By Adalberto Santana on November 29, 2022
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, called for a mass rally that took place on November 27th. AMLO led a march through the main avenues of Mexico City, which culminated in a huge rally in the Plaza de la Constitución, better known as the Zócalo. The authorities of the Mexican capital estimated the turnout at approximately 1,200,000 people. The main theme of the rally was to give a report on the presidential administration’s performance in the fourth year of the Obrador government.
AMLO and Mexico’s Fourth Transformation
In this context, several leaders of the opposition parties, such as the National Action Party (PAN), Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Citizen Movement (MC) and Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), as well as numerous analysts of the corporate media that hold ample space (98 percent) in the written press, radio and television, have not managed in four years to deteriorate and weaken the project of the government of the so-called Fourth Transformation (4T).
On the contrary, all the anti-AMLO propaganda and the discourse that accompanies it, seems to have been the best antidote to vaccinate broad popular sectors in order to strengthen their adhesion to the government of the Workers’ Party. In other words, the correlation of forces shows a very favorable balance for the Mexican president and for the political parties that support him: Partido del Trabajo (PT), Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA) and Partido Verde Ecologista de México (PVEM), as well as the multiple social groups that are the main support to the governmental administration.
So after four years of López Obrador’s government, the political opposition has shown few possibilities of growth and strong stagnation, as well as a scarce feasibility of consolidating the proposal of a block of forces capable of weakening the power of the broad Mexican social left. This is case for the national conditions and the prevailing trends in the Latin American region of which Mexico is an essential part.
The most recent electoral triumphs of the left in Brazil and Colombia this year, confirm the dominant trend in the region. But it is also confirmed by the electoral triumphs of the Mexican left in winning the majority of state governments, municipalities, deputies and senators at the local and national level. In this context, AMLO, in his great mass rally showed his capacity to mobilize broad popular contingents in support of his political project. This situation showed that the conquests achieved at the present time have a broad popular support. That is to say, the program of the so-called 4T has been carried out for the benefit of the Mexican people as a whole. Which is expressed in his slogan of his electoral campaign in 2018 and prolonged in the management of his government: “For the good of all, first the poor”.
This is a posture and slogan that is not framed in the ideological project of the opposition as a whole, which is more fragmented and with a content oriented in its discourse to the middle and upper classes, when in the reality of the Mexican social formation, those social groups are a minority and have lost wide spaces of power that they held in previous governments where a discourse and a program of neoliberalism was promoted. That is to say, a model of savage capitalism that polarized and fragmented Mexican society with clear opposing interests and to the exclusive benefit of minority groups located in the upper echelons of economic, political, social and cultural power. Socially, this neoliberal project that was hegemonic survived for almost three decades, but finally reached its inevitable collapse with the rise to power of AMLO and the 4T.
The growth of social exclusion polarized society and in four years of government, the Obrador project has managed to reduce this social polarization and drastically reduce the corruption that dominated large spheres of public power. This made it possible to expand social justice as a reform model, that is, a model of a more inclusive capitalism. Thus, according to AMLO: “35 million families in the country, 30 million (85 percent), directly receive at least a small portion of the public budget; and the remaining 15 percent also benefit from development conditions, paying less taxes, lower electricity and fuel rates, without suffering from corruption, influence and with business options, work, justice and peace”. The model of the Fourth Transformation, finally, is a proposal of a reformist regime that seeks to strengthen social participation, an inclusive model for the different social classes and to reduce social polarization. In such a way that, for example, an increase in workers’ salaries (variable capital) is proposed to reach 100% by the end of his administration in 2024. In this perspective, there is a dialogue between the business sector and the workers’ organizations, with the government as mediator. This is a traditional formula of Latin American reformist governments such as those of Lázaro Cardenas in Mexico, Getúlio Vargas and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Juan Domingo Perón and Néstor Kichner in Argentina and Juan Velazco Alvarado in Peru, among others.
In his fourth report, the Mexican president also highlighted the creation of more than 1,200,000 jobs and 145 free public universities. In this context, the reduction of poverty and extreme poverty in Mexico has been a fundamental achievement for ECLAC. To a large extent, this was due to the reduction of corruption and the increase in economic support for the most vulnerable groups. Especially marginalized young people without employment and education opportunities, who could join organized crime and that the Building the Future program inhibits this trend in more than 2 million 300 thousand citizens in the prime of their youth.
If the Mexican right-wing opposition were tenaciously less ideologically biased in its conservative, racist, classist and accustomed to corruption traits, it would have a more inclusive political discourse and practice. If preferred, less polarizing for the benefit of the broadest popular sectors and beneficial to all social groups. If it had these practices, Mexico would undoubtedly could make more progress in the path of the broad social and economic reforms being carried out by the so-called 4T.
Source: telesur, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US