Mexico’s Presidential Election, With Andrés Rozental

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Mexico's presidential election.

With me to discuss the dynamics and consequences of Mexico's upcoming election for itself and for its northern neighbor is Andrés Rozental. Andrés is President of the consulting firm, Rozental & Asociados, which advises multinational companies on their corporate strategies in Latin America. He was founding president of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. Andrés served for more than thirty-five years in Mexico's foreign service. His post included ambassador to the United Kingdom, deputy foreign minister of Mexico, ambassador to Sweden and permanent representative of Mexico to the United Nations in Geneva. Andrés, thank you for coming back on The President's Inbox.

ROZENTAL:
Happy to be here, James. Very, very happy to.

LINDSAY:
I want to do a bit of a scene center Andrés. Mexicans are going to go to the polls on Sunday, June 2nd. Like in the United States in November, Mexicans are participating in a general election. They will elect a new president who'll go on to serve a six-year term. All 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies and all 128 members of the Senate of the Republic. And again, as in the United States, most of the attention is focused on the presidential race. Now, the Mexican constitution limits incumbents to a single six-year term. So incumbent President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, more commonly known as AMLO, won't be on the ballot, but I suspect his presence is going to be hovering over the entire campaign. As I look at it, Andrés AMLO looks like he would win if he were able to run for reelection. He's polling in the high sixties. That's an approval rating that most politicians can only dream of. So before you plunge into the particulars of the presidential race and the various candidates, can you help us understand AMLO's appeal?

ROZENTAL:
Well, you've described the scene perfectly well, and I agree with you, that if AMLO were able to run, undoubtedly he would win an election at this stage, although his approval ratings are not that different from those of his predecessors at about the same time. Since we have a very powerful executive branch in Mexico, the president, the incumbent, always sort of finishes around the 60 percent approval rating level. Now, AMLO is a very unusual character. He was a member of the PRI for some years. He ran to be governor of his state of Tabasco. He lost, and because he lost, he decided to leave the PRI.

LINDSAY:
And I should note the PRI long dominated Mexican politics.

ROZENTAL:
For seventy-one years. So he decided to leave and he then founded together with a series of other Mexican politicians and intellectuals, another party called the PRD, which is a left of center party. Today, that party has joined with the PRI and the right of center PAN to form a coalition which has as its candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez, a sitting senator of indigenous background. Her family, her mother was a native Indian, a native original inhabitant of Mexico. And AMLO is by far, in my opinion, the greatest communicator Mexico has had in politics for as long as I've been alive. He is absolutely uniquely qualified. He has a daily press conference. It used to be five days a week. Now it's seven days a week.

LINDSAY:
Oh, it's now up to seven.

ROZENTAL:
We're up to seven. Where he gathers what I would call a friendly audience of journalists or pseudo journalists in some cases, and pontificates for two to three hours every single day and sets the agenda for the day. He sets the agenda for the media, he sets the agenda for discussion. What he says becomes the daily agenda. And that's unusual. It's unusual because no president before in Mexico had done that. And it's also unusual because although it's not a very popular program, perhaps you'll recall that Venezuela's President Chávez used to have a weekly program that lasted for five or six hours where he would be seen by a good number of Venezuelans. AMLO's morning mañaneras, as it's called, really doesn't attract an enormous amount of people watching it, but it does become, as I said, the agenda of the day.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk then about the race itself. You mentioned one of the candidates, Senator Gálvez, but there are two other candidates in the race. Tell me a bit about them and then we'll talk about where the horse race stands less than a week out from the election.

ROZENTAL:
Okay. The other main candidate is also a woman. She is AMLO's choice. She is part of his movement of the Morena movement. She was a former mayor of Mexico City. That is basically her government experience I'd say. She left that position about a year ago to begin to campaign for the presidency. She is leading in the polls and most of the polls and the great majority I would say. But there is an enormous difference depending on which poll you look at as to what the margin of difference is between her and Xóchitl Gálvez.

