The Indiscreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

At the heart of this national project is AMLO’s systematic effort to dismantle the combination of state capture and state terror that beset Mexico with special ferocity over the last thirty years of neoliberal governance. In the 1980s and ’90s, the nation’s assets were sold off to a cabal of elite cronies, creating a new class of post-privatization mega-millionaires. By the 2000’s, this elite — gorged on the nation’s banks, trains, telephone service, iron and steel industry, and more — had joined forces with its benefactors in the PRI and PAN to create a kleptocracy that exceeded all previous limits.

No area of the economy was safe, no state decision free of collusion. Uncounted billions of public money were funneled through phantom companies and public universities into political campaigns, pet projects, and politicians’ pockets. By means of a pay-per-vote system of moches, legislators were bribed to pass the ongoing counterreforms that benefited the very interests making the payoffs.

Presidents frolicked with cabinet ministers in the employ of cartels. Governors filled luxurious ranches with menageries of exotic animals while, in First World capitals, their wives insisted to their diaries that they deserved the abundance that had been showered upon them. Meanwhile, the general public, having already weathered two currency devaluations and the sell-off of its public services, was then subjected to the fresh hell of a “drug war” that killed hundreds of thousands and rent the fabric of the nation with untold savagery.

Here, too, Mexico is not what it was. Through the joint, and at times fraught work of the Justice Department and the Revenue Service’s Financial Intelligence Unit, former development secretary Rosario Robles is in jail for the “master scam” diversion of public funds that took place during the Peña Nieto administration. Emilio Lozoya, who as a member of Peña Nieto’s campaign, negotiated millions of dollars in bribes from the Brazilian company Odebrecht — only to pay the company back with contracts once he was named director of the state oil company PEMEX — has become a cooperating witness for the government.

Over three years, some thirty-one thousand bank accounts worth billions of pesos have been frozen. Both Peña Nieto and former president Felipe Calderón are under active investigation, with Calderón currently caught up in a fresh scandal of allegedly diverting some $300 billion pesos ($15 billion in today’s US dollars) in no-bid crony contracts to launch Mexico’s private prison industry.

At the end of April, Tamaulipas governor Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca of the PAN was stripped of political immunity by the federal congress — the first time ever for a sitting governor — in order to face charges of fraud that led to his racking up some thirty-odd properties, including luxury residences, restaurants, and art galleries. This is just the latest in a seemingly endless stream of PRI-PAN governor-criminals stretching back over the last decade.

In short, the AMLO administration and its congressional allies are unraveling a web of corruption on the scale of Italy’s Mani pulite or Brazil’s Lava Jato (to which it is related through Lozoya, Odebrecht, and the Spanish firm OHL). Not that you’d know it, of course, from international media coverage of Mexico over the past three years.

Spectacular coverage of drug violence is easier, cheaper, and better fodder for headlines than taking the time to learn who’s who and follow the plodding progress of prosecutions. Interest in anti-corruption crusades also tends to fall off when it is being performed by a government that is not to the liking of the international elite that determines media framing.

But even more to the point, tracing the trail of corruption in Mexico would mean uncovering US complicity every step of the way: through financing, weapons, rogue intelligence operations, and the daily fact of playing nice with officials, like former security minister Genaro García Luna, who they knew to be highly compromised by organized crime.

USAID Aids the Opposition

The long arm of the United States has been on display in another way during the midterm election campaign: in helping to fund the political opposition. By means of the United States Embassy in Mexico, and as reported by the magazine Contralínea, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are financing the organization “Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity” (MCCI), founded by Claudio X. González. Not only is González leading the charge against MORENA in this year’s election, organizing the coalition of parties arrayed against it and financing its candidates, he has also been an active figure in the war of attrition seeking to block the key pieces of the president’s agenda in the courts.

Far from representing a passing check, the millions in funding from the US agencies amounted to nearly 20 percent of the organization’s revenue in 2019 and 2020. And while MCCI is not directly a political organization, the United States has effectively been chipping in a healthy salary (González received the equivalent of some $375,000 dollars from the organization over the previous three years) to the chief organizer of Mexico’s opposition.

Spurred by the revelations, Mexico sent a diplomatic note to the United States on May 6 asking it to clarify the matter. At his press conference the following morning, AMLO classified it as a form of golpismo, or coup promotion, and compared it to the participation of US ambassador Henry Wilson in the overthrow of President Francisco Madero during the Mexican Revolution. “It’s an act of interventionism that violates our sovereignty … Our Constitution forbids it. You can’t receive money from another country for political ends.”

The case raises the specter of USAID’s dark history throughout Latin America, from its promotion of “fiscal reform” and “competitive business climates” to its clumsy attempts at regime change in Cuba to its support of the mass sterilization of the poor in Peru. In its Cold War heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, USAID helped to bolster dictatorial regimes throughout the region by training their police officers in counterinsurgency, riot control, explosives, public relations, and “enhanced interrogation techniques” carried out in soundproofed cellars.

Claudio X. González’s election interests, meanwhile, are not limited to financing the opposition and taking checks from USAID: two of his allies will be on the technical committee named by the National Electoral Institute to oversee the Preliminary Election Results Program (PREP) on election night. According to the institute, they will be “contributing to the development of democracy” and “overseeing the authenticity and effectiveness of the vote.”

A Positive Balance

MORENA’s performance over these three years has not been perfect. It has been too timid on a number of fronts, including reining in the privatized free-for-all of the mining and banking industries, attacking the nation’s grotesque wealth inequality, and defending migrants against US pressure.

It has been inactive on indigenous rights, insensitive to protests surrounding the plague of feminicides, and inadequate in creating a long-term environmental vision in the face of climate change. Its budget reductions have cut too close to the bone in a number of areas, including science and culture. And despite the fanfare of a new National Guard, the violence has not abated.

But on balance, its record has been positive. In this urgent historical moment, the MORENA coalition must win the midterm elections on June 6.