AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: How the Pandemic Boosted Financial Inclusion

AS/COA Online · How the Pandemic Boosted Financial Inclusion

For a year now, shuttered businesses and quarantine restrictions have moved many of our interactions—economic or otherwise—online. That means a silver lining for Latin America and the Caribbean, where more than 200 million people were unbanked as of early 2020. In Brazil, emergency aid disbursements resulted in the country’s unbanked population dropping by 73 percent, says Luz Gomez, director for Latin America and the Caribbean at Mastercard’s Center for Inclusive Growth. “There were all these existing trends to digital financial services that were happening all around Latin America that have been really accelerated,” she explains.

“[The pandemic] basically had the effect of doing what we could have achieved in 10 years and compressing that into one year,” says her colleague Arturo Franco. He notes that building access to financial services can lead to tangible improvements in people’s lives, particularly by lifting people out of informality. “What we have seen over the last decade is that financial inclusion doesn’t just help boost economic growth. It can also reduce poverty and inequality,” says the Center’s vice president for data & insights. “It can improve the productivity of business and, ultimately, insure people against economic shocks, like the ones we are going through right now.”

From helping to digitize payments to coffee growers in Colombia or assessing why Mexico’s tiendita owners stick to cash payments, Gomez covers the complex, multi-sectoral aspects of financial inclusion and the need to involve institutions ranging from fintechs to traditional banks to coops. With that approach mind, the next step is to build on the momentum gained during the pandemic. “Let’s not miss this opportunity,” says Gomez, who suggests using the current moment to prepare for the next emergency. “It’s also about building a robust ecosystem that's more attuned to serving the underserved.”

Franco notes that the Center is launching a research institute at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico that will work in partnership with universities in Colombia and Chile to better understand challenges to financial inclusion in the region. On this front, the pandemic is also spurring discussion. Says Franco: “People don't really want to change too much when things look like they're working out, but this is a moment where people are more open to structural change.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Vaccines and Variants a Year into the Pandemic

AS/COA Online · Vaccines and Variants a Year into the Pandemic

February marks a year since the first coronavirus cases were confirmed in the Americas and the virus has left a scar, claiming more than a million lives. Now the pandemic has entered a new phase, one in which countries are trying to roll out vaccines as variants threaten to undermine the protection those vaccines offer.

“We are encountering a problem that nobody is safe until everybody is safe,” says Dr. Roselyn Lemus-Martin, a COVID-19 researcher with a PhD in molecular biology from Oxford University. She explains that Latin America—and the world at large—is in a race against time to get as many people immunized as possible before the variants spread. “With these new variants, it’s going to take us a while to get to herd immunity.”

Meanwhile, a lack of transparency about vaccines can undermine public confidence in immunizations. Lemus-Martin has gained an audience in Mexico for her use of social media to explain the science behind both vaccines and variants, as well as how mechanisms such as COVAX work. She tells AS/COA’s Carin Zissis why there was a concern with Russia’s Sputnik V—for which countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico have acquired contracts—and how a new article in The Lancet is “good news for Latin America” as a study found that the vaccine has a 91.6 percent efficacy rate.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: What’s on the Horizon for U.S.-Mexico Ties in a Biden Administration

AS/COA Online · What’s on the Horizon for U.S.-Mexico Ties in a Biden Administration

As Joe Biden moves into the Oval Office, he’s made immigration a priority item for his administration. It’s also a top issue on the agenda for relations with Mexico—but it’s definitely not the only one.

In fact, during the waning days of the Donald Trump presidency, there were some bumps in the road when it came to his administration’s generally strong ties with the Mexican government. On January 15, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, released evidence from the U.S. investigation into Mexican former Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos and suggested the case was fabricated. Later that night, the U.S. Department of Justice defended the investigation and said Mexico violated a treaty by releasing the documents. The agency also expressed disappointment that Mexico wasn’t pursuing the case against the retired general.  

