Mexico’s Favorite Son

For decades, Mexico City has had a reputation for being ungovernable. The capitals metropolitan area, with nearly 25 million inhabitants, is wracked with violent street crime, urban decay, transportation gridlock, a come-back-tomorrow bureaucracy, and a constant influx of poor peasants who crowd into sprawling shantytowns. The citys mayorship has proved to be a dead end for ambitious politicians. So, when Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador became mayor in 2000, expectations were low.

Less than five years later, however, Lpez Obrador, a self-described ray of hope, has turned the city into his springboard to national political stardom. The 51-year-old chief of government endeared himself to millions by cutting officials salaries, curbing travel, and reducing bureaucrats access to cell phones, credit cards, and city vehicles. Being a man of the people, he gave $60 a month to single mothers, the elderly, and the disabledall made possible, he claimed, by his belt tightening. He awarded scholarships to poor students, obtained low-interest loans for small businesses, and founded the University of Mexico City, which admits students based on a lottery rather than entrance exams. He even exposed the featherbedding, waste, and sweetheart contracts of previous mayors from his own leftist-nationalist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD). Mayors worldwide marveled at his accomplishments, and voted Lpez Obrador, also known as AMLO, first runner-up in the voting for the worlds top mayor in 2004.

Now AMLO is thinking bigger. He recently stepped down to prepare for the 2006 presidential election, and he enjoys double-digit leads in polls matching him up with his likely opponents in President Vicente Foxs National Action Party (PAN) and the once hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Lpez Obradors nostalgia for the good old days when the government dominated Mexicos economy combined with his affinity for expensive social programs make foreign leaders and investors uneasy. Key elements of the political and business elite abhor Lpez Obrador, the son of small-time merchants, a man who has never worked in the private sector, doesnt speak English, and has seldom traveled abroad.

But, aside from Lpez Obrador, the field of candidates remains weak. The PAN and the PRI, which are beset with internal battles over their own potential presidential standard-bearers, show no signs of forging an alliance against their nemesis. In fact, Lpez Obrador can expect to recruit PRI defectors who despise their partys leader and likely candidate, Roberto Madrazo. Meanwhile, Lpez Obrador is preparing to crisscross the country to expand his network of supporters in the nations 31 states. With so much momentum, it appears that the only way he will fall short of his presidential ambitions is if he trips up himself. Unfortunately, for his sake, some see the hubris in this champion of the people as his biggest obstacle.

The Peoples Business
As mayor, Lpez Obrador began work before dawn. Each day, he held a 6:30 a.m. news conference, known as ma&#241aneros after the practice of early morning lovemaking by peasants too exhausted for nighttime romance. These sessions allowed López Obrador to set the agenda for the day’s first news cycle. It was also part of a carefully calculated strategy to set himself apart from other public officials. While they were dozing, he was conducting the people’s business. While they were chauffeured in fancy automobiles, he arrived at city hall in a beat-up Nissan. While they embellished their speeches with rhetorical flourishes, he spoke the language of the common man. While they made excuses for legislative inaction, he unveiled new programs to help the “have-nots.” According to Mexican media expert Federico Wilkins, López Obrador projected the image of a “poor Christ”—a public servant who “has no [personal] life because he lives for the people.”

But López Obrador did not leave his political fortunes in the hands of the poor alone. In a display of pragmatism and political savvy, he also courted Mexico City’s middle class. He constructed new bridges and roads to speed the city’s notoriously turgid traffic flows. He repaved sidewalks and planted gardens along the Paseo de la Reforma, a thoroughfare that connects affluent neighborhoods such as Las Lomas to the city’s downtown. And he convinced billionaire Carlos Slim, Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera, and President Fox to join his effort to restore the city’s blighted historic center, where crumbling colonial buildings had become infested with prostitutes, drug dealers, and sleazy nightclubs. Such efforts aside, the middle class remains skeptical of a messianic leader whose mayoral campaign slogan was, “For the Good of Everyone, First of all the Poor.”

Feeling Their Pain

With half of the nation’s 107 million people living in poverty, there’s no shortage of populist rhetoric in Mexico. Politicians regularly talk of uplifting the downtrodden, yet López Obrador has walked the walk like few others. His near-mythical status among many of Mexico’s poor goes back to his first job out of college.

In 1977, at the age of 23, he returned to his home state of Tabasco to live among the Chontal Indians and serve as the state coordinator for indigenous affairs. In that career-shaping post, he obtained land for the Indian communities, helped them acquire legal title to their property, paved dirt roads that snaked through their swampy zone, promoted housing construction, established schools, and awarded scholarships to youngsters for advanced education. He and his wife lived in a modest dwelling, and if nightfall found him in a remote village, he would sleep on a mat or hammock just as the locals did. Then, he would get up at 5 or 6 in the morning and work alongside them all day. The Chontals still call him lesho, which in Mayan conveys the idea of affection bordering on adoration.

