>Sick of corruption and of Trump, voters embrace the maverick leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
>Proclaiming a “people’s struggle” against the country’s “power mafia,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador is regularly mobbed on the Presidential campaign trail.
>The current Mexican government is led by the center-right President Enrique Peña Nieto. His party, the pri, has depicted López Obrador as a radical populist, in the tradition of Hugo Chávez, and warned that he intends to turn Mexico into another Venezuela. The Trump Administration has been similarly concerned. Roberta Jacobson, who until last month was the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, told me that senior American officials often expressed worry: “They catastrophized about amlo, saying things like ‘If he wins, the worst will happen.’ ”
>Ironically, his surging popularity can be attributed partly to Donald Trump. Within days of Trump’s election, Mexican political analysts were predicting that his open belligerence toward Mexico would encourage political resistance. Mentor Tijerina, a prominent pollster in Monterrey, told me at the time, “Trump’s arrival signifies a crisis for Mexico, and this will help amlo.” Not long after the Inauguration, López Obrador published a best-selling book called “Oye, Trump” (“Listen Up, Trump”), which contained tough-talking snippets from his speeches. In one, he declared, “Trump and his advisers speak of the Mexicans the way Hitler and the Nazis referred to the Jews, just before undertaking the infamous persecution and the abominable extermination.”
Aaron Foster
>Officials in the Peña Nieto government warned their counterparts in the White House that Trump’s offensive behavior heightened the prospect of a hostile new government—a national-security threat just across the border. If Trump didn’t modulate his behavior, the election would be a referendum on which candidate was the most anti-American. In the U.S., the warnings worked. During a Senate hearing in April, 2017, John McCain said, “If the election were tomorrow in Mexico, you would probably get a left-wing, anti-American President.” John Kelly, who was then the Homeland Security chief, agreed. “It would not be good for America—or for Mexico,” he said.
>In Mexico, remarks like Kelly’s seemed only to improve López Obrador’s standing. “Every time an American politician opens their mouth to express a negative view about a Mexican candidate, it helps him,” Jacobson said. But she has never been sure that Trump has the same “apocalyptic” view of amlo. “There are certain traits they share,” she noted. “The populism, for starters.” During the campaign, López Obrador has decried Mexico’s “pharaonic government” and promised that, if he is elected, he will decline to live in Los Pinos, the Presidential residence. Instead, he will open it to the public, as a place for ordinary families to go and enjoy themselves.
Levi Baker
BUILD
Leo Myers
>After Jacobson arrived in Mexico, in 2016, she arranged meetings with local political leaders. López Obrador kept her waiting for months. Finally, he invited her to his home, in a distant, unfashionable corner of Mexico City. “I had the impression he did that because he didn’t think I would come,” she said. “But I told him, ‘No problem, my security guys can make that work.’ ” Jacobson’s team followed his directions to an unremarkable two-story town house in Tlalpan, a middle-class district. “If part of the point was to show me how modestly he lived, he succeeded,” she said.
Xavier Watson
>López Obrador was “friendly and confident,” she said, but he deflected many of her questions and spoke vaguely about policy. The conversation did little to settle the issue of whether he was an opportunistic radical or a principled reformer. “What should we expect from him as President?” she said. “Honestly, my strongest feeling about him is that we don’t know what to expect.”
So they're furious that suddenly their Northern teat is running dry and they can't sneak into the US for gibs, so they vote for a belligerent Socialist? Good luck with that, build the damn wall.
Charles Ramirez
>EVIL HITLER TRUMP WANTS TO BUILD A WALL TO PREVENT ILLEGALS FROM GETTING IN ILLEGALLY >LET'S INVADE THEM WITH MOAR ILLEGALS Explain this logic to me
Oliver Price
If Obrador is not assassinated by a drug cartel hitman, then he is part of their apparatus. Or to be more precise, Obrador is part of the Deep State/Globalists, since the drug cartels are controlled by the CIA which is controlled by others.
Liam Myers
Maybe it's time Mexico got more in tax dollars for it's resources. You don't get much from the Globalist mining companies.
Luis Smith
Just like Maduro?
Caleb Parker
Mexicans dont know about logic
Caleb Barnes
>AYY PAPI TRUMPO GRINGO WONT LET ANY OF MY PEOPLE INTO AMERICA REE WE NEED A REVOLUTION FOR THE PEOPLE OPEN THE BORDERS NO MORE CORRUPTION COMMUNISM NOW
Lmao how do you Mutts even tolerate living next to a third world country that only exports shitskins and drugs?
Just nuke em from orbit before the Dems get in and Elysium becomes a reality