“I think this poses an interesting challenge for the Biden administration on what to do next,” says Dr. Sergio Alcocer, president of Mexico’s Council on Foreign Relations, or COMEXI, who explains that, with matters such as the Cienfuegos case, AMLO is making decisions with an eye toward his country’s midterm elections in June 2021 and bolstering his relationship with Mexico’s military. With that in mind, Alcocer suggests it could be hard to delve deep into solving tougher bilateral issues until Mexico’s electoral period concludes. Moreover, he notes that Biden and AMLO will have different approaches, with the incoming U.S. president focused on taking an active role on the global stage while his Mexican counterpart stays focused on issues at home. “López Obrador has said the best foreign policy is interior policy.”

"Probably—being very pragmatic, both of them—the best would be to meet at the border."

Alcocer, who served as deputy minister for North America in Mexico’s Foreign Ministry during the time Biden was vice president, shared insights for what both governments should expect in terms of working with each other. “Biden knows very well what's going on in Latin America,” he says, adding: “Mexico, in my opinion, needs to realize that the one that benefits the most with a good relation between the United States and Mexico, is Mexico.”

Given that AMLO rarely leaves his country, where will the two leaders first meet in person? Alcocer suggests a symbolic choice. “The best would be to meet at the border,” he says. “This would be a very interesting place for Biden to say, ‘We don't want a wall. We don't need a wall.’" 

World Politics Review | "Don’t We Deserve More?" Mexico’s Spike in Femicides Sparks a Women’s Uprising

A women’s rights march in Mexico City. (Photo by C. Zissis)

MEXICO CITY—One Saturday night last month, Bianca Alejandrina Lorenzena left her home in Cancun and never came back.

Two days later, on Nov. 9, protesters took to the city’s streets to demand justice for her death. Authorities had found the body of the 20-year-old Lorenzana, who was known by her nickname, Alexis, dismembered and wrapped in plastic bags. Her brutal slaying was the spark for the protest, but activists also demanded a response to a spate of recent femicides—the killing of women and girls for their gender—in the state of Quintana Roo, of which Cancun is the capital. The state is part of a dire national trend: Government statistics show that an average of 10 women are murdered each day in Mexico, and femicides have jumped by 137 percent over the past five years.

The protest in Cancun started out peacefully, but it took a dark turn when demonstrators tried to storm city hall and municipal police used live ammunition to disperse the crowd. Two journalists sustained bullet wounds, and protesters posted footage online of a panicked stampede as people fled the gunfire. The message was stunning: Law enforcement officers, who are meant to protect women from violence, had instead used lethal force against them.

The resulting outcry eventually led to the firing of the city’s police chief and the resignation of the state’s security minister, but that night, officials ranging from Cancun’s mayor to Quintana Roo’s governor took turns denying they had given the order to shoot, raising questions about who was in control of local police forces. The initial lack of accountability was a reminder of the rampant impunity in Mexico, where, from 2015 to 2018, only 7 percent of crimes against women were even investigated.

Read the full article at World Politics Review.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: On the Ground during Chile's Year of Change

AS/COA Online · On the Ground during Chile’s Year of Change

Unrest, a pandemic, polarization, and an election. In 2020, those words might get a person thinking of countries ranging from Bolivia to the United States. But, in this episode of Latin America in Focus, Santiago-based journalist John Bartlett takes listeners through Chile’s year of transformation, from October 2019 protests sparked by a transit-fare hike through a pandemic lockdown to the October 25 referendum that saw 78 percent of voters back the rewriting of the country’s dictatorship-era Constitution.

On the other hand, it wasn’t supposed to take a year. The March 2020 arrival of the coronavirus pandemic led to the postponement of the April plebiscite until October. Still, the delay and the lockdow, didn’t stifle the push for a new Magna Carta. “I think more than anything what it did was given Chileans a vital moment of introspection,” Bartlett tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis. “There were several things that happened during the lockdown that really put the emphasis back on some of the demands and social movement. People talking about healthcare, for example,” he explains, noting questions raised about higher death rates in public hospitals rather than private ones amid concerns about inequality that sparked the movement in the first place.

