The off-year Mexican elections that are scheduled on June 6 will amount to a referendum on the country’s populist, autocratic president.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — better known as AMLO –is under attack from all sides and though he is not on the ballot — he can not run for reelection — his personal political party MORENA is.
The danger for Mexico is that AMLO acts like he wants to be a dictator.
Despite having a majority in the Mexican Congress, he hasn’t been able to cast private enterprise totally aside despite trying. The courts have stopped him.
Nonetheless, AMLO calls the courts enemies of the people as he does the nation’s media. He calls any opponents corrupt “neo-liberals” every day at his so-called news conference, in a reference to former President Trump’s criticism of “neo-conservatives.”
Joining me and many Mexican media commentators in urging a vote against AMLO’s party is the respected British weekly newspaper The Economist, which called him “the false messiah.”
Why? Because they see an autocrat in this former PRI officeholder who was as corrupt then as the PRI was until Vicente Fox soundly beat the Institutional Revolutionary Party, as it is formally known, in 2000.
AMLO later ran for president in 2006, and was beaten, but like former Trump he claimed fraud. Ultimately AMLO did win the presidency in 2018 on his third try.
What’s worrisome for Mexican democracy as that ALMLO has threatened that unless he gets a super-majority on June 6, he will dump the 1917 constitution and write his own constitution allowing him to run for President-for-life — like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez.
While he seeks ultimate power, the stench of corruption is all over AMLO and his party, whose acronym MORENA stands for National Regeneration Movement. Worse than that, AMLO has involved the Mexican Army in massive construction projects such as a new international airport.
Worse still, he recently had the head of the Mexican Navy speak at his morning new conference to support an unconstitutional effort to extend the term of the chief justice of the Mexican Supreme Court. In other words, the Mexican military has been corrupted by AMLO.
AMLO looks more and more like a nascent dictator who is spreading Mexican taxpayers’ money to his relatives, friends and newly befriended military.
Mexicans must vote for anyone but MORENA stooges on June 6 or a democratic, free-enterprise Mexico will disappear into a new Mexican dictatorship.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a Marine Corps veteran, political consultant and author of the new book White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) & Mexicans. His work has appeared in the New American News Service of the New York Times Syndicate.
