Escaping the Shadow

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When Andrés Manuel López Obrador left office on Sept. 30, he had recorded around 3,000 hours of footage related to his “mañaneras,” the two- to three-hour live press conferences that he broadcast every weekday while in office, starting at 7 a.m.

The mañaneras are an example of why one of new Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s first tasks is to escape the shadow of her extremely popular predecessor, wrote University College Cork Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow Jessica Wax-Edwards in the Conversation.

That task will be difficult, however, because, while the former president, known as “Amlo”, left Sheinbaum a dynamic economy – he doubled the minimum wage and lifted 9 million people out of poverty – he also failed to solve the public safety crisis that is foremost among most Mexicans’ minds, reported Le Monde.

In Amlo’s six years in office, almost 200,000 homicides occurred, a far worse rate than any other presidential term in a century, wrote World Politics Review.

Sheinbaum therefore must pick up where Amlo left off, a tough job because the actions Amlo took to quell crime and violence in Mexico are highly problematic, analysts say. A few days before he left office, for example, Amlo’s Morena political party changed the country’s constitution to put the country’s crime-fighting National Guard under military control.

Critics say that Amlo was already deepening the military’s role in civilian life. His defenders argue, however, that drug cartels and other criminal organizations have managed to corrupt nearly every institution in the country. Only the military, they say, could remain above the fray and effectively fight the criminal networks there. Amlo’s critics don’t understand, however, why the military is somehow immune to graft.

In his last days in office, Amlo turned judgeships into elected positions, meaning they could be susceptible to the pressures of electoral politics – and graft. These changes horrified Ernesto Zedillo, a former Mexican president who passed reforms to insulate judges from politics when he was in office in the 1990s.  In an essay in Noema magazine adapted from a speech delivered at the International Bar Association, Zedillo said he feared Amlo was establishing a new tyranny under his Morena party.

As a result, some believe that Sheinbaum is likely to follow her mentor’s lead, continuing his policies. It would be hard not to, given that close to half her cabinet is filled with Amlo’s people, many of his initiatives are locked in law, and his son now has a top spot in the Morena party. It’s also going to be tough because this “dependence is made worse by Sheinbaum’s unshakable, at times farcical, reverence for her mentor,” wrote Juan Pablo Spinetto in Bloomberg, noting how she will keep alive his practice of daily 7 a.m. press conferences.

“The result is a trap that the president-elect needs to escape,” he added. “In politics, this superior-subordinate relationship between an outgoing revered leader and an incoming uncharismatic surrogate is a recipe for disaster … the next administration faces challenges that require a fresh approach”.

It’s an approach, Americas Quarterly wrote, the new president, a pragmatist and technocrat, just might take.

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