The last weeks of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government have been marked by political triumph and a broken promise.
As the new congressional supermajority of Morena, the party López Obrador founded, began changing the constitution in ways that will cement its political hegemony, the families of the 43 students who were forcibly disappeared in Ayotzinapa 10 years ago again took the streets to protest over the lack of justice – justice López Obrador vowed to deliver, but did not.
These are two facets of the momentous but complex legacy left by López Obrador – known colloquially as Amlo – six years after he became Mexico’s first elected leftwing president, promising to reshape a country racked by inequality, corruption and violence.
The self-described “fourth transformation” – which put Amlo’s project on a level with the Mexican revolution and the war of independence – fell well short of its lofty goals. But López Obrador’s popularity nonetheless carried his party to a landslide victory in June’s election.
Claudia Sheinbaum, his close ally, will become Mexico’s first female president on Tuesday, with a concentration of political power not seen since the country became a democracy in 2000.
Her electoral triumph reflects the foremost success of Amlo’s government: the sense of socioeconomic justice.
A mix of minimum salary hikes, direct cash transfers and labour policy reform mean many Mexicans have seen their incomes jump. Poverty has fallen.
“López Obrador doubled the minimum wage without creating macroeconomic instability,” said Viri Ríos, an economist. “He showed us that there was space, and maybe still is, to increase wages in Mexico.”
These concrete results were augmented by Amlo’s political narrative.
“It was very simple: he said the country had been captured by elites, and that they had been corruptly benefiting a very small set of the population,” said Ríos. “Which is obviously the case in Mexico, one of the most unequal countries in the world. You don’t get there by accident.”
By putting inequality at the centre of his discourse – and acting on it – Amlo restored large parts of the population to confidence in democracy. By 2023, 61% of Mexicans said they had faith in their national government, compared with 29% when López Obrador took office.
“Most of the population feel that there is finally someone in power who responds to their interests,” said Humberto Beck, a historian.
And in the minds of voters, this seems to have outweighed Amlo’s unkept promises.
Corruption and impunity have not improved. Amlo’s government, like those before it, has had corruption scandals. Meanwhile, justice remains distant even for the most high-profile crimes, such as the forced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students.
Although the homicide rate fell slightly during the last years of Amlo’s government, Mexico has seen more than 30,000 murders each of the last six years. Its homicide rate is still among the highest in Latin America.
Security in some states, such as Chiapas, has deteriorated dramatically, leading to streams of Mexicans being forcibly displaced and even seeking refuge in neighbouring countries.
Meanwhile, more than 100,000 people remain missing. In August 2023, the director of the national search commission resigned, citing pressure to reduce the ever-rising number of disappeared people, which had become politically damaging to the government.
Many of those missing people could be among the 72,000 bodies lying in Mexico’s morgues – but the institutions set up to identify them have been dismantled.
Yet perhaps the most striking about-face of this government was Amlo’s stance on the military.
Before taking power, he promised to return the soldiers to their barracks. Upon gaining it, he both deepened the military’s role in domestic security and gave it new roles in infrastructure construction, the development of tourism and customs management.
Last week, Morena changed the constitution to put the 130,000-strong national guard, which it created as a civilian security force but which was largely staffed by former soldiers, under the control of the military.
“López Obrador expanded the military’s involvement in areas previously reserved for civil society to a level we never could have imagined,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political scientist.
This militarisation, coupled with Morena’s newfound political hegemony, has led its opponents to sound the alarm about the threat of democratic regression.
With its congressional supermajority, Morena will be able to rewrite the constitution at will, until at least the legislative elections in 2027.
It has already pushed through a controversial judicial reform that will make all judges, including those on the supreme court, stand for election.
Critics say this threatens the rule of law, and thus liberal democracy in Mexico. But others argue that Mexico has never truly been a liberal democracy for all of its people.
“I think it was a very functional electoral democracy, but not a liberal democracy, understood as checks and balances and the protection of humans rights,” said Ríos.
In any case, Morena is moving Mexico away from the conception of liberal democracy defined by the separation of powers, and towards a vision of democracy that forefronts popular participation and majority approval.
Morena’s majority approval has been built around Amlo’s personal charisma – which raises the question of how it will evolve without him. Although the outgoing president has often said he would retire to his ranch upon leaving power, few believe he will disappear from the scene entirely.
Some see the recent appointment of his son, Andrés López Beltrán, as secretary of Morena, as a sign of the influence he will continue to hold.
“I think you can read that as an attempt to institutionalise the personal power of López Obrador beyond his term,” said Beck.