There is a third candidate, a gentleman who represents a smaller and more recently formed party called Citizen's Movement. He is running way behind. The fact is that he couldn't possibly be elected, but he has to some extent split votes and support between the two candidates that, the two women candidates that are leading. There were three debates among the three candidates. The debates ended up being more, I would say mudslinging matches about personal issues that each one accused the other of. So they were not defining debates. I think probably didn't move the needle much in terms of support for one or for the other candidate.

Now, the interesting thing, Jim, is that we have, in 2018, AMLO was elected with 52 percent of the vote, of those who voted.

LINDSAY:
Right. Now on his third attempt to become president.

ROZENTAL:
On his third attempt to become president. But that 52 percent only represented about 27 or 28 percent of registered voters. So we have, as you have here in the United States, a rather large degree of abstention of people who don't vote. Of that 52 percent that did vote and voted for López Obrador, I would say that his base, the left of Mexico's voters, the poorer part of Mexico, the rural part of Mexico voted for him. And he probably got somewhere between 27 and 29 percent of the 52 percent that voted for him. The other 30 percent or 27 or so percent were middle-class urban Mexicans who had tired of the PRI that governed, as I said, for seventy-one years, tired of the PAN that had governed for twelve years and decided that it was time to give a third option a chance.

LINDSAY:
I think many Americans can identify with that sentiment.

ROZENTAL:
Exactly. Now, six years later, that cohort will not vote for Claudia Sheinbaum, who is López Obrador's hand-picked, supported candidate. She's also running under a coalition which comprises the Morena movement and two smaller parties, the Workers' Party and the Greens and that cohort will not, I think vote massively as happened in 2018. So the important thing as one looks at the election is what happens with that group of middle-class urban Mexicans? Will they vote for Mrs. Gálvez or will they stay home or will they vote for the Citizen's Movement candidate as a sort of a Kennedy-type independent candidate, as you will have here probably in November? And there's been a strong push for people to vote, to get out and vote. I think all the candidates have asked people, their supporters to vote. There's a lot of social media pressure for people to get out to vote, so we'll have to see.

LINDSAY:
Andrés, have we seen any evidence of deep fakes playing a role in the run-up to the election?

ROZENTAL:
No, I don't think so. There is some dirty politics as always, people making up some stories about Claudia or making up stories about Xóchitl. This is the first time Mexico is going to have a woman, a female president.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask you about that. I think most Americans looking at Mexico's election will be struck first and foremost that the two leading candidates are women.

ROZENTAL:
Yeah.

LINDSAY:
The United States has just had one female presidential nominee. Is this just a fluke? Is it telling us something significant about where Mexico is today?

ROZENTAL:
I think it's very significant because Mexico is to a great extent still, I would say, a male dominated society. We call it a macho society. So I think to have two women running and one of them will be the next president of Mexico is a very interesting development. However, I should point out that in Latin America, we are laggards because Brazil, Argentina, Chile all had women presidents already in the past.

LINDSAY:
That just means that the United States is even further behind the curve.

ROZENTAL:
Correct. Now, another interesting thing is that Mrs. Sheinbaum, the leading candidate and the handpicked successor to López Obrador is also of Jewish background, which in a 98 percent Catholic country is also a very interesting development. I would have thought that the fact that she's a woman and that she's also of a non-Catholic background, which is the first time that's happened, would have in one way or another been an issue, but it hasn't been, it hasn't been at all.

Now, Claudia is very different from AMLO. She is zero charismatic. She is very stiff and I'd say has little experience in public speaking, and she will not be by any stretch of the imagination as good a communicator if she wins as AMLO is.

LINDSAY:
You don't see her holding three-hour press conferences with,-

ROZENTAL:
Yeah. Well, she said that she's going to hold press conferences. She hasn't said she's going to have three hours every day, but she said that she likes the fact that this is the way to communicate with her population and that sets the agenda and so on, so-

LINDSAY:
But the several times I've seen her speak, she doesn't seem as easy,-

ROZENTAL:
No. No.