“[Remittances] are filling an important welfare gap.”

— Roy Germano

For Bartlett, who covered the past year’s events for outlets such as The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post, shifting rules presented the hurdles that come with shifting quarantine zones. At one point, he says, “[In] the building I live in you could leave by one door and be free to do whatever you want and leave by the other door and be in full lockdown.”

The challenges aren’t over yet. Now Chile needs to elect members of a constituent assembly and draft the document for another 2022 referendum and, in the middle of it all, will hold a 2021 presidential vote. But, for Bartlett, there are reasons for optimism. “Chile is an incredibly divided country. It’s no secret that open proponents of the dictatorship are active in all spheres of life,” he says. But the process also allows the country to go through a type of “healing” and an exchange of ideas for what comes next. Says Bartlett: “I'm looking forward to covering it over the next couple of years and seeing what will happen.”

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Katie Hopkins produced this episode.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: A Look at How Migrant Money Cushions Economies

AS/COA Online · A Look at How Migrant Money Cushions Economies

The pandemic is bearing down on Latin American and Caribbean economies. Beyond the daunting GDP contraction figures, people are struggling to make ends meet, and many depend on remittances—the cash that family members living and working abroad send home.

But how secure is that cashflow? In April, the World Bank predicted that remittances worldwide could see their biggest drop in recent history. In Latin America, the experience was mixed in the first half of the year, from record growth in Mexico, to a rebound in Guatemala, to an overall decrease in Colombia. 

As Dr. Manuel Orozco told AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis, although there was some cashflow decline in the region overall, migrants appear to have been better prepared than expected and with more solid savings than during the 2008–2009 global recession. On top of that, there’s an empathy factor. “Migrants realized that the conditions of the pandemic in their homelands were perhaps worse than they were in the United States,” says Orozco, director of the Center for Migration and Economic Stabilization at Creative Associates International. In the case of Mexico, he says that historically about 65 percent of migrants sent cash home, but that figure rose to roughly 80 percent with the pandemic. And cash from migrants “has helped cushion the external shocks form the global recession,” says Orozco, noting that in countries such as El Salvador, with a population of 6.5 million people, 1 in 2 households receive remittances.

How migrants send money to their families is changing, too. Remitly, which allows people to send money home via a mobile app, saw its customers triple from May 2019 to May 2020. “What we’ve seen is a massive shift to customers trusting digital solutions to send money home because maybe they either can’t or don’t feel comfortable getting to that physical, cash-based remittance location,” Remitly CEO and Co-founder Matt Oppenheimer told AS/COA’s Elizabeth Gonzalez, adding that, for Remitly’s users, “it is of such paramount importance…to send money home to their families during what is obviously a global pandemic.”

Aside from how migrants get the money into their loved ones’ hands, in a region where many work informally and don’t have access to government assistance, remittances don’t just pay the bills—they can help keep the peace. “The idea is that migrants, in a sense, replace the state in so far as providing social insurance to their family members back in their origin countries…that remittances are filling that welfare gap,” says Dr. Roy Germano, author of Outsourcing Welfare: How the Money Immigrants Send Home Contributes to Stability in Developing Countries. “By providing an economic buffer to people, remittances have the potential to reduce civil unrest and political instability,” says Germano, also the filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary, The Other Side of Immigration, and a senior research scholar at the New York University School of Law. 

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Elizabeth Gonzalez produced this episode.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: The Strange Case of El Salvador's Plummeting Homicide Rate

AS/COA Online · The Strange Case of El Salvador's Plummeting Homicide Rate

In the year since Nayib Bukele's June 2019 presidential inauguration, El Salvador's murder rate plunged, dropping by roughly 60 percent. That’s a major feat in a country that just five years ago had the highest homicide rate in the world. The precipitous drop in violence is one of the main factors fueling remarkably high approval ratings for Bukele, Latin America’s youngest head of state—a 39-year-old who campaigned as a Twitter-savvy outsider and ended the two-party grip on power dominating Salvadoran politics since the end of the country’s civil war.

