Latin America Advisor | Who Will Mexico's Ruling Party Tap as Its Candidate?

Q: Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum resigned on June 16 to launch her campaign for Mexico’s presidency. The mayor is a member of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party, which has said it would select its nominee for president by early September. On June 12, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard also resigned to seek the nomination. How is Mexico’s presidential race shaping up, and who has the best chance of becoming Morena’s candidate? Who will represent the opposition, and what issues will drive the election?

A: Carin Zissis, editor-in-chief of AS/COA Online: 

López Obrador and his party, Morena, insist there will be no dedazo, a long-held Mexican practice whereby the president picks his successor. Still, Sheinbaum is seen as AMLO’s favorite, and observers use her catchphrase, #EsClaudia (‘It’s Claudia’), like a fait accompli. Then again, Ebrard gained momentum when Morena’s coalition backed his proposal that rivals exit their posts this month to compete for the party’s candidacy. With a five-poll process to pick the candidate and no public debates, Morena hopes to project a unified front, even if rumors of infighting abound and this unprecedented selection process faces tests. And while AMLO, buoyed by popular social programs, continues to command high approval, disapproval runs higher for his government’s handling of top issues such as crime, corruption and the economy. The problem for the opposition is that most voters don’t think it can do any better. Morena has much higher favorable ratings than any of the three parties in the opposition Va Por México alliance, which, beset with its own infighting woes, will announce its selection process by the end of June. Head-to-head polling gives both Sheinbaum and Ebrard double-digit leads over the alliance’s top names. Of course, the election is a year away. Va Por México could get a boost with the backing of Mexico’s third political force, Movimiento Ciudadano (though its party leader compared the alliance to a sinking ship). The opposition could unveil a surprising name. But with AMLO, the Teflon president, at the helm, the Morena candidate announced in September has a strong chance of winning nine months later.

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AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Guatemala's Electoral Crossroads

When Guatemalans vote for their next president on June 25, they will get the chance to choose from nearly two dozen names. But three notable aspirants won’t be on the ballot: conservative outsider and poll frontrunner Carlos Pineda, indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera, and the fson of a former president Roberto Arzú. With all three eliminated from the competition by the country’s courts, they are urging Guatemalans to void their ballots and calling their disqualifications “electoral fraud.”

“There are three [contenders] that might be very dangerous for those who are governing right now. And these are the three who have been eliminated,” says Juan Luis Font, an award-winning Guatemalan journalist with over three decades experience at outlets such as Canal Antigua, Revista ContraPoder, Emisoras Unidas, and the recently shuttered elPeriódico. Although Font continues to cover his country’s political scene from the United States with ConCriterio, he is among the dozens of Guatemalan journalists, prosecutors, and judges forced into exile in recent years amid a backlash against anti-corruption efforts. 

What Font and others have faced reflects a difficult moment for Guatemalan democracy—that coincides with this round of elections. Voters, who will select a replacement for current President Alejandro Giammattei as well as all 160 legislators, are also largely pessimistic: 83 percent say the country’s general situation has worsened over the past three years, and only 16 percent trust the electoral tribunal. 

Font explains to AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis that this competition is a battle between those with an authoritarian philosophy of governance and those who support democracy and “would like to have a republic back in Guatemala.” He also notes that, with security a top concern and young voters looking for solutions, many are looking to the mano dura tactics being carried out by the government of Nayib Bukele in neighboring El Salvador as a model.

So who are the top candidates? Font shares the background of poll leaders Sandra Torres, a former first lady; Edmond Mulet, ex-head of Congress and UN diplomat, and Zury Ríos, a long-time legislator and daughter of a military dictator. He also explains why the center-right Mulet appears to be the greatest beneficiary from Pineda’s elimination and that the support he gains could propel him into what will be a likely August runoff. “He's a diplomat [who has been] positively viewed by international community,” says Font. “And he seems to be a little bit more in favor of respecting human rights and democratic principles in the country.”

This podcast was produced by Executive Producer Luisa Leme and Associate Producer Jon Orbach. Carin Zissis is the host. 

The music in this episode is "El arpómetro de Carlos," by P. Coulon and H. Martínez, performed by Ángel Tolosa for Americas Society. Learn more about upcoming concerts: musicoftheamericas.org

AS/COA Online | The China-Taiwan Tussle in the Americas

In March 2023, Honduras picked a side. Its government switched diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to China, leaving Taipei with just 13 diplomatic allies worldwide.

