Peña Nieto and the return of PRI rule

Only days after his inauguration, Peña Nieto, who had based his campaign on the claim that he could get things done, announced a “Pact for Mexico” that joined the PRI, PAN, and PRD in support of a 95-point agenda of policy reform. The pact generated considerable discontent within the PAN and especially within the PRD, many of whose members expressed unhappiness with their leaders’ decision to collaborate with the PRI. The agreement did, however, prove to be an effective means of winning congressional approval for a series of major initiatives affecting public education, fiscal policy, and the telecommunications and energy sectors. Because of steadily declining domestic oil production, growing imports of gasoline and other refined products, and the federal government’s heavy budgetary dependence on petroleum royalties and taxes, the Peña Nieto administration sought to attract investment from foreign oil companies with the capital and technology necessary to exploit Mexico’s deep-sea reserves and revitalize the industry. To that end, in December 2013 the Congress amended those articles of the constitution that gave Pemex exclusive control over the exploration, production, refining, storage, and distribution of oil, natural gas, and basic petrochemicals. Not only did PRD opposition to the legislation effectively nullify multiparty collaboration through the Pact for Mexico, but disagreement within the PRD about the wisdom of collaborating with the PRI led López Obrador to leave the party. He and his followers then proceeded to found the National Renovation Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional; MORENA).

In February 2014 the Mexican navy’s marines delivered spectacularly on Peña Nieto’s pledge to get things done when they captured Joaquín (“El Chapo”) Guzmán Loera—the head of the Sinaloa cartel, the country’s largest drug cartel—in Mazatlán. Guzmán had been imprisoned in 1993 but made a dramatic escape in 2001, and his continued avoidance of capture, reputedly abetted by corrupt law-enforcement officials, had become legendary. His capture confounded those who had predicted that the PRI would be less resolute than the PAN had been in its efforts to eradicate illegal trafficking and its associated violence. Nevertheless, although government officials cited statistics indicating that drug-related violence was declining, murders, forced disappearances, kidnappings for ransom, and extortion remained serious problems.

In June and July, Mexico became caught up in the crisis resulting from an upsurge in the illegal immigration of Central American children to the United States. Those children, often traveling without their parents, sought to escape escalating drug- and gang-related violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Most of them began their journey by crossing Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, and the Mexican government came under U.S. pressure to stanch the flow. It responded by agreeing to open new border-control stations, obstruct migrants from boarding freight trains traveling northward from the border region, and create special transit visas and a guest-worker program designed to control migration without taking the politically unpalatable step of closing the border to undocumented migrants.

In late September the disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, sparked extensive national and international human rights protests. According to the government’s version of the events, the students, who were participating in a demonstration in the city of Iguala, were abducted by local police and then surrendered to a local drug gang, whose members killed them and burned their bodies beyond recognition. The incident provoked intense public outrage at alleged government corruption and complicity, constituting the most severe political crisis yet to confront the administration of Peña Nieto, whose personal popularity went into free fall.

Nevertheless, in 2014 the Peña Nieto administration pushed through far-reaching political and electoral reform that replaced the Federal Electoral Institute with a new National Electoral Institute, which had authority over both federal and state-level elections, ended a long-standing prohibition against the immediate reelection of municipal presidents and members of both the federal Chamber of Deputies and Senate, raised from 2 percent to 3 percent the share of valid votes a political party must receive in order to retain its official registration, authorized popular referenda and independent electoral candidates not sponsored by an existing political party, and stipulated that at least half of all congressional candidates must be female. All of that came in advance of 2015’s midterm elections, in which all 500 members of the federal Chamber of Deputies and the governors of nine states would be chosen on the heels of the Mexican economy’s poor performance in 2013–14 (during which GDP growth declined to less than 2 percent from 4 percent in 2011–12).

Although the elections on June 7, 2015, were marred by early incidents of protesters burning ballot boxes in Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas states, the voting was otherwise generally peaceful. With nearly nine-tenths of the vote counted, the PRI, which garnered about 29 percent of the total vote (down from some 37 percent in the 2009 election), and its ally, the Mexican Green Ecologist Party (Partido Verde Ecologista de México; PVEM), which captured about 7 percent, were poised to command a solid majority in the 500-seat Chamber of Deputies. Beyond the PRI’s triumph, the biggest story of the election was the victory of independent candidate Jaime (“El Bronco”) Rodríguez in the Nuevo León gubernatorial race, which marked the first time that an independent had been elected governor of a Mexican state.

