Mexican president-elect assembles right-wing cabinet
By Alex González
14 July 2018
After a sweeping victory in
the Mexican presidential elections, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the
leader of the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena), has proposed a
cabinet for his upcoming six-year administration that is dominated by leading
figures of previous reactionary Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and
Party for National Action (PAN) administrations.
AMLO, whose coalition included
Morena, the Evangelical Christian right-wing Social Encounter Party (PES) and
the Workers Party (PT), won more votes than any other Mexican presidential
candidate in history and more than twice the number of votes as the runner up,
Ricardo Anaya of a coalition including the right-wing National Action Party
(PAN) and center-left Party for Democratic Revolution (PRD).
The Morena-led coalition will
have a super majority in both houses of congress and the mayorship of Mexico
City, the second largest city in Latin America. Morena also won governor races
in five out of the nine states that held elections. The new federal and state
governments will take office on December 1.
The election results are
another indication of a leftward shift in the population. Over 30 million
people voted for AMLO and Morena, many of them based on the illusion that the
new administration would implement measures to address rampant inequality, the
country’s advanced state of militarization, and the plight of immigrants on
both sides of the border.
Studies have shown that the
purchasing power of the population has declined by as much as 80 percent in the
past three decades, while the homicide rate is equivalent to, if not worse
than, war-torn countries. Highlighting the collaboration of the Mexican government
with the US deportation apparatus, a recent report by the BBC revealed that the
Mexican government detained—often under deplorable conditions—and deported over
138,000 Central American children under the outgoing Peña Nieto administration.
AMLO’s cabinet is very close
to the one he proposed last December. While the media and pseudo-left have
hailed the “progressive” gender composition of his cabinet (eight men and eight
women), the appointment of well-known figures from former administrations is
yet another reassurance to the powers-that-be that he is a “responsible”
bourgeois politician who can be trusted to safeguard their interests.
Esteban Moctezuma, the
proposed secretary of education, was an interior and social development
minister under former PRI president Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000). On Wednesday,
Moctezuma stated that the national teacher evaluations would stay in place,
albeit with removed provisions that tie scores to hiring and pay. He also
stated that teachers who missed working days while on strike should be subject
to punishment by the school administrations and the unions. In June, a strike
by more than 80,000 teachers was betrayed by the teachers’ unions, which urged
them to vote for AMLO as a supposed solution to their demands. This has been
exposed as a reactionary fraud.
For the position of secretary
of the interior, AMLO has tapped Olga Sánchez Cordero Dávila, a former member
of the Mexican supreme court and a Zedillo appointee. Sánchez Cordero has
already backpedaled on AMLO’s campaign promise to dismantle the Mexican
intelligence agency Cisen.
The agency came under fire
last year after an investigation by the New York Times revealed that the
Mexican government had purchased software to hack into the phones of
journalists and political opponents.
As overseer of the Cisen,
Sánchez Cordero has expressed her enthusiastic support for the repression of
social struggles. “It is imperative that we rule using intelligence. ...
Imagine that there is a social movement in Guerrero or Oaxaca and that we do
not have knowledge of these social movements, that we do not have knowledge of
what is happening in Mexican society,” said Sánchez Cordero. “That would be
very serious.”
The proposed secretary of
finance, Carlos Urzúa, is an economist and World Bank consultant. He has
reiterated promises to maintain “fiscal balance,” i.e., to not raise taxes on
the rich or undertake significant spending on social programs. Instead, the
AMLO administration has proposed “consolidating social welfare programs” and “centralizing
government purchases” to finance his minuscule new programs. In other words,
even with control of the legislature and the presidency, the new government
will not carry out any significant measures to address the country’s social
crisis.
Urzúa has elaborated on AMLO’s
campaign promise to improve “competitiveness” along the US-Mexico border by
slashing the value added tax (VAT) in half. Last week, Urzúa detailed that the
“free zone” would extend around 30 kilometers south of the border, encompassing
the cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, Ciudad Juárez and Reynosa.
Recent studies have estimated
that such a policy would create a budget shortfall of 30.3 billion pesos per
year (about US$1.6 billion). Given that AMLO has promised an “austerity
budget,” lowering taxes will be paid for by attacks on social programs and the
creation of a super-exploited labor force for transnational corporations.
Alfonzo Durazo, AMLO’s new
chief of public security, was a former member of the PRI before being appointed
as private secretary of former PAN president Vicente Fox (2000-2006). Durazo
has vowed to create a new border police force to round up and deport
immigrants. “We need to create a border police force that will be highly
specialized. ... They need to apply the law,” stated Durazo in a recent
interview.
As for AMLO’s nebulous
campaign promise to “fight corruption,” Durazo disclosed that this meant
increasing the salaries of law enforcement officials and creating more police
academies to double the number of security personnel that could receive
training each year. AMLO has previously backed centralizing the country’s
police forces and holding daily briefings with military brass.
The repressive measures that
organically flow from AMLO’s right-wing policies are spelled out by the
inclusion of Manuel Mondragón, who is infamous for coordinating the assault on
demonstrators during the inauguration of Peña Nieto in 2012. The assault on the
peaceful protesters led to one death and the injuries of dozens of students.
After AMLO confirmed that Mondragón would join his security team, the hashtag
#MondragónNoEsCambio (#MondragónIsNotChange) became a trending topic on social
media.
As objective conditions draw
the masses into struggle, illusions that AMLO or Morena will address the
intolerable social and economic conditions confronting millions of Mexicans may
dissipate sooner rather than later. AMLO is not rejecting the “mafia in power,”
which he has blamed for the country’s social ills, but rather incorporating
them into the highest levels of his government.
The task of socialists is not
to lend “critical support” to AMLO, but to politically educate and prepare the
working class for a revolutionary struggle to put an end to the capitalist
system. This requires the unification of the Mexican working class with workers
in the United States and across the Americas, who are also being driven into
struggle.
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