Taiwan has had a separate government since 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took control in Beijing, even though China considers it a renegade province. Over the course of the past 75 years, and particularly since the UN dropped recognition of Taiwan in 1971, Taipei has seen its list of allies dwindle. More than half of those allies—seven in total—are located half a world away in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the two East Asian countries have engaged in bouts of dollar diplomacy to curry favor.

And increasingly, China’s economic might is winning countries over. “Honduras is a perfect example of how, from a lot of Latin American and Caribbean countries’ perspective, there is no economic security versus national security. From their perspective, economic security is national security,” explains Associate Director of Research at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute of Public Policy Leland Lazarus.

With Chinese investment in Latin America reaching $130 billion between 2005 and 2020, the country has become South America's top trading partner and 21 Latin American countries have joined Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. This year’s elections in Paraguay and Guatemala, which are the two biggest economies that still support Taiwan, have made East Asian relations an unlikely campaign issue in both countries; the top opposition candidate in Paraguay has said he’d switch sides and in Guatemala, the Taiwanese president visited in April to shore up support.

If those two countries opted for China, Taiwan would be left with just Caribbean allies in the region.

Amid a flood of Chinese investment dollars and the promise of access to its huge market, why do countries stick with Taipei? “Part of it is just the affinity between democracies, but another part of it is that in the Caribbean economies, what Taiwan is able to provide is sufficient for the economic growth and needs of those Caribbean countries,” says Lazarus. “I want to caveat that—for now. It’s sufficient for now.”

One reason for the caveat is that wealthy Chinese individuals have been attaining Caribbean citizenship. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility that within maybe five years, 10 years or so, that those new citizens could exert political or economic pressure to have those countries switch diplomatic recognition,” says Leland, who’s held roles in the U.S. Southern Command and the U.S. foreign service, as well as having been based in Barbados, China, and Panama.

Morever, China has undertaken military actions of Taiwan’s shores, sparking tensions between Beijing and Washington, which supports Taiwan while recognizing China. So what is the U.S. role? “Certainly from Taiwan's perspective, the allies that remain…are still so important in advocating for Taiwan's participation in international organizations,” says Lazarus. But he points out that even countries that have switched ties recognition can continue to have strong economic and cultural ties. “[The United States] should continue to show the power of our example in terms of our ironclad commitment to Taiwan,” says Lazarus, adding that, “More and more countries really recognize that if there is some sort of conflict over the Taiwan Strait, that would be absolutely catastrophic for the global economy.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Democratic Tests in Honduras and Nicaragua

AS/COA Online · Democratic Tests in Honduras and Nicaragua

Two Central American countries will go to the polls in November for potentially combustive elections that will test the quality of democracy in the region…

…If Honduran dissatisfaction with democracy runs high, the problem is particularly acute among young voters. A poll conducted prior to Honduras’ March 2021 primaries found that 61 percent of millennials didn’t plan on voting, and the same portion wanted to leave the country due to a lack of economic opportunities.

Combating young voters’ apathy is a primary goal for Juan Pablo Sabillon, founder of El Milenio, a non-partisan platform that seeks to motivate and inform Honduras’ sizable youth vote. Sabillon was inspired to create El Milenio during the unrest following the 2017 election when the San Pedro Sula native was, he said, “literally watching my city burn.” He recognized that the election had disenfranchised young voters, saying, “Basically the inspiration [for El Milenio] was really just the absence of a platform or a forum where young people could engage in civilized dialogue.”

With an eye to the 2021 vote, El Milenio shares election information through podcasts and social media, as well as launching Emil, a WhatsApp bot voters can use to learn about legislative candidates’ platforms to help them distinguish between the plethora of names on the ballot. “The decisions that most greatly impact hundreds every day are taken in Congress and people don’t know anything about their candidates,” Sabillon told AS/COA’s Carin Zissis. “We talked with hundreds young people and, yes, corruption is a concern. But they just don’t know the basic information about a candidate.” 

For Sabillon, this election is a make-or-break one for Honduras. He explained that the country spent years building its democracy only to witness backsliding over the past dozen years, concluding: “If we don't achieve a Congress that can help improve checks and balances, pick a new judiciary, and enforce rule of law—or even rebuild the rule of law—Honduras is going to go through very tough times.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Rewriting Mexico's Security and Energy Agendas

AS/COA Online · Rewriting Mexico’s Security and Energy Agendas

October opened up with big moves in areas high on Mexico’s agenda: security and energy. Both issues are among the most crucial to the country’s future.