LINDSAY:
As a public speaker as AMLO is.

ROZENTAL:
She doesn't know how to smile even. So I think in that sense she'll be very different. If she wins, she'll be very different from AMLO, and I don't think that AMLO can take on his coattail's anybody like Claudia in terms of making her a popular president. What happens with him? That's a good question you pose. Is he going to like previous former presidents in Mexico, fade away and go off and live in his ranch in Chiapas? Or is he going to continue to want to exercise influence on his successor? And that's an open question. She says that she's going to be her own person, that she's going to be her own figure, but he is to some extent, very messianic. He has started what he calls a fourth transformation of Mexico, and a lot of people doubt that he's just going to go home and tend to his ranch.

LINDSAY:
AMLO doesn't come across as the shy retiring type.

ROZENTAL:
No, he doesn't. Now, every single former president in Mexico since the 1930s has wanted to be influential with his successor, and they've all failed. The successor comes in, it's a one term presidency, as you mentioned. The minute that they put on the sash of office and sit in the chair, not your chair, the president's chair, but the presidential chair in Mexico, they have generally said the past is gone, go home or go live abroad. We have a former president who's teaching at Yale since he left the presidency. We have another one, President Salinas, who is living in the UK. And then, we have President Fox who stayed in Mexico, but has been almost entirely absent in terms of any political role. So it'll be interesting to see whether on this occasion, the former president, once he leaves office, is going to have any role or what kind of role he may have.

LINDSAY:
So Andrés, let's talk about the issues at stake. What are the issues that seem to be top of mind with Mexican voters as they head to the polls or as they decide not to go to the polls?

ROZENTAL:
I think the first and foremost and perhaps only major issue that affects every Mexican, public safety and security. We have had, as your audience might've read in recent days, articles and editorials in the Wall Street Journal, in the Financial Times, in the Washington Post, in the New York Times and in European media talking about how during the AMLO administration, the organized criminal cartels and gangs have grown, have taken larger position in certain areas of Mexico and where very little has been done to address that issue during the AMLO administration.

And as a result of that, I think most Mexicans are worried about their own personal safety. When they leave the home in the morning until they come home in the afternoon, are they going to be victims of assault or extortion or kidnapping or whatever? And that issue has not been, in my view, well addressed by any of the candidates in the sense that they are very good at the diagnostic, but they are very poor in terms of details of how they would address it, the issue and how they would pay for it, because that's a very important part of the security agenda.

We need in Mexico to strengthen the police forces, the law enforcement. We need to pay policemen better so that they don't get involved in corruption. We need to make sure that local politicians are not in cahoots with the organized crime gangs. There's even a suspicion that López Obrador himself at one point or another has been a friend to these cartels in order to keep them at bay and not to have them involve themselves in his administration. But the fact is that we have a problem of violence, we have a problem of corruption, and we have a problem of personal safety. And I think that's the one issue most Mexicans will make their decision about who and how they vote on.

The other issue, of course, is the pocketbook issue, which is similar to what you have in the states. People are worried about inflation. We have had high inflation during the pandemic and after the pandemic, and I think that people find the cost of living has risen considerably. And although wages have risen, they haven't risen at the same level. And there are people who are suffering. Mexico's socioeconomic makeup is about 50 percent of Mexicans are at or under the poverty line as officially determined. Of those, maybe a third are very poor, what we call absolute poverty. And the other 50 percent are urban middle class and upper class in terms of economics.

So it's a very polarized society in terms of their participation in the economy. There is a rather large part of the Mexican economy that is not fully integrated into the formal economy. So it's an informal economy, street vendors and others who don't pay taxes, who don't pay rent, but who make sometimes considerably good returns on what they do. And in addition to that, AMLO during his administration has increased considerably the handouts, the subsidies that the Mexican taxpayer like me have to give to the elderly, to the young who don't work and don't study, and to others who López Obrador has decided are his target audience for voting on the 2nd of June.

