AMLO and his impact on Latin America

The arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the presidency of Mexico had an important impact on the boost to anti-neoliberal struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC, by its Spanish acronym).

As the presidential elections were nearing and his nomination was growing, the revolutionary and progressive circles of Our America were filled with joy and hope. Let us make a review.

When the Mexican presidential election took place in July 2018, our region was undergoing a significant political regression to both the right and neoliberalism’s hegemony as a result of the temporary victories achieved by an unfettered oligarchic imperialist offensive, which continues. After the blow meant by the electoral defeat of the left in Argentina in 2015, there came the parliamentary-judicial-media coup against the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff in 2016, and the establishment of a pro US stooge government in the country, event that marked a big turn to the right in the regional balance of forces. Then, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was incarcerated to prevent him from running in the October 2018 presidential elections in Brazil, where he would have been a clear winner, indispensable move to consolidate the neoliberal comeback. This, along with a huge smear campaign against the Workers’ Party (PT, by its Spanish acronym), many of whose members were incarcerated and prosecuted without the slightest evidence just as Lula. Another huge fraud in Honduras in 2017 prevented the return of the progressive forces to the government and allowed criminal and imperialism’s agent Juan Orlando Hernández to remain in office. Lawfare spread to Argentina, where Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) and several of her collaborators were subject to a fierce judicial persecution and some of them were imprisoned through concocted causes.

To all such, shortly after Donald Trump took office in the United States, he unleashed an extraordinary onslaught for its ferocity and impudence against the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions, as if Barack Obama’s punitive and unilateral anti-Venezuelan measures had been little and as well as those Cuba continued to suffer after the discreet opening of the Afro American president. The goal is to make Cubans and Venezuelans die of starvation and diseases, not punishing their rulers as spokespeople of the empire shamelessly affirm.

In this context, AMLO’s electoral victory caused a huge joy in the Latin American and Caribbean left, which quite rightly celebrated his victory as their own. Likewise, the record against neoliberal policies in his first year in office, with an extraordinary transfer of economic resources to largely disadvantaged sectors of the population, particularly native peoples, the recovery of the energy sector from ruin and the hands of transnational companies in which neoliberal governments left it, the defense of sovereignty, non-intervention and other very important foreign policy principles enshrined in the Mexican Constitution, are measures that have exerted a very significant incentive in the outbreak of the current anti-neoliberal uprising of the peoples of Our America. It does not mean that the Mexican government had intended it or had anything to do with the organization of the ongoing protests. Not at all, What Mexico has done is just to set the example that an alternative path to neoliberalism can be undertaken at a time when right-wing sectors and self-styled left authors have already given the so-called progressive cycle in Latin America and the Caribbean as closed. We would allegedly enter an endless stage of conservative restoration, but what we are actually seeing is a bloom of defiance against the brutal suppression of neoliberals. An important evidence, along with what we have mentioned, is the electoral victory of the Fernández-Fernández pair in a country as important as Argentina.

A fact that has magnified and earned the government of Mexico huge respect in our American lands has been the remarkable rescue operation and political asylum granted to Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera, President and Vice-President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, ousted by a fascist coup d’état. AMLO has been very clear: “Evo is not only our brother who represents with dignity the majority of indigenous people of Bolivia. Evo was the victim of a coup d’état. And from Mexico, we tell the world: Yes to democracy, no to militarism.”

A not less important fact is that the first state visit of a president to Mexico in the “Fourth Transformation” (4T) was that of Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel.

It is very significant for Our America that Mexico will take over the presidency of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, by its Spanish acronym) from January 2020, because it entails a guarantee that unity and integration will revive in our region.

Translated by Jorge Mesa Benjamin / CubaSi Translation Staff