On October 8, the Mexican capital played host to senior U.S. cabinet officials for a meeting that spelled the end of the 13-year-old, $3 billion security pact known as the Merida Initiative. A new agreement—with a rather lengthy name that commemorates 200 years of bilateral ties— was announced: the U.S. Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities. The two governments are slated to release a three-year plan for the Bicentennial Framework in January 2022. Until its release, the broad strokes of the meeting give a hint of how much will shift.

“For a lot of us who study U.S.-Mexico security cooperation, it feels more like a rebranding than a true change,” says Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, the head of a security research programs at the Center for U.S.-Mexican studies at the University of California, San Diego and the co-founder of the Mexico Violence Resource Project. She tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis that the announced agreement comes after a year of bumpy security relations, particularly following the U.S. arrest of Mexico’s former defense minister, Salvador Cienfuegos, in 2020. But she notes that during the Obama administration, cooperation had already moved on from focusing on narcotics to building rule of law and guaranteeing safe communities.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t shifts in priorities. The fact that Mexican officials emphasized gun smuggling and U.S. officials focused on fentanyl represents the need to tackle “twin tragedies,” says Farfán-Méndez, given the hundreds of thousands of homicides linked to Mexico’s drug war since it began 14 years ago and the approximately 90,000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2020. “I think that to the extent that both governments could show that they care about loss of life on the other side of the border, that that could really go a long way in getting working agreements between both countries,” Farfán-Méndez concludes.

And, while she says “the jury is still out” as to whether each country’s security agencies can resolve feuds under the new framework, the two sides are playing ball. “We're on first base now,” she says. “There's a lot of help that needs to happen from other teammates and in other areas to get things going. But I think, after going through innings with no real play, now we're at least on base.”

If security is a topic of cautious cooperation, energy is an area of discord. On October 1, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, introduced a constitutional reform that would give the state-owned electricity firm, CFE, control over 54 percent of the power market, effectively backpedaling on aspects of a 2013 reform that opened up Mexico’s energy sector to private and foreign investment. AMLO’s reform would also end the independence of the energy regulatory agencies by absorbing them into ministries and giving the government exclusive rights to lithium extraction.

Analysts and members of the business sector say the reform would endanger future private investment by canceling contracts and rebuilding a state monopoly. It would also risk international environmental agreements by favoring less efficient power generation resulting in an increase in prices for consumers. “One of the most important things that I would say about this initiative is that it is very clear on what it wants to strike down, but it's not particularly clear on what it wants to build and what it wants to accomplish as a whole for the Mexican people,” says Montserrat Ramiro, a former commissioner for the Energy Regulatory Commission, or CRE—one of the autonomous agencies that could meet its demise if the electricity reform passes.

That “if” is key. AMLO’s coalition doesn’t have the legislative seats needed to pass the reform on its own, though the president has sought to win over members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which was the very party that ushered in the landmark 2013 reform. Moreover, the reform could result in legal battles connected to the USMCA trade pact, explains Ramiro, who has held senior energy-focused roles at institutions such as the OECD and Mexican Institute for Competitiveness.

Even if the reform does not come to fruition, Ramiro expects AMLO will keep seeking ways to solidify a statist approach to the country’s energy sector. “I think he will just continue to say whatever is best for his political messaging, which he is a genius at—that is absolutely uncontroversial,” she says. “We will still be debating false accusations on either the energy companies or CFE itself and what our future is… And, and it will just keep on going until another government comes in.

World Politics Review | The Real Winner of Mexico's Midterm Elections Wasn't on the Ballot

Mexico’s June 6 midterm elections were widely framed as a referendum on President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s statist makeover of the country’s institutions. In the hours after polls closed, headlines pointed to a defeat for the president’s party, Morena. But despite its losses in the lower house of Congress, the results had a number of bright spots for Morena and for AMLO, as Lopez Obrador is popularly known.

On the other hand, there was one clear winner that wasn’t even on the ballot: the country’s electoral authority, the Instituto Nacional Electoral, or INE, which overcame significant challenges to successfully oversee the biggest election in the country’s history.