On July 11, 2015, the Peña Nieto government received another blow to its prestige when El Chapo escaped from the maximum-security Altiplano prison near Toluca, through a wood-reinforced, lighted, and ventilated tunnel that was more than one mile long. Some six months later, in early January 2016, however, the drug lord was recaptured in a raid on a safe house in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. Peña Nieto came under renewed and heightened criticism in April 2016 when the international commission looking into the disappearance of the 43 students ended its mission by citing government obstruction of the investigation. Moreover, in late August Peña Nieto was widely lambasted for meeting with U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who had called illegal Mexican immigrants to the U.S. rapists and promised to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border that he said would be paid for by Mexico.

In September 2017 Mexico was rocked by a pair of devastating earthquakes. The first, which struck on September 7 off the coast of the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca in the southern part of the country, was the strongest to hit Mexico in a century, registering a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale and taking a total of more than 90 lives. The second, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake, buffeted Mexico City and the states of Morelos, Puebla, México, and Guerrero on September 19, the 32nd anniversary of the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, and killed more than 200 people.

A series of corruption scandals contributed greatly to the nosedive in Peña Nieto’s public approval rating as his presidency moved toward completion. One involved the sale of a Mexico City luxury home to Peña Nieto’s wife by a company that was awarded a large government contract, which provoked accusations of conflict of interest. An official investigation cleared Peña Nieto of any wrongdoing, but he apologized for the affair anyway. His administration also was accused of using sophisticated cell-phone-invading software to spy on anti-corruption groups, journalists, and human rights activists. Moreover, increasing drug-related violence contributed to more homicides being committed in 2017 in Mexico than in any other single year in some two decades. Endemic violence also beset the 2018 election season, as more than 130 politicians, political operatives, and activists were killed in the run-up to the voting. Most of those deaths occurred in districts where drug gangs were thought to be trying to block the election of candidates dedicated to eradicating the gangs’ illegal operations.

The election of López Obrador and the shift leftward

The 2018 elections were said to be the most extensive in the country’s history. Not only were Mexicans choosing a new president and filling the seats of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, but also another 2,800 state and local offices were at stake, including nine governorships. The principal presidential candidates were Ricardo Anaya Cortés of the PAN; José Antonio Meade Kuribreña, the technocratic candidate of the PRI; independent Jaime Rodríguez Caldéron; and López Obrador, running this time under the banner of the National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional; MORENA), which he had founded in 2014. Nationwide, the elections were contested by three somewhat shifting coalitions of political parties: (1) All for Mexico (Todos por México), led by the PRI but also including New Alliance (PANAL) and PVEM; (2) For Mexico to the Front (Por México al Frente), a right-left coalition of convenience made up of the PAN, the PRD, and the Citizens’ Movement party; and (3) Together We Will Make History (Juntos Haremos Historia), comprising MORENA, the Labour Party, and the Social Encounter Party.

In the July 1 balloting, Mexican political life took a dramatic turn leftward as López Obrador swept to a landslide victory, winning 31 of 32 states to form the first left-leaning government in the history of Mexican democracy. By capturing some 53 percent of the vote to about 22 percent for Anaya Cortés, about 16 percent for Meade Kuribreña, and only about 5 percent for Rodríguez Caldéron, López Obrador also claimed the largest victory margin in a Mexican presidential election since 1982. More than any other issue, eliminating corruption seemed to resonate loudest with Mexican voters in this “change” election. Tacking somewhat toward the ideological centre with his campaign, López Obrador had emphasized corruption busting, but he had also continued his traditional focus on narrowing Mexico’s wealth gap and improving the lives of its poorest citizens.

Change was also the hallmark of the federal legislative elections, in which Together We Will Make History (specifically, MORENA) was poised to become the preeminent presence in Congress, winning more than half of the seats in the Senate and more than three-fifths of those in the Chamber of Deputies. The coalition also won five of the nine governorships up for grabs. In doing so, it obliterated the PRD’s monopolistic lock on the leftist vote, contributed to the fracturing of the PAN (many of whose members were disenchanted by the party’s nonideological partnership with the PRD in the elections), and seemingly marginalized the mighty PRI, which, together with its coalition partners, prepared to enter the new Congress with only about one-fifth of the seats in either house.