LINDSAY:
Andrés, I want to go back to the issue of violence just for a moment because it ties to a broader question of the health of Mexico's democracy. And I think if you're taking a long view, one of the most impressive stories over the last thirty to forty years has been the rise in deepening of Mexico's democracy. And it is truly a good news story. But what's happening during this campaign is we're seeing a number of attacks on politicians. One total I saw said as many as thirty candidates for office have been killed so far this year. You've talked about corruption, you've talked about the increased prominence of the drug cartels. Are you worried about the future of Mexican democracy?

ROZENTAL:
Very, very worried, and many of my friends and colleagues are equally worried. Now, part of it comes from those issues that you mentioned, the corruption, the organized crime. But there's another part which is extremely important, and that is AMLO during his six years of presidency has to a great extent, wanted to dismantle or emasculate some of the entities that were created as checks and balances on the executive branch in terms of how to make sure that the executive branch and the legislative branch of government have oversight, independent autonomous oversight. And what López Obrador has done, get these institutions either to get rid of them, to have them disappear or to subordinate them to his will, or in the cases where he hasn't been able to do that, to name people into those organizations who are very friendly to him and who follow his ideology.

So to give you an example, we have an electoral institute that judges, overseas, and gives the results of our elections, our federal elections. He there has put in a group of commissioners in that electoral institute that are very favorable to him, and he has taken money away from that institution so that it is not going to be able to do the same quality of work in this upcoming election then it might have done otherwise. The other institution he hates is the Institute on Freedom of Information and Transparency, which was a recent creation in Mexico to oversee government activity and to help individual citizens get information about the government and to keep their information private. And he has, in both cases, undermined that institution. He has refused to name two of the vacancies in the commission and the commission now because the Supreme Court ruled that it could operate without a quorum, it is to some extent hobbled by the fact that it's not fully staffed.

The other, the institutions that Mexico's democracy relies on, in addition to those two are of course the Supreme Court, the judiciary in general, and the legislative branch of government where the opposition has seats and where the second in line of the results of the voting are seated in a minority but a fairly large minority. What he has done is he's changed the rules through Congress, but dominated by his movement, he has changed the rules so that Congress really no longer constitutes an effective check and balance on the executive branch.
And he's done the same thing with the judiciary. In the Supreme Court and in the federal judges around the country, he has named people who are sympathetic to him and to his political movement. And although the Supreme Court still has a working majority in favor of oversight, when it comes time for a constitutional issue, whether a law that has been passed by the executive or by the legislature is not constitutional, it requires a two-thirds majority in the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutionality. And the Supreme Court no longer has that majority. So to some extent, there's a stalemate in the judiciary thanks to him, and that has to some extent weakened considerably the two branches of government that would normally be a check on the executive branch.

LINDSAY:
Andrés, I'd like to sort of shift gears, if I may, and get your sense of where Mexico's relations with the United States are likely to go. I'm going to assume that the polls are correct and Claudia is going to win the election, but maybe it doesn't matter who the next occupant of the Mexican presidency will be. Where do you see the relationship between the United States and Mexico going or not going?

ROZENTAL:
During the López Obrador administration Jim, the relationship was, I would say, strained, difficult on some issues, not difficult on others. For example, during López Obrador's administration, two years, we have to remember were under President Trump in the United States, and the other four years were under President Biden. President Trump, as you'll remember, made all sorts of threats against Mexico, trade threats, tariff threats, migration threats, and López Obrador reacted fairly positively from the U.S. point of view on those issues.

One in which the reaction was not as positive was on the drug fentanyl issue, which of course in the United States is a very important political issue, but also health issue. And López Obrador, during his six years denied, consistently denied that Mexico produced fentanyl, that all it did was transport fentanyl or the precursors of fentanyl that came from China and from Asia, packaged it and it was exported into the U.S., which isn't true. I mean, we do have a lot of synthetic drug laboratories in Mexico which produce not only fentanyl, but also methamphetamines and other things.

