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Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, sharing a stage with crates of
coconuts and limes, looks out upon a crowd of thousands:
a sea of sombreros bobbing in the sun. They’re farmers,
mostly—or used to be, before the North American Free Trade
Agreement upended the old traditions here in the Mexican
heartland. Now, many take whatever jobs they can ind and
lament that so much corn, Mexico’s iconic national crop, is
now imported from the U.S.
López Obrador—or AMLO, as he’s widely known—assures
the crowd that their dreams of returning to their farms are
within reach. After he wins the presidential election on
July 1, he says, he’ll provide them with free fertilizer and
cheap fuel, and he’ll establish minimum price guarantees
for homegrown crops. The ields here in the central Mexican
state of Zacatecas will spring back to life, which will provide
people with jobs and, in turn, stem the outward low of
migrants to America. But for this chain of prosperity to
kick in, there’s one condition: An electoral deathblow must
be struck against the ruling political class, a group López
Obrador references in terms this rural audience appreciates.
“Filthy pigs!” he shouts. “Hogs! Swine!”
The contempt that most of Mexico feels toward the estab-
lished political order might be measured by the rising pitch
of the whistles and the jeers, a resentful clamor that the
64-year-old López Obrador—ist raised, sweat beading on his
brow—has done his best to provoke and amplify. For decades
he built a following throughout Mexico the hard way: stag-
ing rallies in every one of the country’s 2,400-plus munici-
palities, no matter how small, no matter how distant from
the centers of power. Now, after two failed presidential bids,
he’s emerged as the undisputed front-runner, enjoying an
advantage of almost 20 percentage points over his nearest
rival in a crowded ield.
Earlier this year, despite López Obrador’s commanding
lead in the polls, 85 percent of Mexican corporate execu-
tives surveyed by Banco Santander SA predicted he would
ind a way to lose this election. Now their conidence seems
to be giving way to apprehension. They fear his brand of
populism is fueled by a false nostalgia for simpler times—a
mythical era that was never that good to begin with—and
they’re afraid he might roll back 25 years of economic mod-
ernization. López Obrador doesn’t bother to counter the
claims that his victory would represent a large-scale socie-
tal upheaval; in fact, he encourages the notion, casting his
rise as the most consequential political development here
since the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910.
It’s tempting to compare his campaign to Donald Trump’s,
though ideologically they’re negative images of each other.
Both appeal to a base that dreams of reviving sectors—
manufacturing in the U.S., agriculture in Mexico—that were
economic backbones broken by globalization. So far, López
Obrador’s relationship to the American president is shaping
up as a symbiotic one. His campaign, which taps into a proud
vein of nationalism, seems to grow stronger every time Trump
uses Mexicans as rhetorical cannon fodder.
“We won’t care about threats of a wall,” López Obrador
announces, assuring another rally crowd in Zacatecas, one
of the states that sends the most migrants to the U.S., that
with him in power, they’ll inally achieve equal footing with
their neighbors to the north. “Nothing will matter. They’ll be
the ones with the problem because our people won’t have
to go to the United States, and they won’t have anyone to
pick their crops or build their houses. And so we’ll be the
ones deciding the conditions.”
Before dueling tuba bands lood the rally with noise, one
enthusiastic onlooker raises his voice above the others. He
calls out a phrase that has become something of a campaign
slogan for López Obrador, a saying with roots in Mexico’s
rural past, when people tried to pick their winners in the
cockighting ring. “
Ese es mi gallo!
” the man shouts. He’s
my rooster!
LópezObrador’s story begins in Tepetitán, a village of fewer than
1,500 on a river bend in the southern state of Tabasco. His
grandparents were
campesinos
and his parents ran a fabric
shop. Boyhood friends recall a kid who loved baseball and
whose destiny didn’t look a lot diferent from theirs. But when
he was 15, a murky drama unfolded inside his parents’ store
that would become a foundational parable of his career.
Late one afternoon his younger brother, José Ramón,
grabbed a pistol and tried to persuade López Obrador to use
it to scare an employee of a nearby shoe shop. According to
a report by Enrique Krauze, a prominent Mexican historian,
López Obrador argued with his brother, trying to persuade
him to put away the gun. He had just turned his back on the
boy when he heard the bang. His brother had accidentally shot
himself, sufering a fatal wound.
He doesn’t say much about the incident today, other than
acknowledging that it afected him deeply. Krauze has sug-
gested the tragedy burdened López Obrador with guilt, which
he tries to atone for with an almost messianic zeal to change
the course of history.
As a young man he became an advocate for Mexico’s indig-
enous population, and he helped oversee the construction of
rudimentary houses and latrines in rural villages. His irst foray
into electoral politics came in 1976, when he joined the sena-
torial campaign of a candidate representing the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Choosing a PRI ailiation was
almost a given; the party maintained a stranglehold on national
politics, occupying the presidency from 1929 to 2000. He was
quickly appointed a local party head but lasted less than a
year—he tried to oversee spending among PRI mayors in
Tabasco, and they pushed back. According to a local histo-
rian, López Obrador was also advised to tone down his revo-
lutionary rhetoric and was warned, “This isn’t Cuba.”