Then, at the end of April 2020, murders once again spiraled out of control. With 85 homicides over the course of just five days, the government’s ability to keep the peace seemed vulnerable once again to the power plays of El Salvador’s gangs. The president acted swiftly, enforcing 24-hour lockdowns in prisons and welding metal sheets onto cell doors to prevent incarcerated gang members from communicating. Bukele also drew international attention and condemnation for tweeting photos of large numbers of imprisoned gang members locked together in human chains in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s still a very fragile and very easily reversible equilibrium.”

This kind of mano dura response to gangs predates the current government. “Before Bukele took the presidency…homicide levels were already on a downward trend, which was mainly due to basically all-out war that was waged by the state security forces against gangs, combined with very tough measures in prisons that hindered the communications between gangs in jails and outside jails,” Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst with the International Crisis Group (ICG), tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis.

Still, the rate has dropped to record lows under Bukele, with the government crediting its security strategy, known as the Territorial Control Plan. Breda expressed doubts, saying: “Most of the measures that have been taken resemble the attempts from previous administrations, which didn’t provide these stark and immediate results.”

So how did Bukele do it? In a July 2020 report titled Miracle or Mirage? Gangs and Plunging Gang Violence, the ICG suggests there are other reasons behind plummeting crime. “We think it’s more likely to be the gangs’ decision to scale back the use of violence…probably as part of an informal understanding between gangs and authorities,” says Breda. This wouldn’t be the first time a Salvadoran government negotiated a gang truce. The 2015 surge in violence took place after the last truce fell apart.But there are reasons why this time around provides a new opportunity, says Breda, who notes that Bukele’s popularity means he has a great deal of political capital to engage in dialogue with the gangs. To some degree there’s little choice; gangs are active in 90 percent of El Salvador and involve some 400,000 people in a country with a population of 6.5 million. Interacting with gangs is “unavoidable” on a local level even when entering or exiting communities, says Breda, who adds that how Bukele decides to wield his influence has much to do with him having an eye on next year’s legislative elections.

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Luisa Leme produced this episode.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Shining a Light on Police Abuse in Mexico

Photo by C. Zissis

AS/COA Online · Shining a Light on Police Abuse In Mexico

Earlier this month, as demonstrators across the United States took to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and to oppose police violence, Mexico was witnessing protests of its own.

On May 4, police detained a construction worker named Giovanni López just outside of Guadalajara because he wasn’t wearing facemask amid the coronavirus pandemic. He later turned up dead, his body showing signs of torture. While the types of bodycams that have frequently exposed police violence in the United States are not widely used in Mexico, López’s family had recorded a video of the police taking him and they released it to the public in hopes of speeding justice. The video went viral in early June, and protests erupted, primarily in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Three municipal police officers were arrested for the extrajudicial killing.

The case of Giovanni López drew attention to a problem in Mexico’s criminal justice system: police abuse is highly prevalent and rarely reported, let alone investigated. A 2019 World Justice Project (WJP) Report based on a survey of nearly 52,000 people found that only about 10 percent of cases of police torture get reported in Mexico, while nearly 8 in 10 prison inmates experience some form of violence or ill treatment at the hands of police. Torture—which can range from a bag over the head, to threats against family members, to electroshocks, to sexual violence—is frequently used to extract confessions.

“Mexico is using torture and ill treatment as investigative tools.”

“Mexico is using torture and ill treatment as investigative tools,” the report’s co-author and WJP Senior Researcher Roberto Hernández told AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis. Hernández also co-directed the Emmy Award-winning film Presunto culpable (Presumed Guilty). On top of being Mexico’s most-watched documentary to date, the film exposed why the country’s criminal justice system so frequently leads to the conviction of innocent people and, after its theatrical release nearly a decade ago, helped usher in a judicial reform.

