AMLO at war with business elites who warn he’ll wreck the economy

According to the LA Times, Mexico’s presidential front-runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is at war with business elites who warn he’ll wreck the economy

AMLO calls them the “mafia of power” and says they wield their political influence for personal gain.

They call him the next Hugo Chavez and warn that his leftist economic policies could turn Mexico into Venezuela, a country beset by food shortages, crime and crippling inflation.

Less than two months before Mexico’s July 1 presidential election, front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is clashing with the nation’s business elite in an escalating war of words that has calcified battle lines and helped send the peso tumbling.

In recent days, Lopez Obrador, of the National Regeneration Movement, has accused some business leaders of secretly trying to build an alliance against him. He says they have sought to persuade the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party to abandon its third-place candidate, Jose Antonio Meade, in favor of second-place candidate Ricardo Anaya of the National Action Party, whom Lopez Obrador is beating in the polls by double-digits.

Business leaders feel more comfortable with Anaya, whose party was in power for the two previous presidential terms and who, unlike Lopez Obrador, is not advocating major economic changes.

Lopez Obrador says the efforts against him are part of a “dirty war” waged by wealthy tycoons who want to stop him and who have enriched themselves at the expense of ordinary Mexicans, 40% of whom live below the poverty line.

“They don’t want to stop stealing,” Lopez Obrador said at a campaign event last week.

Click here for full article on the LA Times