Mexico Military

The Mexican flag during a ceremony in the capital's Zócalo. (Image: lopezobrador.org.mx)

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LatAm in Focus: Mexico's March toward the 2024 Election

By Carin Zissis

Political analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor explains the AMLO government’s moves toward militarization and the ramped up race for the presidency.

"It's very easy to give things to the army. It's very hard to take them back."

The armed forces are also taking on a growing role in a range of tasks, including construction of the president’s landmark infrastructure projects—an airport, an oil refinery, and a train line—as AMLO seeks to build his legacy and cut ribbons ahead of the next presidential vote. Bravo Regidor questions the viability of the projects and says that AMLO’s main legacy will be his popularity. “He himself is going to be a force to reckon with for whoever the next president is,” Bravo Regidor says to AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis.

And the race for the successor is already underway. In less than a decade AMLO’s relatively new political party, Morena, has won two-thirds of the governorships, holds the largest number of congressional seats, and has captured a majority of state legislatures. The party’s rising political control has many wondering whether Morena is replacing Mexico’s prior hegemonic power, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). “The analogy holds in terms of [Morena’s] capacity to become the place where political entrepreneurs want to be,” says Bravo Regidor. But he notes that while the PRI’s priority was political stability and to build institutions, “None of these seem to be features of lopezobradorismo…[AMLO’s] politics tend to be very deliberately disruptive.”

Does the opposition have a chance against Morena candidates in 2024? The debate over the military’s role has driven a wedge between opposition parties, exposing the frailty of their current electoral alliance. Still, the fact that Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is seen as AMLO’s favorite among the corcholatas—a term used for political candidates that compares them to prize bottle caps—creates divisions within Morena as well. “This creates all sorts of tensions within the party,” says Bravo Regidor. That, in turn, “is creating the impression that the succession process is not going to be a smooth process.”

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Executive Producer Luisa Leme produced this episode.

The music in this episode is "Cantos de México" by Carlos Chávez performed by Orquestra Pasatono for Americas Society. Learn more about upcoming concerts at musicoftheamericas.org.

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