Tag Archives: #AMLO

Mexico celebrates Presidenta Sheinbaum

by Jim Hodgson

For the first time, Mexicans have chosen a woman to be their president. She is Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, a climate scientist who previously served as mayor of Mexico City. 

“The transformation continues!” A campaign billboard promotes the campaign of Claudia Sheinbaum in the southern state of Chiapas. The slogan refers to the ‘Fourth Transformation‘ of Mexican political institutions and the economy begun by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

That a woman is president is no minor detail. It was only in the middle of the last century that women in Mexico won the rights to vote and to run for public office. Even now, only 14 of 193 nations have women in power as presidents or prime ministers.

Sheinbaum can be expected to continue the generally progressive approaches taken by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). Her leading opponent was businesswoman and former senator Xóchitl Gálvez, candidate of a centre-right coalition. 

A CBC News report days earlier said that neither Sheinbaum nor Gálvez actually committed themselves to “real change for women” on issues such as pay equity, reproductive rights, or violence against women. 

One of Mexico’s leading journalists, Blanche Petrich, wrote that three women (Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Cristina Fernández in Argentina, and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil) who were representative of the progressive “pink wave” governments in Latin America did not “leave a legacy that would definitively reverse gender inequality.” 

A CBC News report on the quality of feminism represented by Mexico’s two leading candidates, and Blanche Petrich’s review in La Jornada of past experiences of women as presidents in Latin America.

Bachelet, notes Petrich, once said: 

“What does it mean to be a woman in public office? Is it to be the same as a man, but with a skirt? No. When a woman arrives alone in politics, the woman changes. When many women arrive in politics, politics change. And clearly, one of the challenges and needs of our democracy is to improve the quality of politics.”

In the Mexican election, Sheinbaum and Gálvez tended to address issues of concern to women within a range of economic, social and criminal justice proposals. Framed this way, there were sharp differences between the two.

Sheinbaum will continue to give priority to social programs, pensions and scholarships that benefit the least advantaged, as well as concentrating on investment in infrastructure to support industries that create jobs. The approach by Gálvez was that of conservatives everywhere: keep taxes—and wages—low and let the market take care of the rest (though she did promise to maintain AMLO’s social programs).

At her victory celebration late Sunday night, Sheinbaum affirmed her movement’s commitment to democracy. “By conviction, we will never make an authoritarian or repressive government. We will also respect political, social, cultural and religious freedoms, and gender and sexual diversity.”

Regarding criminal justice issues (which media tend to subsume under the heading “security”), Mexico obviously has serious problems. At least 34 candidates were killed during the election period that included national as well as some state and municipal elections. 

There are still about 30,000 homicides per year, though the government says the number has been dropping by about five per cent per year. 

AMLO tried to turn back the violence unleashed by one of his predecessors. In 2006, then-President Felipe Calderón, with backing from the United States, launched a military-led offensive against the drug cartels to curb their violent turf wars. Instead, the violence became much worse. 

AMLO promoted an approach he called “abrazos no balazos”–hugs not bullets. It meant addressing the social roots of violence by giving people the education and other resources they need to avoid being drawn into the drug-trafficking cartels and their systems of power. Over the long term, the approach should lead to reduced levels of violence.

But it has been controversial and is subject to manipulation, even in mainstream media like The New York Times, and has led to threats of military intervention from various U.S. politicians, including the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump. 

Even within the AMLO-Sheinbaum coalition, there is agitation. When Eduardo Ramírez–a former AMLO opponent who, like too many others, opportunistically shifted loyalties–celebrated his victory as governor of Chiapas Sunday night, he said: “There will be hugs, but no impunity.”

From Palenque, Chiapas, Latin American leaders call for migration solutions

In recent weeks, my partner and I took a long drive from British Columbia through the western United States and then almost the length of Mexico to arrive in Chiapas.

While people who migrate northwards either for seasonal work or for more permanent refuge from poverty, violence and impacts of climate change were on our minds and in the news, at least some of the people we met alongside us in gas stations and cafés were seasonal workers heading home for the winter. 

Migration, my friends, is normal. In southern Texas and northern Mexico, we encountered thousands of monarch butterflies as they headed for Michoacán. And here in Chiapas, the migratory birds are arriving daily.

At around the time of our trip, leaders of ten nations of Latin America and the Caribbean – frustrated by slow progress with the United States (and other northern countries) in advancing meaningful human development and managing the flow of people – gathered in the historic Maya city of Palenque, Chiapas, and proposed some ways forward.

