CHRISTY THORNTON—Each of these policies will represent important changes from status quo. They will require not only challenging domestic structures of power, licit and illicit, but taking on entrenched interests in the United States, as well. Powerful lobbies for the agricultural and defense industries, which have benefitted so much from economic policies like NAFTA and security policies like the Mérida Initiative, are sure to oppose the changes López Obrador has proposed. As a renewed socialist Left gains energy in the United States, it will be crucial to keep these international issues front and center in our struggles, in solidarity with the work that will also be so necessary within Mexico.
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LAURA CARLSEN—No one expects a 100% transformation, or paradise to begin on Dec. 1– the day the new president is inaugurated. But politics isn’t ever a game of winner-takes-all. The fundamental hope expressed at the urns on July 1 is simply that the lives of the millions of Mexicans who have suffered the ravages of neoliberalism and repression these past three decades will improve.
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ANDREW KORYBKO—
Mexico is therefore in a conundrum because it must urgently deal with the cartels yet there’s no perfect solution for doing so, as the existing “hard” policy has evidently failed while the “soft” one could amount to surrendering the state to their clutches. These groups are also much too enticing of a lever of possible influence against the Mexican government for US intelligence agencies to willingly abandon them, especially since they might one day want to exploit them as Hybrid War instruments against AMLO if his foreign policy becomes too multipolar. -
STEVEN ARGUE—To the extent AMLO attempts to carry out these and related promises and comes under further U.S. imperialist attack, it will become necessary to defend AMLO from inevitable U.S. imperialist regime change operations.
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An interview with Dr. John Ackerman – professor of law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), columnist with La Jornada newspaper and Proceso Magazine, and a frequent contributor to international media such as The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique and Foreign Policy – regarding the myth of the transition to democracy in Mexico, the imminence of fraud in the upcoming presidential election, and the promise of a progressive government led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
