In June, Mexicans delivered a message of strong support for the left. Claudia Sheinbaum, of the incumbent Morena party, won with close to two-thirds of the total vote, beating the second-place opposition candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez, by 30 points. The race was, in part, a referendum on current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his party’s agenda. Throughout his presidency, AMLO enjoyed high approval ratings—at times the highest in the world—and consolidated a governing coalition that cut across class, racial, and gender lines. Sheinbaum’s campaign message was clear: her government would maintain and expand the policies that built AMLO’s base of support, including labor protections and the expansion of social programs.
If the party’s success came from building a wave of popular support able to realign national politics, there are questions about how it will hold on to and mobilize that support in the years to come. “Where exactly on the political map should AMLO be placed?” asks Tony Wood. As sociologist Edwin Ackerman shows, Morena’s main base is the working class, but it received critical backing—about 40 percent—from the upper classes.
The question is: how can the party, and the movement it leads, situate itself more solidly on the left? More specifically, will Morena use its mandate to move past prevalent violence and militarization—both of which increased under AMLO—into a new arena of social, rather than militarized, security? Although the Mexican right is currently in disarray, its ability to consolidate a reactionary faction remains substantial so long as the military continues to play an outsized role in Mexican politics.
Sheinbaum’s overwhelming victory recalled the heyday of the so-called Pink Tide, when leftist leaders like Hugo Chávez, Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, Evo Morales, and others won their reelections by wider margins than they had secured in their initial victories. In this Mexican election, the mandate extended down the ballot, where Morena won two-thirds of the seats in the lower chamber of Congress, seven of the nine governorships at play, and a strong majority in the Senate.
The triumph adds to a series of victories for the left in Latin America in recent years, including the elections of Bernardo Arévalo in Guatemala, Xiomara Castro in Honduras, Luis Arce in Bolivia, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Gabriel Boric in Chile, and Lula’s return to power in Brazil, consolidating a leftist counterweight to far-right governments like those of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and potentially Trump in the United States. Searching for exit routes from the debris of neoliberalism, the Latin American left has new potentials, and stakes, for building national and international post-neoliberal futures.
Despite Morena’s fair and compelling wins, a class of pundits in Mexico and the United States has gone on the offensive to frame Mexico’s election—the largest democratic exercise in the country’s history—as a democratic backslide. The likes of commentators Denise Dresser, Enrique Krauze, and David Frum—a group giving meaning to the liberal in neoliberal—have warned that Sheinbaum’s victory moves the country closer to authoritarianism.
What’s important, in part, about their critiques of democracy is not that they are substantive—they’re not—but rather that they obscure legitimate criticisms of Morena from grassroots groups and organizations, including environmental defenders and families of the disappeared. In this juncture, we need to take stock of Morena’s leftism.
Right-Wing Reactions
In the face of two consecutive defeats in 2018 and 2024, the Mexican right is reforming. Led, in part, by individuals who participated in Mexico’s transition away from one-party rule in the 1990s, the new right decries Morena’s attack on neoliberalism, albeit without explicitly naming it as such. To them, AMLO’s “the people” versus “the enemies of the people” discourse smells of autocratic polarization. Constitutional reforms proposed by Morena, some of which are attempts to make the federal government a relevant player in national politics, are taken by the right to mean the erosion of checks and balances.
AMLO needs to be added to the list of despotic populists around the world, Dresser urges, for his attempts to centralize power and corrode institutional autonomy. He is a messianic despot, Krauze declares, whose support can only be understood through a cult of personality devoid of any serious political content. Then come empire’s emissaries: “A Mexico that is losing its democracy,” writes Frum, “will also continue to lose authority to the criminal syndicates.” A blind, or worse, deceived electorate, combined with an authoritarian shift, will do away with hard-won liberal institutions and induce lawlessness.
Historian Alexander Aviña has examined these criticisms for what they are: a tropicalizing of Mexican politics, largely for a U.S. audience primed to believe stories of cartel violence, corrupt politicians, and caudillos south of the border. The criticisms, as far-fetched as they may be, contain a reconfiguration of right-wing opposition in Mexico. Among other things, Dresser has criticized AMLO’s cash transfer programs, which lifted five million Mexicans out of poverty, as a form of neoliberal—the boogeyword in Mexican politics—populism. Frum warned that Morena’s proposed constitutional reforms would make Mexico a failed state overrun by criminals. Krauze criticized Morena’s “servants of the nation” program, which employs thousands of party organizers to canvass for social programs, as a new source of clientelism. Out of this imagined chaos, “only the cartels pushing poison into [Mexico and the United States],” writes former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “will benefit.” The criticisms are against a state willing to use its power and mandate to organize and benefit the public. That those criticisms are taken up by U.S. interlocutors makes the Mexican opposition part of a new international right, albeit without considerable domestic grounding.
The opposition is grasping to a mode of governance represented best by NAFTA’s offspring: the Mérida Initiative. The 2008 bilateral security agreement between Mexico and the United States expanded the scope of Mexico’s drug war under four pillars: disrupting organized crime, upholding the rule of law, creating a “21st-century” high-tech border, and developing “strong and resilient” communities. The pact kicked off a cycle of violence in Mexico to a scale previously unseen. At the same time, it was good times for investors looking to accumulate land, labor, and resources by violently dispossessing and disciplining land defenders, workers, and small farmers. It was also great for those, like Dresser, Frum, and Krauze, who believed that, by imitating Western institutions, Mexico could enter the halls of modernity.
