AMLO Sides With the Cartels
28th April 2023
Mexico’s president, the increasingly authoritarian and erratic leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, visited Veracruz this past Friday to commemorate the 1914 American occupation of that city. In his remarks was a startling declaration: the Mexican state and military, under his leadership, will defend Mexico’s criminal cartels from the Americans.
“There is talk in the United States,” said AMLO, “of intervening and confronting organized crime, drug traffickers, treating them as terrorists and that for this reason they will come to ‘help’ us, to ‘support’ us to confront organized crime… we do not accept any intervention… if they did, it will not be only the sailors and soldiers who will defend Mexico, all Mexicans will defend Mexico.”
The remarks, shocking in themselves, went mostly unnoticed by US media, and unaddressed by a US State Department whose bureaucracy has been so friendly to AMLO — against the interests of its own countrymen — that even the New York Times runs stories on the American ambassador’s intimate relationship with the Mexican autocrat. This blind eye on the part of both American media and government is a mistake — because AMLO’s remarks in Veracruz were neither a one-off nor a misstatement. They are part of a pattern in which the Mexican state under this president has openly moved to end Mexico’s generational experiment in democratic liberalization, and toward a sort of cooperative symbiosis with its own narco cartels. Mexico is trading the uncertainty of a free society for a return to the old days of Mexican autocracy and stage-managed politics, underpinned by truly staggering corruption and an overt alliance with some of the most violent and terroristic organizations, not just in Mexico or this hemisphere, but the world.