In the early 1980s, López Obrador’s zeal to help the dispossessed led him to join the PRI, which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. At the time, its political strength made it the only channel for political success. But after vicious clashes with party “dinosaurs,” he bolted from the party in 1988 and, the following year, helped form the leftist-nationalist PRD. After losing two bids for the governorship of Tabasco, López Obrador became the party’s national president in 1996. Under his leadership, the PRD contingent in the Chamber of Deputies swelled from 71 in 1994 to 125 in 1997; the number of senators doubled to 16; and the PRD captured its first three statehouses, while joining coalitions that elected two additional governors. These stunning achievements earned López Obrador the PRD candidacy for the mayorship of Mexico City. He did not disappoint. Running on his trademark ability to connect with the poor, López Obrador beat out candidates from both the PRI and PAN with 34.5 percent of the vote.

The Messiah Complex

López Obrador’s supporters will tell you that the former mayor’s rising political fortunes have made him a lot of enemies. Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez, who now serves as interim mayor, has said the national government has “no scruples” at all and that its hope is to stop López Obrador from running to succeed Fox. The mayor’s puritanical reputation, for example, was called into question last year, when videotapes surfaced showing officials close to him receiving bundles of cash from a shadowy entrepreneur with dozens of city construction contracts. Instead of investigating these payoffs, López Obrador excoriated the accusations as a plot hatched by his political opponents, including President Fox, Interior Minister Santiago Creel, and the U.S. government. His ability to play the victim mitigated his drop in popularity.

There is no question that he is drawing fire from some of his political foes. In April, sensing López Obrador’s growing popularity, rival political parties attempted to strip the mayor of his political immunity. They hoped to prosecute him for defying a judge’s order against building a service road to a hospital. It was a terrible miscalculation. To most Mexicans, punishing López Obrador for ensuring access to a medical facility was like jailing a jaywalker while muggers flouted the law. After the 2000 presidential election, politicians from both the PRI and the PAN were caught channeling millions of dollars into party coffers. When 1 million people took to the streets to protest the move, Fox backed down. And, thanks to the whole ordeal, López Obrador’s popularity soared.

Still, the overreaching by López Obrador’s opponents tends to distract attention from hard questions about him. In office, perhaps because he was so often in front of the cameras, he occasionally showed poor judgment. In April, he chided the media for devoting more attention to the papal succession than to his own legal battle. His endorsement of Indian communities’ implementing “uses and customs” is an invitation to political fragmentation: Although it demonstrates his typical concern for the poor, these traditional practices curtail women’s rights and allow municipalities to monopolize natural resources within their boundaries.

His fiscal discipline is also a concern. His big-spending ways as mayor may have been good for approval ratings, but they also drove up the city’s debt. Will he abandon his nationalistic gospel and endorse critical reforms in energy, fiscal, and labor policy? Not according to his manifesto, “An Alternative Project for the Nation,” in which he proposes, vaguely, “Modernity forged from below for the benefit of all.” He promises to lavish subsidies on industry, tourism, fishing, and the “popular economy.” In addition, he stresses the need to create jobs and spur growth through large-scale public works projects. Yet, he neglects to specify how he will pay for these outlays, except to slash government expenditures, tighten tax collections, and reform the hugely inefficient national oil monopoly, Pemex.

Recently, he has sought to allay concerns of the international financial community. He denies any plans to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and the United States, and he vows to maintain the Fox administration’s sound macroeconomic policies. “Inflation and instability affect the poor the most, since they have no way to defend themselves,” he recently told the Financial Times.

Although it’s still early, the presidential race is now López Obrador’s to lose. But the people’s adoration, dating back to his years spent with the Chontal Indians, may have fed a dangerous belief in his own infallibility. López Obrador is sometimes dismissive of reporters’ questions and criticism, and he often justifies his policies by pointing to their popularity. His ascetic way of living, he seems to believe, eliminates the need for transparency. As mayor, he attempted to enact a 10-year budget secrecy rule on 43 city agencies and projects. He relished going over the heads of courts, the city legislature, and the local transparency commission. On a national level, this approach would involve mobilizing the masses to pressure the PRI and PAN members of congress into ratifying his agenda. Such a strategy could translate into legislative paralysis, widespread social turmoil, increased narco-trafficking, and an even greater flood of illegal migrants into the United States.

López Obrador’s supporters argue that, as president, he would be pragmatic, as evidenced by his pronouncements on NAFTA and inflation, and that he would name a diverse, first-rate cabinet. If, indeed, he were to downplay his self-righteous authoritarianism in favor of coalition building, he could be a great boon to Mexico. If, however, he harnesses his mass appeal to run roughshod over state institutions, he may further damage the organs of Mexican democracy, and ironically ensure dark days for the followers of this “ray of hope.”