So on the migration issue, López Obrador caved to Trump and Biden's threats and in effect did what was asked of him, which is to try to make sure that Central American migrants and other migrants that want to get to the United States didn't get to the Northern border of Mexico or The southern border of the U.S., that they were stopped at the border with Guatemala and Belize. That's been partially successful, not entirely. There's still a good number of migrants from all over the world.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, that's one of the big changes is the migrant flow, Andrés, isn't it? It's not just people coming from the Northern Triangle that is Central America, but from all over the world.

ROZENTAL:
That is correct. And there were fewer Mexicans migrating without papers to the United States than had been the case in recent history. But now we have Venezuelans, Haitians, Ethiopians, Chinese, people from all over the place who want to get to the United States. And President Biden and the U.S. administration made it as the most important part of the bilateral agenda over these last few years, given the political importance that migration is in the U.S. and will be in your election in November. So on that, I'd say Mexico cooperated.

On the security agenda, there has been little cooperation. The former Secretary of Defense of Mexico was arrested in Los Angeles on drug-related charges and money laundering. It created a furor in Mexico. The Mexican president personally called President Biden and attorney general and everybody and said, "You've got to either prove what you're saying or you have to let this guy go." He was eventually returned to Mexico. He was never tried in Mexico as López Obrador had promised the U.S. administration, but it poisoned the relationship on the security agenda. It poisoned the military-to-military relationship, and there's been much less cooperation on that agenda than had been the case previously.

LINDSAY:
Well, I have to ask you on that score, Andrés, there has been a lot of talk in the United States recently, particularly in Republican circles about using the U.S. military or perhaps covert forces to go after drug cartels in Mexico. What has the reaction been in Mexico to those stories?

ROZENTAL:
Well, the reaction has been one, I would say of there are those in the U.S. who have always felt that Mexico is to one extent or another extent, whether it's on the migration agenda or on the border security agenda or whatever, that Mexico is not doing its part, and that therefore we are going to come in and take over. And as you know, after the Trump presidency, some of his closest advisors came out with the fact that he had proposed sending in drones and attack vehicles and so on to hit the cartels. Now, the problem is fundamentally, and I think Mexicans know this, and I think the U.S. administration knows it as well, we have three large cartels, organized crime cartels in Mexico. There's the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, there's the Sonora Cartel in the North, and there's the Gulf Cartel on the east coast.

But those are only three of hundreds of very small gangs, groups of criminals who prey on small and medium-sized businesses. They extort, they kidnap, they kill, they're violent. But how are you going to go after hundreds of those? You might be able to decapitate the three biggies, but then as we saw in Colombia and in other countries, it's like a hydra-headed thing. All of a sudden you got rid of the top guy, but then there are ten of his lieutenants, each one wanting to take over and inherit.

LINDSAY:
And they often end up fighting each other, increasing the level of violence, and it can spill over borders.

ROZENTAL:
And that's where we are today. That's exactly what has happened in Mexico. During the Calderon and Peña Nieto administrations, there was a concerted effort to address the big cartel issue. But at the end of the day, with the six years of López Obrador's inaction, the fact is that now we have this much wider problem throughout the country, so that I think that people in Mexico certainly our security experts, people who analyze this understand that it would be absolutely impossible to eradicate even with a major military intervention, what is going on.

And I think there is sufficient respect for Mexico's sovereignty and ability hopefully, to try to begin to address these problems with cooperation from the U.S. undoubtedly. I mean, I think there's a proposal outstanding by one of our major security experts, independent and nongovernmental, to find an agreement, a written agreement, a treaty among Canada, Mexico, and the United States to complement the USMCA on the security agenda, and therefore allow for a much greater degree of cooperation among the three countries, especially vis-a-vis Mexico to have more resources, more intelligence, more shared information than is the case today.

