On December 6, the MORENA movement demonstrated its strong popular support by filling Mexico City’s Zócalo — the world’s second-largest public square — and the surrounding streets beyond capacity. According to the official count, some 600,000 people turned out to celebrate the seventh anniversary of its rise to power, with the election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in July of 2018 and his inauguration the following December.

In an hour-long speech, and with that historical moment in mind, AMLO’s successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, began by making a clear demarcation with the past:

From that moment on, it became very clear that just as Church and State were separated in 1857 [with the Reform Laws], in 2019 the principal separation had to be that of economic power from political power; and so it has been, and so it must continue to be, for the good of the Republic. . . .  Today it is clearer than ever before that the corruption and privileges of neoliberalism deeply damaged our homeland and our people; thirty-six years of that economic and political model left as a legacy poverty, inequality, the handing over of our natural resources to private interests both national and foreign, loss of sovereignty, violence, and corruption.