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Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018
“There are people in history who have no ideology and
adapt to circumstances,” says Geney Torruco, who serves as
the oicial historian of Tabasco’s capital city, Villahermosa.
Such people, he says, have almost nothing in common with
López Obrador. Rodolfo Lara, his middle school teacher,
describes someone whose leftist beliefs have never really
changed, even if his method of expressing them has evolved.
“He’s matured in the sense that his expressions aren’t as
harsh. He invokes ‘love and peace’ whenever they try to
corner him. But has he changed his ideology? I don’t think
so,” Lara says.
In 1988, López Obrador joined a coalition of leftist parties,
ran for governor, and lost by a wide margin, which didn’t stop
him from leading protests claiming voter fraud. He lost a bid
for governor again in 1994, and this time his complaints of
vote-rigging carried more weight. Regulators found evidence
of numerous discrepancies at polling stations. He led a cara-
van of protesters from Tabasco to Mexico City, where he and
his followers took over the capital’s main square. The sit-in was
eventually broken up, but not before it helped force the resig-
nation of Mexico’s interior minister, who serves as the presi-
dent’s second-in-command.
López Obrador now was a presence on the national stage,
and his leadership of a string of protests against Pemex, the
national oil company, helped him stay there. In 1996, Mexican
police tried to remove him from one such blockade. Pictures
of him in a blood-soaked shirt graced the cover of a national
magazine, reinforcing his standing as one of the country’s most
persistent social agitators.
All of this set the stage for his irst—and, to date, only—
electoral victory. In 2000 he was elected mayor of Mexico
City. He instituted a slate of social programs, including
monthly pensions for the elderly, and ushered in wide-
spread infrastructure improvements. As his popularity grew,
his political opponents closed in on him. Amid accusations
that he improperly built a road to a hospital on private land,
he was impeached. The case buckled under scrutiny and
under pressure from protests that attracted more than 1 mil-
lion supporters. Mexico’s attorney general, who was widely
accused of trying to sabotage López Obrador’s presidential
aspirations, was forced out of oice. López Obrador ended
his term in 2005 with approval ratings hovering around
80 percent.
During his irst presidential campaign, as the candidate of
the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) in 2006, he was
often cast in the media as a member of Latin America’s New
Left, a group that included populists such as Venezuela’s
Hugo Chávez and Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner. But Mexico’s
politics have always been more intricately connected to the
country’s northern neighbors than its southern ones, and it
narrowly resisted the leftward swing. López Obrador lost to
Felipe Calderón by about a half-percentage point. He disputed
the results, again alleging fraud and casting himself as a polit-
ical threat that Mexico’s elite would do anything to destroy.
His followers took over tollbooths on federal highways and
surrounded the oices of foreign banks, accusing the busi-
nesses of conspiring with Calderón to deny him his rightful tri-
umph. López Obrador declared himself the legitimate winner
and appointed members to a shadow cabinet. He led another
sit-in in downtown Mexico City, and this one lasted more than
a month.
By the time he lost his second presidential bid, in 2012, his
reputation among rivals was irmly set, and it centers on two
dominant traits: a seeming willingness to tear down any insti-
tution he believes is biased against his political movement and
a bitter reluctance, regardless of the circumstances, to give up.
If the anxiety that López Obrador provokes among Mexico’s
political and business leadership has a geographical cen-
ter, it probably sits somewhere near Monterrey. Many of
the country’s most successful international corporations are
headquartered in the city, which has been thoroughly trans-
formed during the past 25 years by Nafta. Factories and busi-
ness parks ring the outskirts, and its roadsides are crowded
with chains: Carl’s Jr., 7-Eleven, Walmart. Monterrey isn’t
immune to Mexico’s epidemic of cartel violence, but some of
the suburbs on the west end of town could be mistaken for
upscale neighborhoods in Southern California. The region
has the country’s lowest poverty rate and highest formal
employment rate, and a per capita income roughly double
the national average.
When Trump hectored Carrier Corp. to keep manufactur-
ing jobs at a plant in Indianapolis during the 2016 campaign,
those jobs came here anyway, to a sprawling complex of
factories and warehouses north of town. And when Trump
swore of Oreos because Nabisco started talking about
López Obrador, bloodied from a
confrontation with the police, on
a 1996 magazine cover. “Tabasco,
a lawless state,” the text reads.