Hernández, who is also a lawyer, says there has been some progress in conjunction with the reform. For example, the system has shifted from a point in which only 7 percent of inmates say a judge was present in the courtroom to hear a case to one being present in most cases. In addition, he cites the example of a municipality called Escobedo in the northern state of Nuevo León that implemented successful policing practices, right down to using bodycams when making traffic stops, that reduced abuses. “I think it’s going to be these small examples of, if you will, islands of integrity that could set forth positive change and prove that it is possible to make these things happen in Mexico,” says Hernández.But, in the meantime, there is a lot of room for progress, from strengthening the public defense system to implementing a recommendation from Mexico’s human rights commission for police forces to use bodycams across the country. “The main problems, the persistent problems of Mexico’s criminal justice system are still there—the use of torture and ill treatment, the overuse of eyewitness testimony…the overuse of confessions,” says Hernández. “Mexico still has a long way to go.”

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Luisa Leme produced this episode.

Univision News | Commentary on COVID-19 Cases in Mexico

#Mexico reported its largest single-day rise in both new cases and fatalities since the start of the #outbreak. To discuss this #UNews spoke to @CarinZissis, she's a Mexican political analyst and the editor in chief of the @ASCOA. pic.twitter.com/OvpTV36Cnl

— Univision News (@UnivisionNews) May 27, 2020

World Politics Review | Will AMLO’s Popularity in Mexico Survive COVID-19?

MEXICO CITY—In mid-March, as governments around the world were imposing lockdowns and other restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was upbeat. He waved off “this idea that you can’t hug” as a result of the virus. “You have to hug each other,” he insisted. “Nothing will happen.” At a press conference on March 18, he pulled out his wallet to show off the religious images, four-leaf clover and $2 bill he carries for good luck—and as protection, he claimed, from COVID-19. A few days later, he encouraged people to keep going out to restaurants with their families.

But by the end of the month, he had reversed his stance. AMLO, as the president is widely known in Mexico, released a video on March 28 encouraging people to stay home, flatten the curve and avoid unnecessary trips to hospitals. He curtailed his rigorous travel schedule, ending the weekend trips he took on commercial flights to visit villages where he shook supporters’ hands and hugged children. On March 30, the government declared a national health emergency. ...

Read the full article at World Politics Review.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Dr. Julio Frenk on the Coronavirus Pandemic in an Age of Populism

AS/COA Online · Dr. Julio Frenk on the Coronavirus Pandemic in an Age of Populism

As most of the world reels from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Julio Frenk told Latin America in Focus: “The sooner you start acting, the better.”

The president of the University of Miami, who also served as Mexico’s health minister and dean of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, says social distancing measures are crucial to stem the pandemic’s spread. “Those do work and the sooner you adopt them, even understanding that they do carry an important social and economic cost, the better off you’re going to be,” he says, pointing to time lost during the first days that COVID-19 hit Italy.

When it comes to countries’ health systems, Dr. Frenk, who has held decision-making roles during a number of pandemics, describes investing in technical competence as “fundamental” for preparedness. “It’s great to have these big hospitals and do heroic surgery to save a life, but the real core of the health system is the public health component and particularly having good epidemiological surveillance systems.” He added that this was a key aspect to controlling the 2009 swine flu epidemic. “Mexico behaved in a very responsible way, and knowing there would be serious economic consequences, immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization, and that again gave time to other countries.”

Dr. Frenk said that, for that reason, the wave of global populism since that outbreak has undermined global readiness on the public health front. “In 2009 the multilateral system was in a much better shape than today,” he told AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis. “You see that time and again, and it’s happened already with coronavirus: presidents presuming that they know better than their experts.”

