From the Land of Water to the Capital

For AMLO, as he would come to be known, it was to be a very long road. Born in the small town of Tepetitán, in the municipality of Macuspana, the shopkeeper’s son seemed destined for anything rather than the presidency. But growing up in such a “backwater” (literally: the poet Carlos Pellicer wrote that Tabasco is “more water than land . . . the land lives at the mercy of the water that rises or falls”) had its advantages: the young Obrador spent his formative years in a more secular, egalitarian society, far from the starchy hierarchies and dominance of the Catholic Church that marked the capital and center of the country.

Tabasco was to be formative in other ways, as well. After university — where he benefited from the tuition-free public education of the UNAM — AMLO returned to his home state as director of the Chontal Indigenous Coordinating Center, part of the National Indigenous Institute (INI). Working and living among the Chontal ethnicity, he coordinated cultural, literacy, housing, and agriculture projects. Much more than at the classic first job, however, the politician-to-be learned from the communities about organizing and decision-making by consensus, skills that were to serve him well in the future. Later, he wrote that the experience “explains in large part what I am.” In 1996, some two decades after taking up his post with the Chontals, the image of AMLO with a bloody shirt following police repression of a roadblock to protest the contamination of their lands by the state oil company Pemex was to prove fundamental in making him a nationally known figure.

Quickly disillusioned by the lack of democracy in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the once-hegemonic party that was careening toward an irreparable fracture, AMLO became a founding member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the umbrella party formed after the 1988 electoral fraud uniting breakoff PRI dissidents with the historical left in the form of the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS), whose registro, or official party status, it inherited. But the incoming government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, born out of the fraud, had no intention of legitimizing the upstart party. When the federal government refused to recognize the PRD’s first municipal victories in Tabasco in 1991, AMLO led a five-hundred-mile march to Mexico City that came to be known as the Exodus for Democracy; the carefully timed trek was designed to show up the Gortari administration’s lack of commitment to democracy at home just as it was hosting the Chapultepec Peace Accords that brought the civil war in El Salvador to an end.

Days before the accords were signed, the 40,000-strong contingent made it to the city’s main square, the Zócalo, and set up camp; that night, AMLO was summoned to the Governance Secretariat. They could have their victories, he was told, but they had to leave immediately. AMLO refused: it was the consensus of their meeting that the marchers, many of whom had never been to Mexico City in their lives, wanted to visit the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe first. They would leave the following day. Before too long, AMLO would be back in a tent in the Zócalo, in much different circumstances.

Mayor of Mexico City and the Election of 2006

The success of the Exodus for Democracy, combined with a spirited campaign against overwhelming odds for the governorship of Tabasco in 1994, catapulted AMLO to the presidency of the PRD in 1996. In addition to leading the party to its first state-level victories and an increased presence in the federal Congress, he blasted his way onto the national stage for his staunch opposition to FOBAPROA, the scandalous bailout in which the nation’s recently privatized banks were “rescued” by the Mexican taxpayer only to be sold off one by one to foreign conglomerates.

Patenting a strategy he was to later use as president when he released the exorbitant salaries of gilded journalists and members of the Supreme Court, AMLO made public the list of names and companies that had benefited from the FOBAPROA largesse. In the wake of this off-loading of billions in private debts onto the public, a burden that will weigh down the Mexican state for another fifty years, it was then that AMLO crystallized the message that he would hammer home for the rest of his career: Neoliberalism is corruption. Privatization is corruption. To save a state taken hostage, one must first attack these networks of corruption.

In 2000, AMLO bucked the trend at the top of the ticket, where Cuauhtémoc Cardenas was defeated by Vicente Fox of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), to be elected mayor of Mexico City. Once in office, he quickly began piloting the programs he would later take nationally: a universal senior pension, disability and unemployment benefits, aid to single mothers, microcredits for small business, health care for the uninsured, recall elections, a new public university, and infrastructure works such as the elevated highway lines and an interconnected Metrobus system with dedicated lanes. And in the realm of communications, a daily 6:00 a.m. press conference allowed him to go over the heads of the corporate media and speak directly to the public.

So popular had AMLO become by the midpoint of his term that he seemed a shoo-in to be the PRD’s candidate for the presidential election of 2006 — and very likely the winner. This was something that Fox was determined to stop at all costs. Thus was born the desafuero affair, in which his attorney general and a pliant judicial system were tasked with trumping up a charge against AMLO — that he had disobeyed a court order to desist in the construction of a connecting road to a hospital — in order to strip him of his political immunity and disqualify him from appearing on the presidential ballot. Congress followed through, and AMLO was within a whisker of going to jail when a massive public outcry caused Fox to back off. It was a first taste of a lawfare strategy that would become all the more prevalent down the road.