A good way to measure the strength of neoliberalism and its opposition in Mexico is to see the extent to which those pillars are still followed. Whereas right-wing commentators have called for the return of Mérida Initiative governance in all but name, the real test for the left in Mexico will be its ability to move toward a post-Mérida Initiative future.
A Dependent Left
Morena, like most other Latin American leftist governments, comprises a dependent left. “Political dependence” in Latin American countries, writes Vânia Bambirra, “should not only be defined as foreign interference in national life,” but also as the situation where national elites’ decision-making is shaped by the priorities of global capital.
However, even within the parameters set, for example, by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and the Mérida Initiative, both Ackerman and journalist Jose Luis Granados Ceja have noted the impact and significance of Morena’s social policies in revitalizing the Mexican left. Now, the question for Sheinbaum is how to incorporate the grassroots groups who remained alienated during AMLO’s presidency into a larger governing coalition. Most are victims of the neoliberal war expanded by the Mérida Initiative: family members of the disappeared, land defenders, labor leaders, and migrants. In other words, the coming years will test how much the governing left can push against the limits set by political and economic dependence.
Because of the Mérida Initiative’s deep restructuring of the Mexican political economy, its framework can be used to posit a leftist critique. AMLO’s administration, contra two of the initiative’s pillars, has redistributed resources, built grassroots political engagement, and worked to democratize the judiciary. The other two unaddressed pillars—disrupting organized crime and building a 21st-century border—require, and have not received, equal attention. Those remaining pillars continue to be the justifications for the military’s prominent role in Mexican politics.
Against campaign promises to return the Army to the barracks, AMLO expanded the roles and budget of the military. His creation and mobilization of the National Guard for tasks ranging from immigration enforcement to infrastructure projects increased the military’s presence in an already militarized country. Initially founded as a civilian-led force, one of AMLO’s current proposals would place the National Guard under the Ministry of Defense, which would allow it to bypass transparency and accountability processes, something that victims of violence and family members of disappeared have long organized against. AMLO’s presidential term has been the most violent in Mexican history, although it follows historical trends of increasing violence since Felipe Calderón’s disastrous 2006 declaration of the war on drugs.
Tensions related to militarization are most evident in AMLO’s landmark infrastructure projects, the Tren Maya and the Trans-Isthmus Corridor. These projects have the mutual aims of generating economic growth in southern Mexico—the country’s most impoverished region—and stemming the transit of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border. But the solution to the region’s impoverishment—large infrastructure built by a government workforce—is also the problem. The underside of the megaprojects, which the National Guard is building and administering, is that they are also consolidating a corridor of military presence and displacement. As Dawn Paley reports, both projects are uprooting local communities, transferring communal land ownership to private hands, and inflicting military and paramilitary violence on the communities protesting them.
Under AMLO, the whole southern half of Mexico has become a geography of containment. In 2012, a U.S. official declared that the “Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border.” Two years later, in 2014, President Enrique Peña Nieto announced the Plan Frontera Sur, a channeling of resources and armed forces to Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala to stop migrants from reaching the United States. AMLO’s use of armed forces for development projects and immigration enforcement follows and expands the blueprint of his predecessor’s plan.
To be clear, Morena is constrained by a drug war political economy headed by the United States, which, by illegalizing migrants and so-called cartels, provides the impetus for militarized development across the hemisphere. One of the biggest challenges for Sheinbaum, and for the Latin American left, is figuring out how to move away from the drug-war common sense into a new era of demilitarized development and cooperation.
As scholars of dependence have noted, this is an international as well as a domestic challenge. Internationally, the “iron river of weapons” from the north will continue to flow south unless, among other things, power is chipped away from the U.S. gun lobby. Additionally, U.S. relations and foreign aid are conditioned on the pillars of the Mérida Initiative—a constraint to take seriously since Mexico and the United States are each other’s largest trading partners. At home, Mexico’s generation-defining war on drugs has created deeper dependence on the military as a political and economic actor. A connected challenge is what to do with the surplus population of ex-military and ex-paramilitary groups that could, if not otherwise integrated into civil society, reproduce cycles of militarism and violence like those in post-Vietnam United States or following Colombia’s long civil war.
A New Common Sense?
AMLO’s administration oversaw the growth of an independent labor movement. His healthcare reform, even with its patchy launch, centralized a healthcare system for Mexico’s wageless. His government managed to reinvest a disillusioned public in local and national governance.
A left in power will never be perfect. However, Sheinbaum and Morena can renew a national common sense based on social security, mass welfare, and dignified life. That cannot be achieved—and the Mexican left cannot have a sustained claim to power—without challenging the cycles of militarization puncturing the Mexican political economy to this day. AMLO was successful in building a large coalition able to work in favor of marginalized Mexicans. This is no time for Sheinbaum and Morena to stop pushing left.
Javier Porras Madero is an organizer and PhD candidate in Latin American history at Yale University.
