Andrés Manuel López Obrador, first as a candidate and then as head of the federal executive branch, offered to fulfill the promises of his government’s project, which he calls the Fourth Transformation. However, it seems that those promises have been forgotten or are they deceptions by the President?
(Diario de Yucatán).- López Obrador, as president-elect, swore that with his project of the Fourth Transformation (4T) he would put an end to many ills entrenched in the entrails of Mexico’s political, social, and economic organism.
However, after four years at the helm of the country, AMLO seems to have forgotten his promises or, as described in his book “Años, engaños y desengaños” by Oaxacan writer and historian Andrés Henestrosa, he shows that “the deceptions are the illusions we make for ourselves, and the disappointments are what life gives us in the end…“.
What about the eradication of corruption, the rejection of military control, the no more indebtedness of the nation, the defense of democracy and INE, the annihilation of the power mafia, that austerity that began as republican and then Franciscan poverty?
Dr. Martín Rodrigo Echeverría Victoria, research professor at the Institute of Government Sciences and Strategic Development of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, analyzes each one of the six postulates raised by the Morena leader, the creator of the 4T, and explains the reasons for his alleged non-compliance.
Eradicating corruption
“My government will not be remembered for being corrupted, our legacy will be marked by the purification of the Mexican public life, and we are making progress“, said the President.
But, in the opinion of his opponents, corruption has worsened during AMLO’s mandate, and a few visible signs are the accusations against Manuel Bartlett Díaz and Alejandro Gertz Manero, Director of the CFE and Attorney General of the Republic, and even against his close relatives, such as his brother Pío and his cousin Felipa.
In Dr. Echeverría Victoria’s opinion, the promise to eradicate corruption is still there by means of symbolic operations to capture the big fish of past administrations or those linked to acts of dishonesty, although they do not conclude because they are poorly put together cases, without a professional legal scaffolding and they fall down.
Military control
“The army is not the way to solve insecurity problems“, stressed AMLO.
On several occasions during his presidential campaign, AMLO stated that military control and public security tasks at the federal level were not the solution and insisted that “we have to take the Army off the streets”, a decision that he later changed and even supported with a legislative vote the militarization of the National Guard.
“The promise to return the Army to the barracks, to take it out of the streets, is a statement that was not well calibrated after observing the degree of decomposition in the Federal Police or in other corporations. I believe that AMLO, upon taking office, found a desolate panorama in which he could only use the Army to provide more or less immediate results”, the academic points out.
With this resolution, adds the Master in Political Communication, what is noticed is the trait of the short-termism of the Mexican State, and the issue of taking the Army out of the streets attends, does not solve the problem of public security in the short term and gives results that allow celebrating modestly, but there is no concrete, broader solution.
Contract debt
“There will be no need to increase taxes in real terms, nor to put the country in debt, nor will there be any increase in gasoline prices“, mentioned the president.
Despite the fact that during his inauguration as President, López Obrador pledged not to increase Mexico’s debt level, which exceeds 10 trillion pesos, last Friday, October 21, the Chamber of Deputies approved the 2023 Revenue Law.
With this new endorsement from the legislative branch dominated by Morena, the party in power, the 4T government is authorized to contract a domestic debt of 1.1 trillion pesos and a foreign debt of up to 5,500, approximately 110 billion pesos at the current exchange rate.
In this regard, the master in Audiovisual Communication from the International University of Andalusia, Spain, judges that the country’s indebtedness was a necessity derived from three external shocks: the Covid pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia war and the shortage problems of the Chinese power, and its intentions with the US.
“The country’s indebtedness was a necessity, in general terms, and as far as I remember, less than other nations that faced the Covid crisis based on debt. The government is now getting into debt in a more or less natural sense, apparently moderately controllable, because there are historically adverse conditions in the global economy,” adds Martín.
Defense of democracy
“The shameful tradition of electoral fraud will come to an end”, one of AMLO’s statements.
With the argument of putting an end to the electoral frauds he claims to have been the victim of in two presidential elections, the President is now launching harsh attacks against the National Electoral Institute (INE), especially during his usual morning press conferences.
Dr. Echeverría Victoria, author of the book “Comunicación política y crisis de la Democracia. New trends and challenges”, affirms that there is an interesting feature of the current federal administration and of the President himself, who presents himself as a democrat in the liberal and Juarista sense of democracy.
But at the same time he clearly evidences some power centralization operations, which implies that he does not like to distribute control, he likes to control it, a non-democratic characteristic.
With INE, he stresses, he is making a plea to reform the electoral body, not to disappear it, but with significant changes that make it different from the way it operated before, but with constant criticism to the counselors and its costs are difficult in a Mexico where distrust, organized crime and bad practices of politicians are commonplace.
We will not get involved with the power mafia
“They (the power mafia) do not want to lose the privilege of being in charge”, a well-known statement of Mexico’s president.
For the former vice-president of the Mexican Association of Communication Researchers, the mafia of power was an imaginary of manipulative elites who controlled the strings of power, enemies of AMLO who prevented him from reaching the federal government on two previous occasions, in order to preserve their privileges.
“It is a discourse that Andrés Manuel used during the presidential campaigns of 2006 and 2012, but he eventually put it aside because he realized, I believe, that if he continued attacking the power mafia, in effect that group of supremacists would not let him reach the National Palace,” says Dr. Echeverría Victoria.
In the face of this panorama, according to Martin, what AMLO did was “not to react against those he called the mafia of power, and even sought to ally himself in some cases, inviting them to his government’s business council, and in this way deactivate or at least build bridges of dialogue, be more inclusive”, he interprets.
In contrast, on March 19, journalist Julio Scherer Ibarra, former legal advisor to the Presidency, made a public denunciation in which he offers a panorama of AMLO’s administration made up of public officials who do not respect the law and used mafia methods to benefit themselves or private individuals.
Austerity
“My children have no influence in this government, no contract is given to any of the recommended ones“, Andrés Manuel stated how his government will stand out for being honest.
Within the preaching of austerity, of Franciscan poverty that López Obrador boasts, in which he insists that rulers should live without luxuries or privileges, without room for the “uncomfortable relative”, at least his son José Ramón López Beltrán contradicts him by exhibiting in social networks a standard of living far from “the poor first”.
The researcher says that in his opinion there are practices of nepotism in the federal administration, although they are not necessarily linked to the President, he adds that he does not observe him in the old PRI style, placing his in-laws everywhere.
Translation of a piece by Carlos Cámara for Diario de Yucatán
TYT Newsroom