Photo from the Office of the President of Mexico

Led by Mexico, the governments of Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Panama and Venezuela signed the Palenque Declaration on Oct. 22 and called for solutions. (A representative of the newly-elected government in Guatemala also joined the talks.)

In the declaration, presented by the Mexican Foreign Minister, Alicia Bárcena, the leaders described several structural causes of migration: internally political, economic, social factors and the effects of climate change. But they also pointed to “external factors such as unilateral coercive measures of an indiscriminate nature – dictated from the United States – that negatively affect entire populations and, to a greater extent, the most vulnerable people and communities.”

They urged the United States to lift the sanctions imposed on Cuba and Venezuela that help drive the exodus. Such sanctions are against international law and, as the migration flow shows, they have impacts beyond the countries to which they are applied.

The document also proposed undertaking efforts to modify the financial architecture of debt; to close social gaps to as to reduce the impulse to migrate; push for measures aimed at increasing agricultural activity to promote food self-sufficiency in the region; and to promote intraregional trade and investment for socioeconomic development.

The signatory nations stressed that measures must be taken to confront transnational organized crime, human trafficking and corruption, as well as promote joint cooperation in security matters.

They called for destination countries to “adopt immigration policies and practices in line with the current reality of our region and abandon those that are inconsistent and selective, to avoid arbitrarily producing both ‘call effects’ and ‘deterrent effects’ – advantages given to certain countries for political reasons while nationals of other countries are blocked.

They encouraged destination countries to widen their regular migration pathways, with emphasis on labour mobility and promotion of re-integration and safe return of temporary workers to their homes.

The declaration makes special mention of Haiti, and called on nations to support efforts by the United Nations and others to re-establish conditions for human security so that the political, economic and social situation may be normalized, and to focus on sustainable development. (The presence of the Haitian president at the gathering angered some of the Haitian migrants camped out in the centre of Palenque, reported La Jornada.)

Undated photo from Prensa Latina.

The declaration’s emphasis on economic drivers of migration did not satisfy everyone. Eunice Rendón of the Mexican advocacy group Agenda Migrante told Courthouse News Service that while insecurity was mentioned as a factor driving migration, “it’s not one of the causes, it’s the principal cause,” Rendón said.

“People go because the gang members threaten to kill them, because they try to forcibly recruit them,” she said. (Some might argue that the lack of education and employment opportunities are drivers as well in recruitment for organized crime.)

Meanwhile, migration dramas continue. On Nov. 9, authorities reported that they found found 123 Central and South American migrants trapped in a trailer in Matehuala, San Luís Potosí (less than a week after we passed through there). And than 400,000 migrants have crossed the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama in 2023, according to the Panamanian government, up from 250,000 in 2022.

“The narco conquest of Indigenous land is like all the other conquests”

In September 1987, during my first visit to Mexico, I took a train through the Sierra Tarahumara from Chihuahua city to Creel and then along the rim of the spectacular Copper Canyon (left) to Los Mochis on the Pacific coast in Sinaloa state. (Now the same trip is a fancier tourist excursion, the Chepe Express.)

The murders last month in the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico’s Chihuahua state of two Jesuit priests sparked grief and tension among Indigenous people, the Catholic church and various levels of Mexican government. The priests were Javier Campos Morales, 79, and Joaquín Mora Salazar, 81, known respectively as Gallo and Morita. A third person killed with them, Pedro Heliodoro Palma, was described as a tourist guide. Their bodies were taken by the killers, who were said by police to be linked to the Sinaloa cartel.

Mexican Jesuits recognized “with humility” that in a country with more than 100,000 disappeared people, they were fortunate to recover the bodies of their brothers within 72 hours of their disappearance. “A search that was coordinated among three levels of government reflects intense attention and action are likely not accessible to the immense majority of families whose cases do not gain public attention.”

In the last 30 years, 70 Catholic priests have been murdered in Mexico, including seven during the current presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). The motives, wrote sociologist Bernardo Barranco in La Jornada, are multiple: theft, kidnapping, extorsion, passion and politics. I would add incidental contact with drug-traffickers who, in this case, seem to have been chasing someone who sought refuge in the church in Cerocahui, municipality of Urique, where the Jesuits have carried out ministry among the Rarámuri Indigenous people in the Sierra Tarahumara. 

