Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former Mayor of Mexico City, has been on a global tour of sorts over the past month. He started in Chicago (the speech is available on video here), went to Washington, D.C. and then headed to Spain. He’s touting what is called the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), a progressive grassroots political organization in Mexico (Morena is a word that also means dark-skinned person in Spanish).
Lopez Obrador: I can fix things, really
His message is clear: stop focusing on border and security issues and instead give us more aid so we can get our economy to grow. “It is more effective and humane to implement cooperation in order to reach development, rather than insisting on giving priority to police and military cooperation, as we do now,” he said.
“It is not with military assistance or intelligence work, helicopters or weapons shipments that we will remedy the insecurity and violence problem in our country,” he said during his speech in Washington (you can watch his speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center here). Lopez Obrador wants the United States to return to the “good neighbor policy” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt which emphasized economic development. That would be nice. Of course, during FDR’s time illegal immigration was not an issue, and who had heard of drug cartels? But those are just inconvenient details, right?
His solution, according to IPS, is “to incorporate young people back into Mexican society by giving them jobs and schools to continue their studies.” Mexico has tried socialism for decades and it has failed miserably.
Lopez Obrador is not just an ex-politician or talking head. In 2006 he represented the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution in the heated presidential election. And this was not just a lecture tour. As the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies points out, high on his agenda was trying to “reach Mexican immigrants or other potential electoral supporters” in the United States. The former mayor was clearly looking to play politics with the Mexican community here in the hopes of having them influence elections in Mexico and the United States.
Mexico has Presidential elections coming up and Lopez Obrador may very well be a factor. Things in Mexico are bad right now. But they could get even worse if someone like Lopez Obrador comes to power.
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