By Jorge Elbaum on May 31, 2024
Claudia Sheinbaum campaigning in Mexico, photo: Xinhua
On June 2, elections will be held in Mexico, the second most populous state in Latin America and the Caribbean, with around 130 million inhabitants. Another 11 million Mexicans live in the United States. Of those around 98 million are eligible to choose between three candidates: Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (-continuator of the legacy of current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)-, the representative of the conservative right-wing alliance, Xóchitl Gálvez, and the social democrat Jorge Álvarez Máynez, of the Movimiento Ciudadano party. The different polls predict an overwhelming triumph of Sheinbaum, the former Head of Government of Mexico City.
The causes of this possible triumph of the ruling party are related to AMLO’s success in his fight against poverty. According to indicators shared by local and international agencies, nine million Mexicans have been lifted out of poverty due to income improvements motivated by two factors: the increase in pensions and the sustained growth of salaries, which improved 3.3 percent with respect to inflation during his six-year term. The Gross Domestic Product grew 5.7 percent in 2021, after the pandemic, 3.9 in 2022 and 3.2 in 2023, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). The current year’s increase is expected to reach 2.8 percent.
Conservative sectors are at war against AMLO and against Sheinbaum, and that offensive has foreign partners. The main one resides in the United States, for whom the current government is a nightmare because it has broken the agreements that the narco-oligarchy of the PRI and the PAN had established with the transnationals. Three of the dimensions through which the interference from the north is instituted are: illegal arms trafficking, migratory processes and drug trafficking. Last January, AMLO succeeded in filing a lawsuit against U.S. arms manufacturers that are the driving force behind the smuggling of rifles for the benefit of drug trafficking cartels.
In 2021, AMLO’s government initiated legal action in U.S. courts for “negligent and unlawful business practices that facilitate illegal arms trafficking, generating enormous human and material damage.” The lawsuit was filed against Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Glock and Colt, among others. According to the Mexican government’s statement, illegal commercialization involves the entry of 342,000 to 597,000 weapons each year. When Mexico made the original presentation in the U.S. courts, its then Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard, advanced that his country would seek compensation of at least 10 billion dollars, linking illegal arms trafficking to the number of homicides, which in 2020 reached 36,579 murders.
Regarding the migration issue, between 2018 and 2023 there has been the entry of 1.2 million Mexicans to the United States, 58 percent more, on average, than previous years. The vast majority of those migrating north are hired at pauper wages and contribute exponentially to the exploitation of the labor force, reducing the so-called “labor cost” of employers: while Washington rants against immigration, employers extend the exaction of value to Latino workers. Nearly 79 percent of migrants are male and half of them are between 15 and 29 years old.
Drug trafficking is another of the dimensions that appear thematized in the elections. The State Department insists on making visible the (foreign) supply that has the Mexican cartels responsible for border trafficking. But it refuses to make visible the commercialization within the United States, linked to the local mafias that are articulated with the laundering of assets in the financial lairs controlled by Wall Street. To face part of these scourges, AMLO’s government has decided to apply measures against the so-called FINTECH, platform companies used by cartels to launder assets.
One of the latest measures consisted in taking away the license of the Argentinean Marcos Galperin’s company to carry out credit activities without being a bank. As of June 2024, Mercado Libre must become a bank in Mexico if it intends to continue operating in that country. This is one of the measures by which the global right is trying to demonize Claudia Sheinbaum. To achieve this, they even did not hesitate to spread several false information in which they accuse the candidate of MORENA of wanting to institute a Pluricultural Mexico as a previous step to promote the end of private property. The Judeophobic appeal towards the candidate was also present when false posters were disseminated in which Sheinbaum proposed “free and compulsory circumcision for newborns”. The global right wing spares no effort to prevent its lucrative business from being thwarted by popular mobilization.
Source: Pagina 12 translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English