He also points out what we need to learn from this pandemic. “The stock market has lost trillions of dollars in market capitalization. With a fraction of that we could have competent surveillance and preparedness systems. But again, this is the invisible part of the health system. It’s the thing that we only notice when it fails.”

“I hope this is a wakeup call for people because now it’s hitting home. You cannot engage in this sort of anti-science discourse without eventually paying the price,” says the former World Health Organization executive director. “And, by the way, the way we’re going to get out of this current pandemic is through science.”

Univision News | Commentary on Femicide and Women's Protests in Mexico

Interview with Univision News about the national strike "A Day Without Women" in Mexico.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Mexico's Fight against Femicide Reaches a Boiling Point

Photo by C. Zissis

AS/COA Online · Mexico’s Fight against Femicide Reaches a Boiling Point

Abril. Ingrid. Fátima. Isabel. Laura. Joaquina. Florentina. Rosario. Francisca. Camila. Ten women are murdered each day in Mexico.

In a country where nearly 99 percent of crimes go unpunished, violence against women and the impunity that comes with it are sparking outrage and mobilizations—a movement reflected throughout Latin America.

This year on March 8, International Women’s Day, protests will take place across Mexico. The following day, using hashtags such as #El9NingunaSeMueve and #UnDíaSinMujeres, women around the country will strike from work and school, bringing to mind the impact of 10 lives lost daily.

Amid this clamor for justice, a question remains: how do we get results? After all, in recent years Mexico has poured resources into battling discrimination and violence against women. And yet, the femicide rate rose 138 percent from 2015 to 2019.  

“We’ve got very good legislation. Everything on paper looks great,” says Ana Pecova, executive director of EQUIS Justice for Women, a Mexico City-based organization that works to transform institutions, laws, and public policy to boost women’s access to justice. Pecova, who won a National Journalism Award in Mexico in 2016 for her op-ed “Derechos de papel” (“Paper Rights”) in Nexos magazine, says the problem is that women’s rights too often don’t stand up beyond the paper they’re printed on.

In her conversation with AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis, she explains the Kafkaesque nature of women’s services offered in Mexico, whether it be understaffed justice centers closed during hours when women are most likely to face violence, to a lack of simple tools for conducting femicide investigations. “People are simply outraged at not only the cases of violence that are happening, but also the very basic lack of access to justice, where institutions fail women at every possible moment,” Pecova says. And harsher punishments are unlikely to help. “We have no evidence that increasing penalties is going to fix the problem,” she says. “It’s just a Band-Aid. It’s just patches.”

On top of that, there’s been a shift in the violence women face since Mexico took up a militarized approach to organized crime. “Starting from 2007, everything begins to change here in Mexico and violence—violence that women face particularly—begins to become much more complex,” says Pecova, pointing to the fact that women’s murders are often more brutal than those of men and increasingly involve firearms. “Now we have a whole other phenomenon of violence that takes place in the public sphere, and we have absolutely no policy to deal with that in place. We don’t even recognize that as a factor of risk for women.”

Pecova says there is an urgent need for solid, transparent data to evaluate and improve justice for women. She also suggests looking at preventative measures that start at home or in the workplace. For example, studies show women who have jobs or live in households where chores are shared are less likely to face domestic violence. Says Pecova, “I think we’re just feeling as a society an urgent need to do something, to start implementing policies that work.”

Produced by Luisa Leme.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Sizing Up the Start of AMLO's Presidency

Andrés Manuel López Obrador came into office on December 1 with pledges to transform Mexico. Now, as he wraps up his first 100 days in office on March 10—and despite some controversial moves to make good on his promises for change—he continues to have high levels of popularity. One reason is that the across-the-board landslide victory by López Obrador and his party MORENA left the opposition decimated. “Even if you become skeptical or disenchanted with López Obrador, you have nowhere else to go, so that keeps his approval ratings very high,” says Carlos Bravo Regidor, an associate professor and director of the journalism program at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, or CIDE, in Mexico City.