Due to a recent political reform that led to a realignment of electoral calendars, some 20,000 local municipal positions were up for grabs across the country, as well as all 500 seats in the lower house of Congress. Heading into the election, Morena held a slim majority there with 256 seats; with its coalition partners, it had the two-thirds supermajority needed to amend the constitution. The allocation of seats is determined by a combination of direct and proportional representation, and the final make-up of the new Congress won’t be determined until August, but Morena is projected to lose close to 60 seats…

Read the full article.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: A Pre-Midterm Pulse Check on the Mexican Electorate

AS/COA Online · A Pre-Midterm Pulse Check on the Mexican Electorate

With 21,000 seats up for grabs across all 32 states, Mexico’s June 6 midterms will be of huge importance. Not only will voters select candidates for a record number of posts, but they’ll also get the chance to signal their assessment of the political movement of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—better known as AMLO—even if he’s not on the ballot. Will his newcomer party, Morena, build on its sweep of the 2018 elections? And what are the chances Morena’s coalition will win a supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies, where all 500 seats are up for grabs?

“In every single midterm election since 1997, the governing party has lost support and lost presence in the lower chamber of Congress,” says Dr. Alejandro Moreno, head of public opinion polling at El Financiero. He explains polls indicate Morena is unlikely to buck that trend. Still, he tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis that support for AMLO’s party is similar to where it was in the last election, even if there have been shifts in where that support is coming from. “The younger voters, who were the first and most immediate supporters of López Obrador, are the first ones to abandon him,” says Moreno, who adds that a rise in support among older voters is compensating for that loss.

He also says that Morena’s supporters are made up increasingly of rural voters with lower education levels who previously backed the once-mighty Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). “2018 was more like a rare manifestation of the vote rather than a realignment for the future,” notes Moreno, who points out that both rural and urban middle class voters—two groups that in the past diverged—came together for AMLO in that vote. Now he says: “Things seem to be going back to how they were before.”

"Polls offer this opportunity to have an X-ray of the electorate."

But some aspects of this election are new, and one example is the heightened divisions. “We haven't seen this level of political polarization in the country that I can remember [since I started doing] polls in Mexico,” says Moreno, who is also a political scientist at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, or ITAM. Why? Voters are less attached to major political parties, which is coupled, he says, with “the president following—for good or bad, I'm not going to judge, just to describe—a polarizing strategy.” Meanwhile, parties that in the past were what Moreno describes as “historical adversaries” have formed alliances in this election to take on the governing party. “Now it's everyone against Morena and its allies.”

Latin America Advisor | How Effectively Is Mexico Fighting the Covid Pandemic?

Q: Mexico’s Health Ministry acknowledged last month in a report that the country’s true number of coronavirus-related deaths may exceed 321,000, a nearly 60 percent increase from the official tally. The figure includes 120,000 “excess” deaths that were previously unaccounted for due to reasons including a lack of testing and unreported cases of Covid-19. What is the real state of the pandemic in Mexico, and what major limitations in the country’s public health system has it exposed? How well has Mexico’s government planned for vaccination rollout? With legislative and local elections scheduled for June, will the new statistics have political consequences? 

A: Carin Zissis, editor-in-chief of AS/COA online:

On the Saturday before the start of Semana Santa, Mexico’s Health Ministry quietly revealed devastating excess death figures, even as the confirmed tally already meant the second-highest per capita death toll in Latin America after Peru. The scale of tragedy is hard to pin down, given a public health strategy with one of the lowest coronavirus test rates in the world. The lack of testing left thousands of Mexicans watching loved ones die at home, unable to confirm Covid-19 as the cause. Communication has been another hurdle. While the Health Ministry urges people to stay home or mask up, the message from the top isn’t always clear. The country’s senior coronavirus official went on a beach vacation when contagion was at its worst. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has rarely worn a mask in public, and catching the virus didn’t convince him to start. When it comes to the vaccine rollout, news is also mixed. On Christmas Eve, Mexico was among the first Latin American countries to administer the vaccine and has secured contracts for enough doses to cover 129 percent of its population. Given the government’s schedule to complete vaccinations by March 2022, it should administer 500,000 doses daily, but it is falling far short of that mark. As of Easter Sunday, only 1 percent of Mexicans had been fully vaccinated. June midterms serve as another vaccination deadline. A March poll shows AMLO’s approval runs higher among the vaccinated. With legislative control in play and, given AMLO’s figurehead role, his party would benefit if his government can pick up the vaccination pace.

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