Is AMLO the change that Mexico’s needs?
AMLO comes to govern a country hit by corruption, violence, and insecurity
Andrés Manuel López Obrador is near to become Mexico's president. Nonetheless, his arrival to the presidency is charged with changes for a country that seeks to escape from violence and corruption.
Leer en español: ¿Será AMLO el cambio que necesita México?
Meanwhile, Mexicans are with high expectation that AMLO, as he is known, will transform politics, recover the economy and improve security. At least that was announced by Forbes magazine, which mentions a survey conducted by the firm Mitofsky at the end of July 2018.
Some Mexicans, according to the aforementioned survey, said that the changes mentioned needs to be carried out in the first quarter of 2019. On the other hand, there are those who want to see them by the end of 2019. Will he achieve them?
Let's evaluate until his term as mayor of Mexico City between 2000 and 2005 and let's look at his administration to get an idea of what he did as a public official for the benefit of his citizens.
This will help us to visualize a panorama of what could be his presidency. The New York Times, for example, points out that, without provoking an explosion of the budget, he managed to expand social spending to provide pension to the elderly.
He knew how to build important alliances, such as the achieved with telecommunications billionaire Tsar Carlos Slim, with whom he worked together to remodel the Historic Center of Mexico City, which, as the US media mentions, had failures as a result of the earthquake that occurred in 1985. To face insecurity, he met with international security experts to implement guided ideas to fight crime that affected the capital of Mexico.
Taking IGNORE INTO account the above, the ability of Obrador to achieve important alliances, will serve to speak the same language for the benefit of Mexicans with such autonomous government agencies, such as the Supreme Court of Justice, the Bank of Mexico, the National Commission of Hydrocarbons and the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data.
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As for the insecurity in Mexico, which up to 2018 and according to figures from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SNP), reported the death of 170,000 people due to organized crime and 28,000 missing from 2006 to 2016. AMLO has proposed to remove the Army from the streets and, on the other hand, professionalize the Police at the national level. This, and coordinated with the Government, the police are in charge of the security.
In this regard, most Mexicans expressed their support, choosing him as their president. The national pressure of the Mexican people will be intense, so Obrador will have to give results little by little.
However, there are those who fear that Obrador will be able to govern as Chávez did in Venezuela. However, the reality is totally different. Why? In his presidential campaign speech Obrador said he would fight for the welfare of the poor, so giving them a knockout causing high inflation by spending much more of the national budget approved is unlikely. The most real thing is that AMLO governs similar to how "Pepe" Mujica did in Uruguay, who executed his social projects without spending more than the budget he had approved, being austere.
Obrador is a good example of a politician, without acts of corruption. That is perhaps the demand of the great majority of Mexicans. Who are uncertain of Enrique Peña Nieto who, according to a poll published at the end of 2017 by the newspaper Reforma, his image dropped an 86%.
For now, politically speaking, there is already a change that Mexicans showed: AMLO will be the first leftist president of Mexico.
LatinAmerican Post | Edwin Guerrero Nova
Translated from: '¿Será AMLO el cambio que necesita México?'
* The opinion of the editor does not represent the average
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