As the lame-duck president, Peña Nieto continued to oversee Mexican participation in negotiations to revamp NAFTA, which had been brought about at the insistence of Trump after he triumphed in the U.S. presidential election. In August Mexico and the United States announced that they had reached agreement on a new trade accord that preserved much of NAFTA while also introducing a number of significant changes. At the end of September, Canada joined the agreement, which was dubbed the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). At the end of November, as one of his last official acts as president, Peña Nieto joined Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in signing the USMCA on the sidelines of the Group of 20 (G20) summit meeting in Argentina; the agreement had yet to be approved by the legislatures of the three countries.

Once in office, López Obrador governed more like a populist than a progressive, positioning himself in opposition to the country’s political and economic elites and addressing the needs of the poorest Mexicans. His government made direct payments to tens of millions of people living below the poverty level, raised the minimum wage, and enacted labour reform, but he alienated the middle class with many of his policies. As he took on the mantle of the country’s saviour, he began belittling opponents, criticizing independent journalists, and bending the truth at his daily morning press conferences, leading some observers to brand him as a demagogue.

López Obrador had campaigned on reducing the crime-fighting role of the military, whose policing practices had resulted in a litany of civil rights abuses. But in December 2019, when he replaced the Federal Police with the National Guard, only about one-fourth of the newly created force was made up of former police. The remaining members were drawn from the army and navy, and, when the National Guard failed to tamp down Mexico’s homicide epidemic, the president increased the policing powers of the military. All of this greatly disappointed López Obrador’s supporters on the left.

Diminishing reserves and the decline in the world oil market prices in the mid-2010s created a crisis for Mexico’s oil industry as Pemex became one of the world’s most-indebted oil companies. Blaming the neoliberal economic policies of his predecessors for Pemex’s decline, López Obrador promised to eliminate the foreign private involvement in the energy sector that Peña Nieto had courted. However, many felt that López Obrador’s plan to build a costly new oil refinery at a time when Mexican refineries already were operating at only about 40 percent capacity was badly misguided.

Mexico was especially hard-hit by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that swept the globe in 2020; the virus causes the potentially deadly disease COVID-19. In March 2020 a two-month national lockdown was instituted to try to stop the spread of the virus, but the federal government stopped short of mandating compliance with other measures recommended to curb its spread, such as mask wearing and social distancing, and voluntary adherence to health guidelines was limited. The government also did not widely test the population to monitor the spread of the virus, and López Obrador consistently downplayed the severity of the pandemic. Nevertheless, the first wave of the disease in Mexico plateaued in summer 2020. However, it began spiking again late in 2020, and by November more 100,000 people in Mexico had perished from COVID-19-related causes, the world’s fourth highest national total. By April the official count of COVID-19-related deaths in Mexico had reached about 210,000, but the health department acknowledged that because of the paucity of testing, the actual total was probably closer to 330,000 deaths. Meanwhile, the Mexican GDP declined by more than 8 percent in 2020, the largest single-year contraction for the country’s economy since 1932.

As López Obrador became an increasingly polarizing figure, the June 2021 midterm elections shaped up as a referendum on the first three years of his presidency. Although he had failed to either turn around the economy or reduce violence and crime, the president remained popular with the disadvantaged Mexicans many of his policies supported. Besides putting all 500 seats of the lower house of Congress on the ballot, the elections featured 15 gubernatorial races and more than 1,900 mayoral contests. Widespread violence marred the campaigns, and nearly three dozen candidates were assassinated in the months leading up to the elections. In the end, MORENA fell from its absolute majority of more than 250 seats in the Chamber of Deputies to 198. However, MORENA’s principal partners in the ruling coalition, PVEM and the Labour Party, gained 32 and 9 seats, respectively, thus preserving the coalition’s majority in the lower house, though its supermajority was gone. The PAN, PRD, and PRI, which mounted a unified effort in the election, all made gains.

In April 2022—still enjoying the approval of some three-fifths of Mexicans, according to opinion polling—López Obrador sought to renew his mandate by staging a referendum on his presidency. Criticizing the costly recall vote as an empty exercise, many of López Obrador’s opponents called for a boycott of the vote. Ultimately, some 90 percent of those who voted approved retaining the president; however, the turnout was far below the 40 percent of the electorate required to make the vote binding.