Humiliated, President Fox then decided that the election itself would be his desquite, or payback. And so it was — despite all credible preelection opinion polls showing AMLO defeating his conservative rival, Felipe Calderón, by several percentage points, the Federal Electoral Institute handed the victory to Calderón by a miniscule 0.56 percent amid rampant evidence of vote tampering and miscounting. AMLO, camped out once again in the Zócalo of Mexico City, called for a full recount; the federal electoral tribunal refused, preferring instead to recount only a few handpicked precincts that were not enough to alter the official outcome.

When Calderón was finally proclaimed the victor after several months of turmoil, AMLO refused to accept the results, famously declaring “to hell with their institutions!” In barely twenty years, the Mexican left had suffered a second massive electoral fraud. The parliamentary path to power seemed hopelessly blocked.

Welcome to the Wilderness

For AMLO, whose trajectory had been steadily upward until then, these were his wilderness years. For Mexico’s punditry class, there was no doubt that his own antics had finished him: camping out in the Zócalo like a squatter, blocking Mexico City’s main artery, El Paseo de la Reforma, for months, to the fury of commuters; and worst of all, declaring himself “legitimate” president, taking a parallel oath of office, even naming a parallel cabinet.

Pummeled nonstop in the corporate media but blocked from appearing himself, AMLO responded in two key ways: First, by hitting the road in a bid to visit all of Mexico’s 2,476 municipalities, no matter how remote — a feat he succeeded in accomplishing twice over. (A large part of AMLO’s lasting popularity had to do with the number of people who saw him and felt like they knew him: in dusty plazas, streetside restaurants, and rickety old gymnasiums, places where no other national politician would visit.) This at a time when Felipe Calderón, infused with the fury of his imposter syndrome, was bathing the country in blood through a “war on drugs,” making this kind of touring risky at best.

And second, AMLO was ahead of the curve of most politicians in recognizing and harnessing the incipient power of social media. When grassroots, online initiatives like Radio AMLO and AMLO TV sprang up, he added to their reach through his personal accounts — just like, years later, he was to break the mold by allowing alternative media and YouTubers into his presidential press conferences, to the fury of legacy outlets. Without the growing influence of these media in those years, which helped channel the popular energy built up over the decades and heightened by the desafuero, it is hard to see how he would have survived the juggernaut against him.

None of this, however, was enough for him to win his second presidential candidacy in 2012. The post-2006 war of attrition was still too recent, corporate media still too strong. Indeed, it was the television network Televisa that concocted the perfect Frankenstein to bring the PRI back from the dead: Enrique Peña Nieto, the vacuous, frivolous, authoritarian but telegenic governor of the State of Mexico, married to a soap-opera star in a wedding broadcast live on TV. And even that wasn’t enough: despite the staged inevitability of a Peña victory, bolstered by doctored polls appearing daily on the front pages of newspapers like Milenio, AMLO roared back to close a 20-plus point deficit to single digits in the final weeks of the campaign. This, in turn, kicked into motion a concerted effort of vote buying through debit cards laundered through Soriana supermarkets and the Monex bank to ensure that Peña was indeed able to cross the finish line.

In the end, his campaign was estimated to have outspent legal campaign-spending limits some thirteen times over. But in a final, in-your-face insult, the only campaign fined for spending violations was AMLO’s.

A New Party

This time around, it had become clear that resuming the tour was not going to be enough. The PRD, the hope of the post-1988 left, had been hopelessly captured by a centrist faction known as “the Chuchos”: indeed, the party was in the process of allying with Peña Nieto to pass a series of neoliberal reforms known collectively as the Pact for Mexico. In November 2012, AMLO and his movement filed for a new organization, the National Regeneration Movement, or Morena, a clever acronym that also means “dark-skinned woman” in Spanish.

By July of 2014, the organization had fulfilled all the requirements — signatures and state assemblies — to become a political party and receive public financing. Debuting in the 2015 midterm elections, the party won thirty-five seats in Congress, nothing like what was to come but enough of a foothold to begin advancing its agenda. In November of 2017, AMLO announced his third and what he promised to be his final presidential candidacy for Morena: this time, it was to be either the National Palace or his ranch in Chiapas known affectionately as “La Chingada,” a play on the Spanish phrase “Vete a la chingada,” or “Go to Hell.”

Having been through political hell (or at least purgatory) already, López Obrador would soon finally have his chance to govern. The man from Macuspana would not be the first person of humble origin to attain the presidency of Mexico. But to paraphrase historian Federico Navarrete, he was the first to not attempt to conceal it.

That fact alone was to set off a new era in Mexican politics.