The government’s marquee security reform is the creation of a national guard with at least 50,000 members recruited largely from the armed forces. He favors the same top-down, militarized approach that failed to curb violence over the past decade. On security, Mexico’s radical new president has thus far offered more continuity than change. 6 This tsunami of violence continues to crest: during the first quarter of 2019 homicides have risen nearly 10 percent from the same period in 2018. About 230,000 people were murdered between 20, more than double the number killed in the previous decade. 5īut the new president still faces his toughest challenge: reducing violence in a country plagued by some of the world’s most vicious criminal gangs. 4 And he has started to undo an energy overhaul designed to modernize the state-dominated oil industry, promising workers that he will rescue the heavily indebted government company, Petróleos Mexicanos or Pemex, by investing billions in a new refinery to make the country self- sufficient in gasoline. He suspended an education reform enacted to improve the country’s underperforming public schools. López Obrador has also solidified labor union support by reversing some of his predecessor’s most controversial “neo-liberal” measures. 2 He has acted quickly to redistribute wealth by increasing pensions for the elderly, offering scholarships or apprenticeships to millions of young people, and providing additional subsidies to marginalized small farmers. 1 To the delight of those disgusted with elite privileges, AMLO flies commercial (in coach), plans to sell the presidential plane, and slashed the salaries of top officials (including his own), putting their government vehicles up for auction. With approval ratings at about 80 percent, López Obrador seems so far to be satisfying his supporters’ expectations.
Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly known as AMLO, assumed office in December 2018 with a robust electoral mandate having trounced traditional parties and secured a clear majority in the Mexican Congress. 1, 2019), the quarterly journal of complex operations published by the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. An earlier version of this article appeared in PRISM (vol.
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