’ll run the same kind of campaign. And Biden has to show, he has to prove that he’s not vulnerable, that the border and the control of the border and the control of immigration is not his Achilles heel. So he’s decided to turn a blind eye to democratic backsliding in Mexico because López Obrador is functional. López Obrador continues to do for Biden what he did for Trump, which is to use the military to detain immigrants, to essentially transform Mexico into a third safe country, which means thousands of Nicaraguans, Haitians, Venezuelans are being deported on a monthly basis back to Mexico.

Gideon Rachman
And have they just not struck a deal, in fact, that Mexico will take 30,000 deportees a month?

Denise Dresser
A month. So Biden came to Mexico recently. He did not say a word about democratic backsliding. He did not say a word about militarisation. He praised López Obrador even though there is a very contentious commercial dispute taking place between Mexico, the US and Canada because Mexico is in clear violation of commitments that it acquired under the free trade agreement, because of López Obrador’s very nationalistic position on propping up state-owned monopolies in energy which contradict the spirit of competition in the field of energy among the three countries. Biden decided to not bring that up as a topic because he got this deal. You know, Biden has made this pact with the devil, and this is a devil that is very functional to him. He may be a devil, but he’s our devil, one might say.

Gideon Rachman
And indeed, the very importance of Mexico on immigration. But also, I guess you’ve talked to the US. The other thing they’re very concerned about is drugs and the production of fentanyl in particular, which is killing many thousands of Americans. And it’s coming out of here.

Denise Dresser
And perhaps people in the State Department in the US think, well, the militarisation of Mexico may not be a bad thing because, you know, the military will help us combat drug trafficking and take down the producers of fentanyl, whatever. But that, I think, is a position that assumes incorrectly that the military can never be corrupted. And historically, that has not been the case. And there’s just been a trial of the person who was the head of Mexico’s security forces back in the Calderón administration in 2006. He’s just been found guilty in a New York court on all counts of being in bed with the Sinaloa cartel: guilty of trafficking cocaine, receiving bribes, protecting the cartel. If that happened to a civilian, why wouldn’t it happen to a member of the military?

Gideon Rachman
So let’s just finish by talking about the drugs issue and the issue of violent crime here in Mexico, because the figures are pretty staggering, I mean.

Denise Dresser
They are staggering. We have the numbers of a country. It’s as if we’d been in a civil war, but we haven’t been in a civil war.

Gideon Rachman
You’ve lost what, 400,000 people killed by violence in the last five . . . 

Denise Dresser
In the last, I’d say 15 years, 18 years.

Gideon Rachman
And 100,000 disappeared.

Denise Dresser
More than that now. People who have just vanished and there are civil society organisations of Madres Buscadoras, mothers who are searching for their lost children. Just think about that number for a moment: 100,000 people who you can’t locate, who every day they find clandestine graves, evidence of massacres committed either by drug traffickers or organised crime or the military. The culprits are unclear, but Mexico is becoming one of the most violent countries in the western hemisphere. And in the midst of all of this, the solution has been consistently to militarise. Instead of creating a functional police, instead of addressing rule of law issues, instead of deciding, well, we shouldn’t be fighting a war against drugs, it’s a futile war. We’re never going to win it ’cause it’s an American war that is being fought on Mexican soil. But Mexico has very little leeway. Mexico is not going to decriminalise drugs even if that’s the rational perspective in terms of its own national security interests, because there’s too much American pressure not to do so.

Gideon Rachman
But Amlo, what does he say about that? Because, I mean, as you say, he is a self-styled man of the left. I think one of the few things that he’s not generally accused of is personal corruption. Why does . . . 

Denise Dresser
Can we please stop calling him a member of the left?

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I did say self-styled member of the left. He would regard himself as a member of the left, wouldn’t he?