LINDSAY:
I'm glad you raised the USMCA Andrés, because I'd like to close by talking about it. I think it's important to point out that Mexico has become America's largest trading partner. We are deeply interconnected on an economic level, but obviously in the United States, there was long resentment against NAFTA, which became the USMCA. And one of the provisions of the USMCA is that it will come up for review, and that review is scheduled to, I'm not sure whether it begins or concludes on July 1, 2026. Have Mexicans begun thinking about how those conversations may go given the protectionist turn in American trade policy? Because one could imagine whether it's Joe Biden in the White House or Donald Trump, that the United States may ask for a lot from Mexico and Canada in order to get its willingness to continue USMCA.

ROZENTAL:
Absolutely correct, Jim. I think in Mexico at least, there's already been a lot of thought given to this issue. The review actually begins at the end of 2025, so that's next year. And it really doesn't end in 2026 because there is a ten-year window for USMCA to continue while negotiations take place depending on what the review is actually about.

Now in Mexico, there's been a lot of insistence by the government and by those who negotiated the USMCA originally, or NAFTA even before that, that the review be exactly that, a review, not a renegotiation. Because if it becomes a renegotiation, you open a Pandora's box and all of a sudden everybody is going to want, all three parties are going to want changes. The U.S. is probably going to want changes on the energy side. Mexico is going to want changes on the dispute settlement provisions. Canada's going to want changes with its bilateral issues with the United States. So if it becomes a renegotiation, I'm afraid that then it's probably going to last for the ten years, and then one of or several of the three countries will opt out of a continuation.

LINDSAY:
But even if they do reach an agreement at the end of that period, that uncertainty is going to cause economic harm to all the members of the USMCA because businesses like certainty; they want to know what the rules are. It's going to be very hard to persuade companies to make investments or long-term decisions if they're worried that the rules are going to get rewritten down the road.

ROZENTAL:
Absolutely. Absolutely, Jim. And I think that's the biggest challenge that USMCA faces, and it faces it in all three of our countries because the investment, the flow of investment from the U.S. to Mexico at least, has not been as strong and quantitatively as important as it was in the past. Even though today we are the U.S.'s largest trading partner, as you say, we could be much more. And the whole issue of reshoring and nearshoring with what's going on in the U.S.'s relationship with China could have given Mexico a huge opportunity to reshore productive investment into Mexico for our bilateral relationship. Now, it has happened to some extent, but not to the extent it should have. And as you say, business wants certainty. Most businesses have long-term business plans, and they want to make sure that there's no imminent change in the overall element of those business plans.

There's one case, for example, that is currently causing a lot of discussion between Mexico and the United States, and that's an American investment in Quintana Roo, which is the state where Cancun is located, which is a quarry investment that mines and quarries material, which is exported to the United States for road maintenance and other things. It's a long-term investment. The concession that was granted to this company runs until 2037, but AMLO has closed it down, has sent in the law enforcement to keep it closed down, hasn't worked now for several years, and it's the matter of a dispute, which even reached Secretary Blinken the other day who made some comments in Congress about it.

So we always have disputes. We always have issues. When you have such a huge investment and trading relationship between two countries, it's one of the largest in the world, and there will always be issues of one sort of another. But the USMCA was meant as a change from NAFTA to give dispute settlement a much more efficient, rapid ability to settle disputes than NAFTA had. But unfortunately, that has not worked as well as it should have. And I would assume that when the review comes up next year, the one issue that is going to be at the forefront is what can we do to improve the adherence to dispute settlement provisions?

LINDSAY:
I think you're exactly right, Andrés. And on that note, I'm going to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Andrés Rozental, president of Rozental & Asociados. Andrés, it is always a delight to talk to you. There's so much more I know we could have discussed. Thank you for joining me.

ROZENTAL:
Thank you, Jim. It's been an honor.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen. Please leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. A transcript of our conversation is available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox is solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Markus Zakaria was our recording engineer. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.