On January 13, 2023, the London-based organization Index on Censorship named Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) its Tyrant of the Year for 2022. “While competition was tough, one leader surged ahead, by a mile in fact,” insists the accompanying text, which goes on to recite a series of justifications for the designation, including violence against journalists and environmental defenders, cozying up to Donald Trump, and “lashing out at women, NGOs, and the New York Times.” It concludes the list of offenses by quoting the business magazine Forbes to the effect that AMLO is a “human rights disaster.”

The text is, to put it charitably, strange. Written with a sort of secondary-school vocabulary and sentence structure, it asserts, for example, that the number of kidnappings, assaults, and arrests under AMLO’s watch “has been huge,” and that the Index covered Mexico “a lot” in the years under his predecessor. Further down, it presumes to speak for the entire nation by insisting that “people were cynical” about AMLO’s pledges at the time of his election — despite his winning in a historic landslide — and “it’s a shame to see their cynicism was correct.”

Despite this, a number of corporate outlets in Mexico and Latin America dutifully repeated the news, with articles about his nomination and subsequent designation appearing in El Financiero, Infobae, and El Universal. Conservative columnists and Twitter wags rubbed their hands in glee that the Mexican president had been included in a “rogues’ gallery” including Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, Ali Khamenei of Iran, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. For the love of God, AMLO had even beaten out Vladimir Putin!