Andrés Manuel López Obrador has coasted through the artificial, arbitrary and frequently anticlimactic hundred-day gate with the wind at his back: an 80 percent approval rating and the sense, like few presidents in modern Mexican memory, of reshaping the office in his image.

AMLO, as he is known for short, has proven to be a consummate master of political imagery. Within minutes of assuming the presidency on December 1, 2018, he opened the lavish presidential residence Los Pinos to the public for the first time. Hours before his inauguration, the first curious visitors were already wandering wide-eyed through a sumptuous series of rooms that, in symbolic terms, carried similar weight to the unveiling of Ceausescu’s Spring Palace in Bucharest. AMLO rode to the inauguration from his private residence — where he continues to live — in the same simple Volkswagen Jetta subsequently used to usher around visiting heads of government such as Spain’s Pedro Sánchez. And with the windows down, he allowed a cyclist to ride up and wish him well with the words: “En ti confiamos.” We trust you.

Once in office, the new president continued to dismantle the trappings of the imperial presidency, putting the opulent presidential plane — acquired for some $218 million dollars in 2012, just in time for the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto — up for sale, together with sixty other governmental planes. AMLO, for his part, would fly coach. And whereas Los Pinos was opened on his first day, the president took advantage of his hundredth day to officially close the Islas Marías penitentiary, the once-feared gulag of torture and torment that housed, among others, the Marxist writer José Revueltas (the novelist’s time in the prison forms the basis of his 1941 novel Los muros del agua or “Walls of Water”).