In this episode of Latin America in Focus, Bravo Regidor talks with AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis about why violence and security will be the area where voters will want to see results first, how López Obrador—known as AMLO—handles checks and balances, and the role of history and nostalgia in AMLO’s presidency. “When he tries to position himself historically, his enemy is what he calls the neoliberal period, so what happened in Mexico between the 1980s and 2018,” says Bravo Regidor. “That period was also the period when Mexico became a democracy. And AMLO doesn’t make that distinction. For AMLO, democracy started with him.”

But that also means AMLO’s nostalgia looks back to a less globalized world, says Bravo Regidor, who writes for Reforma and Mexico.com and is a frequent radio and TV commentator. “The idea that López Obrador has of Mexico is from a previous era,” he says. “At the moment of the 2018 election, that complex society that Mexico is today ended up voting for a guy that doesn’t really reflect that complexity in his vision of the country, his vision of the world, or his policies.”

The conclusion of AMLO’s first 100 days in power also happens to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the hegemonic political force in Mexico through most of the twentieth century. MORENA’s rise has drawn comparisons to the PRI, but Bravo Regidor notes that there’s a crucial difference. “MORENA has something that the PRI never had, which is democratic legitimacy. One of the weak spots of the PRI was that its democratic legitimacy was in question, and that made the PRI a lot more susceptible to opening spaces for the opposition,” explains Bravo Regidor. “The PRI knew deep down inside that that was their original sin, so to speak. MORENA doesn’t have that original sin, so that renders MORENA a lot stronger because MORENA doesn’t have to give anything away to the opposition. ‘We won, and we won by a landslide.’”

Listen to the podcast to hear more about AMLO’s position on U.S. ties and approach to Venezuela, how the president’s daily press conferences give him an “omnipresence,” and what—for Bravo Regidor—has been the biggest surprise of the new government.

This episode was produced by Luisa Leme.

AS/COA Online | Counting Down the First 100 Days of AMLO's Presidency

This coverage was cited in publications such as Mexico’s El Universal.

Its underway: the Andrés Manuel López Obrador presidency and his pledge of a Fourth Transformation for Mexico. He won by a landslide in a July 1 election that marked a repudiation of the status quo. What comes next has stoked both hopes and worries over whether his particular brand of populism means shifts as dramatic as the prior three transformations he’s referring to: Mexican independence, formation of the republic, and the revolution. Any student of Mexican history can tell you those three events took years. López Obrador, also known as AMLO, has six, given that the Constitution allows for one term of that length. He begins with the strongest mandate of any Mexican president in decades, control of Congress, and enough state legislatures to push through constitutional reforms.

As Mexico charts a new path, AS/COA Online's Carin Zissis, based in Mexico City, counts down the first 100 days of the López Obrador presidency…

Full content.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: What to Expect from an AMLO Presidency

Mexico has one of the longest presidential transitions in the world. All told, it will be five months since the time that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known as AMLO, won the election by a landslide in July until his December 1 inauguration. Over the course of that time, observers have been trying to figure out whether he’ll end up leaning more toward being a leftist populist or a moderate pragmatist. Whichever it turns out to be, he takes office with strong approval, a majority in Congress, and little in the way of opposition. 

It’s that position of strength that has helped him, thus far, keep up warm ties with U.S. President Donald Trump, says former Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Arturo Sarukhan. “Trump is someone who sniffs out weakness,” says Sarukhan, who notes that Trump has avoided including López Obrador in his Mexico bashing. AMLO has been doing his best to avoid a conflict with the U.S. president. “That explains why, during these very long months of a transition, he has said zilch on issues like the separation of minors from their parents, the DREAMers, DACA, and what has been going on at the border.” But a brewing crisis over how to handle a Central American migrant caravan in Tijuana will likely serve as an early test for both the López Obrador government and what Sarukhan calls an AMLO-Trump “bromance.”

