Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known on the street as AMLO, took a strident tone during his sit down with CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday. He threatened to flood the U.S. border with even more migrants if the U.S. does not acquiesce to his demands including the following: AMLO wants $20 billion a year for poor countries in Latin America and the Caribbean; citizenship for the millions of Mexicans illegally living inside the U.S.; and sanctions to be lifted against both Cuba and Venezuela, including the longstanding Cuban Embargo.
He doesn’t ask for much.
Obrador’s performance was a study in third-world political communication and revealed a thuggish side to the Mexican leader and his national inferiority complex. He refused to acknowledge that drugs, including deadly fentanyl, are being made inside Mexico. He didn’t stop there, he then went on to claim that Mexicans are not drug-addicted like Americans because their culture and families are superior to those of Americans (so, why do millions of them walk hundreds of miles through deserts to get to the U.S.?).
Will he take action against the cartels? AMLO was defiant. No, he will not. This is, of course, a continuation of AMLO’s previously stated policy that Mexico will not serve as the police force of any foreign military. But he also refuses to allow the U.S. to take its own actions against the drug pushers along the border who are poisoning our country.
Naturally, the CBS journalist conducting the interview missed any number of opportunities to ask hard questions like, “Why is one-third of your country under the control of drug cartels?” “Why are your schools so poor that teachers and families have to pool their money to plug leaks and keep roofs from caving in on the kids?” “Why does Mexico expect open borders from the U.S. but put American residents in Mexico through the bureaucratic ringer to get a residency card?” Even having an expired tourist card in Mexico can get you arrested, fined, deported, and/or years in prison. In beach towns all over Mexico, immigration police go out daily looking for Americans drinking and dancing in the bars and cantinas who lack papers or who have overstayed their visas.
Open borders? Apparently not.
The fact is, Mexico, for all of its lovely beaches and weather, is, internally, a wreck and ruin. The murder rate in Mexico is four times higher than that of the United States. Drugs and murder are common. Meth-pushing cartels and their lethal rule have almost totally supplanted law and order within the country. In the open wastelands of the desert, armed thugs lie in wait for passing cars. In the lifeless towns of Sinaloa and Guerrero, young male gang members sing narcocorrido songs, drug ballads, to each other in the windless afternoon, while across the way, in an old church bleached white by sand and sun, aged women pray for peace to Santa Muerte, Our Lady of the Holy Death, while the sound of gunshots tells of a blood siesta playing out across town. In the hills above, drug lords bathe new inductees in the blood of animals, and recruits murmur oaths to a different God.
The whole country wears the scent of death. Its weary population numbly watches on, both outraged at the carnage and resigned to it. They are tired of trying. Even the government has given up.
In just the past nine years, 160,000 Mexicans have been murdered, many at the hands of drug lords and their sicarios. In the 2018 elections, an astonishing 132 political candidates were assassinated by criminal groups. Others were threatened, causing hundreds of polling stations to be closed for fear of violence against voters and election workers. An American acquaintance was recently framed for drug possession by cops while vacationing in Cancun. He’d gone out to a bar one evening. A cop had stuck a joint in the pocket of his pants, arrested him, and forced him to pay $500 to be released. These kinds of events are common in Mexico now, even in places once thought safe for tourists. The wise foreigner stays in after dark and trusts no one. And the rule among expats is: “Do not get arrested here.” Because if you do, you’re going to be given the third degree, and forced to pay extortionate fees to get loose again.
In Mexico, wrote William S. Burroughs many years ago, a policeman commands about much respect as a train conductor. As a result, an estimated 90 percent of all crimes committed in Mexico go unreported.
Making everything worse is AMLO’s psychotic policy of abrazos no balazos, or “hugs, not bullets.” In other words, fighting crime by not fighting it at all and hoping the decades-old pandemic of violence will burn itself out — an approach that does not appear to be working. In a healthy country, that kind of policy would secure his impeachment, along with a visit to a shrink to have his head examined.
Though Mexico is a trillion-dollar economy, it certainly doesn’t feel like one, or even a place with a future. Rather, it feels like a place where hopelessness has settled in, whose citizens have accepted that things will not get better, and probably will get worse. I’ve felt the same despair in places like Egypt and Haiti.
With the public exhausted, and politicians and law enforcement unable or unwilling to crack down on the drug barons and their hoodlums, the bad guys know they hold all the cards.
Watching Obrador bat away question after serious question during the painful 60 Minutes interview while engaging in open blackmail against the United States, which has done more to help Mexico economically than any other country in its history, it occurred to me that AMLO’s arrogance is not just third-world nationalism — rather, he has no respect for our first magistrate, Joseph Robinette Biden.
A responsible U.S. President, one with some spine, would call up AMLO and tell him to knock it off with the public threats, that political blackmail is not how you get what you want, nor is it something one expects from a friend. Of course, Biden won’t do that. Just like AMLO, he doesn’t care. He just wants to manage his country’s decline, enjoy the trappings of power, retire rich, and be damned to his country’s fate. That’s what these two old men have in common.
Obrador, like numerous other world leaders, has our President’s number. They know they can jerk Biden around, make threats, meddle in our internal affairs, and nothing will happen. We can be sure that AMLO, like Putin, is hoping Biden gets reelected.
