El burro Obstinado
AMLO's blocking of North America's energy future.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador better known by his acronym nickname AMLO has often drawn the comparison in American reporting as being Trump like, applying to him membership in the club of nationalist populist that has emerged on the scene in recent years. This narrative however is largely a product of American reporting which produces for an American audience who lack context for any country that isn’t their own. For the kind of Politics espoused by AMLO is nothing new to Mexico but rather something very old.
Since the earliest years of its independence from Spain two issues have defined Mexico’s politics. First how to address the under development of parts of the country that leads to stark internal inequalities which foster internal instability. Second how to limit the involvement of United States the hemispheres sole superpower in Mexico’s affairs.
The Response Mexico had to these two issues almost a century ago was the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in Spanish). The PRI politics promoted a mix of Mexican nationalism and state-owned enterprises, in 1938 the assets of foreign oil companies were expropriated, and Mexico’s oil reserves made the property of the State owned oil company Pemex. Through a mix targeted distribution of the revenue of state owned companies to constituents and a fair bit of election fraud, the PRI maintained a strangle hold on Mexican politics for 71 years from 1929 to 2000.
AMLO for his part got his start in politics in the PRI in the 1970s before becoming a member of PRD a splinter party of PRI’s more left leaning faction which resented the role of technocrats in the PRI and the rise of national debt. The divide in the PRI and the economic troubles of Mexico in the 1990s ultimately brought down the PRI and ushered in a wave of economic liberalization Mexico. Which would continue under each subsequent Mexican President, until the 2018 election in which the Mexico’s political right was divided among three candidates while Mexico’s left consolidated around AMLO.
AMLO’s politics are rooted in reversing the economic liberalization of the past three decades which is seen from his perspective as more rule by the technocratic faction of Mexico. Chief among these reforms he takes issue with are those in the energy sector with Amlo proposing counter reforms to nationalize Mexico’s lithium, give state owned utility CFE priority dispatch even when not economic. And do whatever possible to prop up the heavily indebted Pemex by promoting a narrative around self-sufficiency of refined products.
Should AMLO get his way he jeopardizes not just Mexico’s future but the wider North American energy product. Hydro fracturing has blessed the United States with an abundance of natural gas and thus cheap power of which Mexico can share in. First in importing power and gas from Texas, and second by opening itself up to the development of its own shale fields with American expertise.