“I would hope that the incoming Mexican government does not seek to appease Donald Trump on this front in exchange for nothing,” says the Americas Society board member, who adds that the new government should negotiate for development aid to handle the economic and security issues that drive Central Americans to leave their countries. “What can’t stand is a deterrence-driven only immigration policy between Mexico and the United States.”

But another reason López Obrador will seek to quell U.S.-Mexico tensions is because he plans to focus on domestic politics over international affairs. One sign of that is the transition team’s controversial decision to invite increasingly isolated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to the inauguration. “I believe that López Obrador, much like his political and ideological DNA, has a vision of Mexico’s foreign policy anchored in the sixties and seventies,” says Sarukhan. “He has clearly said that he thinks Mexico should not be intervening in the domestic affairs of Venezuela or Cuba, for example, going back to this sacrosanct doctrine of non-intervention.”

Beyond foreign policy, the private sector got a hint of and the jitters over how the new administration will govern when the transition team held an October referendum that resulted in ending a $14 billion airport project in Mexico City. “In some ways the honeymoon is over before the wedding because a lot of things have been happening even before he takes office and the airport is a perfect example,” says Amy Glover, CEO of emerging markets corporate relations firm Speyside Mexico.

But Glover, who has 20 years of experience in public affairs and business experience with a focus on Mexico, cautions that it’s still too early to forecast how foreign investors will approach an AMLO presidency. “Mexico is just too big of an economy to really ignore,” she says.

“Let’s face it: Mexico is a country with too high of a percentage of people living in poverty,” adds Glover. “I think It’s important to remain engaged as civil society and not discount the possibility for positive change before we even get started.”

She also notes that Mexico’s Congress coming close to having gender parity in the latest election is a positive sign of strides made by Mexican women in recent years. Says Glover: “Mexico should be proud of the fact that it has so many amazing women participating in politics.”
 

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Amid Caravan Crisis, a Look at Mexico's Migration Policy

Thousands of people—many of them women and children—are making their way in migrant caravans on foot, through tear gas, and over rivers to get from Central America to the United States. "They know what they're facing when they hit Mexico, they know what they're facing with the Trump administration. And yet they keep marching and they keep moving forward," says Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law and a lecturer on Mexican migratory policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Some 300,000 migrants try to make it through Mexico each year, explains Leutert, who met with AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis in Mexico City before heading to the Mexican border with Guatemala for research. Migrants who go it alone face steep smuggling fees, extortion, and kidnapping, leading some to sacrifice migrating under the radar in exchange for the safety of caravans. Says Leutert: “There is something political about what they’re doing and standing up and saying, ‘Look at our country: We don’t have a future there, we have the right to seek asylum in Mexico or the United States.’”

Mexico’s policy centers on apprehension and deportation, but it’s becoming more than just a transit point: from 2014 to 2017, the number of migrants seeking asylum there grew sevenfold, with the total expected to hit 23,000 this year. The country finds its refugee system short-staffed and overburdened while confronting a crisis that shows no signs of ebbing. On top of that, as discussed in this episode, factors like climate change only threaten to dial up the pressure.

All of this happens as Mexico prepares to inaugurate a new leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The future president has suggested offering work visas to Central Americans and calling all countries involved to increase development aid to the Northern Triangle—even as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to cut it. But, when it comes to the complexity of handling migration, Leutert cautions: “Just like the Peña Nieto administration and the Calderón administration and the Vicente Fox administration, you’re going to see the López Obrador team hit the same challenges.”

Despite how formidable it may seem to solve the problems that spark migration, Leutert, who covers the issue for Lawfare, offers recommendations. For example, the United States could offer temporary work visas, Mexico could take a risk-management approach, and there should be a more dignified treatment of asylum-seekers overall. Because, ultimately, migrants leave Central America out of need rather than desire. “People don’t want to march in caravans,” says Leutert. “There are a lot of things that every involved country could do if they were really serious about stopping this.”