Mexico needs statecraft, yet its president offers theatre

MEXICANS HAVE been outraged this month by two brutal murders: one of a woman whose body was mutilated by her partner, the other of a seven-year-old girl who was kidnapped and seemingly tortured. Needless to say, neither of these cases was the fault of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). But he is the man in charge. When questioned at his early-morning press conferences about the wave of violence against women in his country, his first response was to blame a “progressive degradation [in Mexican society] which had to do with the neoliberal model” that he accuses his predecessors of adopting. He then claimed that feminist groups, who blame the violence on patriarchy and lawlessness, had been infiltrated by conservatives, and tried to change the subject.

This episode conforms to the pattern of AMLO’s 15 months in the presidency. If the motto of Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s dictator from 1877 to 1911, was “little politics, much administration”, AMLO’s guiding formula seems to be almost the opposite. He inherited three big problems: rampant crime, including violence against women; slow economic growth; and corruption. On the first two issues, Mexico is at best treading water.