Denise Dresser
Well, it depends what kind of left you’re thinking of. We’re talking about a president that does not support abortion rights. Does not think combating climate change is a big issue, is not a defender of human rights, does not support the feminist agenda in Mexico in any way, shape or form. He’s not a progressive leftist, not even in terms of his social policies. He could have taxed the rich. He decided not to do so. He decided to jump into bed with them and maintain the status quo. And you say he’s personally not corrupt. I could agree with that assessment. But he has allowed corruption within his own party and within the government itself. There are multiple cases of fraud, of personal enrichment, of cronyism that have been fully documented, and that he has turned a blind eye to because it may be corruption, but it’s the ends justify the means. And if the means benefit the people in the long run, it’s just something that we had to do. And so we’re going to let my friends do public works and construct everything I want to build without having to go through a competitive process.

Gideon Rachman
The point that I was going to get to relating to drugs and violence and the disappeared in particular is that you would expect that somebody who says he has the interests of common people at heart to be very concerned by issues such as the disappeared. What has he done about that, if anything?

Denise Dresser
Well, he campaigned saying that he was going to be close to the agenda of the disappeared, and he also campaigned on demilitarising the country. It’s one of the reasons why I voted for him. He said in two months, the military will return to the barracks. Upon assuming office, I guess he had the conversations with the Mexican military and they probably told him, we’re here, we’re not leaving. And this is, these are the alternatives you have. And he decided instead of returning the military to the barracks to actually give it more power. So once you do that, you cannot side with the mothers of the disappeared. You cannot solve crimes like Ayotzinapa, where the 43 students were killed years ago, because all of those themes involve actually calling the military into account. And if you’re co-governing with the military, you’re not going to investigate it, you’re not going to put it on trial, you’re not going to ask that it be accountable to the people. So there’s a fundamental contradiction in this style of governing that bodes ill for whatever is left of Mexican democracy by the time López Obrador leaves office in 2024.

Gideon Rachman
To finish, you struck me as somebody who’s obviously not a quitter, as they say. You’re gonna keep pushing on these issues. I mean, you seem to have deep foreboding about the legacy that López Obrador is going to leave. But what does Mexico, in your view, need to do? What do we need to see to get the country back on the right path?

Denise Dresser
Well, one of the reasons that López Obrador has been able to act in such an unconstricted way is that there’s no functional opposition, either on the left or on the right. And every morning he uses the press conference to denounce opposition parties as conservative enemies of the people, elitist. And of course, those parties were in government in the past, and he can always point to their mistakes. And that’s a leitmotif throughout the morning press conferences.

And the opposition has not come up with a strategy that actually works against a very able politician with a very successful narrative that strikes a deep chord that provokes emotional, tribal, I’d say identity politics kind of affiliations. So it’s a divided opposition. It’s a discredited opposition. It’s leaderless. It seems kind of rudderless. And the only way in which the opposition could win the next presidential election is if it had a fresh face, a citizen candidate, someone who wasn’t tainted by past failures of governance and a united opposition.

But a united opposition would be a united opposition of the former ruling party, the PRI, and the former ruling party, the National Action party. Both have a legacy of bad governance and of corruption. So the president is going to point and say that’s a return to the status quo.

What would you have to do? You’d probably have to have an international community that actually started sounding the alarm bells. You’d have to have a Biden administration that was willing to speak out instead of just sweating López Obrador out and hoping that whoever succeeds him will be more pragmatic and have fewer authoritarian tendencies. You’d have to create incentives for Mexico to truly integrate into the rest of North America and take advantage of what’s happening in China, global markets, nearshoring.

Mexico has not been a country that has grown at a fast pace despite having a free trade agreement and having had it in place since 1994. And one of the reasons has been cronyism, corruption, lack of rule of law issues. So you’d have to address those in order to get Mexico back on track. And that isn’t a question of the next person, the next candidate. These are systemic and structural issues that would have to be addressed. And there are also institutional issues. But everybody seems to be focused on who will López Obrador choose. And that to me is deeply regressive because once again, we’re going back to pre-1990s when the way of interpreting Mexico was trying to get into the president’s head and figuring out who he was going to choose.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Professor Denise Dresser with the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico City, ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening. Please join me again next week.

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