In 2006, then-President Felipe Calderón launched a military-led offensive against the drug cartels in an attempt to curb their violent turf wars. Instead, the violence became worse. 

In the town of Creel, in southwest Chihuahua, on Aug. 16, 2008, gunmen opened fire on a group of young people who were participating in a barefoot family race. One of them was carrying his baby in his arms. Some of the youth were related to the town’s mayor but had no link to organized crime. Thirteen people, including the baby, died. 

A few weeks later, Jesuit Fr. Ricardo Robles wrote: 

For a while now, but especially in recent months, a group of friends and I have been trying to better understand the significance of the evermore extended presence of the narco in the Sierra Tarahumara. It’s the narco-planting, that in some areas has seen four generations of narco-cultivators and has made this way of life become ordinary, indeed almost the only lifestyle now. But it is also the narco-transportation, the narco-struggle for control of territories, the generalized narco-corruption, including paid-for narco-elections, the abundant narco-money-launderers and the small narco-traffickers and narco-consumers. 

What is new in what we are seeing with the narco? A Rarámuri friend said it is the same thing they have seen for five centuries. “It’s another activity in which Indigenous people are pressured and obliged to work. It was the same with the mines,” he said. “There was the same violence and crime, the same deaths, the same enrichment and impoverishment and in everything we were left with the worst part. The same with the invasion of our territories, the same with the theft of our forests, the same with tourism that even takes our water, the same with the return of the mines. The same when one day they brought the planting of marijuana and poppies. For us it’s the same thing. This is how invasions are, but perhaps for you this seems new.”  

Perhaps all that is truly new is that now the blood is spattered on all of us, that we are all being conquered, tyrannized and forced to submit.

The Spanish conquistadores, hungry for gold and other precious minerals, arrived in the Rarámuri territory in 1589. The Jesuit religious order followed in 1608. They were expelled from the Spanish colony and 19th-century Mexico, but returned after 133 years in 1900 with the intention of educating the Indigenous people. La Jornada journalist Luis Hernández Navarro writes that after facing about 40 years of resistance, the Mexican Jesuits finally began to learn from the Rarámuri. By the 1960s, they had set aside their western notions and moved closer to the Rarámuri cosmovision. The Rarámuri converted the Jesuits “from being carriers of a doctrine into disciples, from being do-gooders into friends of the men and women of the Sierra Tarahumara, and companions in their secular resistance and defence of their freedom and autonomy.” Hernández adds that the two Jesuits killed in June had “accompanied the Rarámuri people who were subjects of their own history and not objects for colonization.”

In 2017, one of Hernández’s own La Jornada colleagues, Miroslava Breach, was murdered after documenting the expansion of organized crimes and its links with political institutions in Chihuahua. The image on the right is from the Committee to Protect Journalists. By the end of June, at least 10 journalists had been killed in Mexico this year.

At the funeral June 25 of the slain priests, Fr. Javier Ávila Aguirre, the Jesuit who serves at Creel, called on President López Obrador during his homily to look again at his approach to public security. “Our tone is peaceful but loud and clear. We call for actions from government that end impunity. Thousands of people in pain and without voice clamour for justice in our nation. Hugs are no longer enough to cover the bullets.”

In his daily news conference on June 30, the president responded: “Those expressions of ‘hugs are not enough.’ What would the priests have us do? That we resolve problems with violence? That we disappear everyone? That we bet on war?”

The point, however, made by human rights groups and some religious leaders, is that after nearly four years AMLO’s approach to the drug war has not produced a noticable reduction in violent attacks on civilians – or priests or journalists. While the president says he is working on the “causes of violence” – poverty, marginalization, exclusion – what people want is protection now. 

The issues raised by the Jesuits and human rights groups should not be seen as normal political attacks on an incumbent politician, but rather contributions in a search for real solutions. 

Bernardo Barranco, the sociologist-columnist cited above, told a La Jornada colleague in an interview that churches are present in places where the state is absent, and that they could have a mediating role. He pointed to the state of Guerrero where, for example, Bishop Salvador Rangel of Chilpancingo-Chilapa negotiated in 2018 with organized crime so as to end the assassination of local candidates and to permit the population to vote. 

Such conversations may not lead to solutions in every instance, but it’s clear that new ideas and less defensive dialogue are needed if Mexico is to find a way forward.

And North American narco-consumers need to say NO to illegal drugs, at least for the sake of solidarity with victims of narco-violence.