Mexico's Wannabe Dictator
The government of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) will end next year per the Mexican Constitution’s one six year term. Nonetheless, the lame duck President is energetically violating the Constitution and laws and legal restrictions constitutionally imposed on him as President.
In other words he is usurping Mexico’s Presidency.
In doing so he is endangering Mexico, our next door neighbor and sometime number one trading party. He's doing so illegally. He is a reactionary fervently working to return Mexico to the 70-year-old one party dictatorship he apprenticed in as a young “achichincle” (ah-chee-cheen-cleh, political gofer, errand boy).
Who for? For the butchers of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) that used an otherwise useless Mexican army to massacre hundreds of college students who demanded freedom in 1968. A young Lopez Obrador ran errands for the butchers and learned authoritarianism from them.
Specifics:
He instituted “consultations” with Mexico’s poor to flood plebiscites with votes to “cancel” a multi-billion dollar (yes American dollars) Mexico City airport project that would have finished an airport that would have been a world class airport. Claiming “corruption,” Lopez Obrador canceled the half-completed airport that cost billions of dollars in cancellation fees.
In Baja California, his plebiscite, ordered before he even took office, canceled a multi-billion dollar brewery 75% completed and its 1000 well-paid jobs because of an alleged water storage. A tiny number of people voted. Coincidently, four years later the American brewery company announced it would replace the partially completed brewery in Baja California with a new one in Lopez Obrador’s home state of Tabasco.
To replace the canceled mega-airport in the Mexico City area, Lopez Obrador ordered the Mexican Army to build a new airport 30-miles from Mexico City proper. Although Lopez Obrador went to the Army’s partially-constructed airport and announced it was finished a year ago, it wasn’t and still is not finished, no one is using it unless forced to by AMLO’s government.
To guarantee more usage of the new airport that established airlines refuse to use, Lopez Obrador has paid millions of pesos to buy the name of a bankrupt out-of-business airline and use that name for the Mexican Army to open a new airline using the old name in order to use the new airport.
When Lopez Obrador was sworn in as President in 2018, he disbanded the National Police and replaced it with a “National Guard,” a uniformed paramilitary to back up local and state police. By the Constitution, the leadership was required to be civilian, not military. This year, Lopez Obrador decreed that the National Guard was to be integrated with the Army. Mexico’s Supreme Court of Mexico ruled that unconstitutional. Lopez Obrador declared war on what he called a “neoliberal” bandit court that has no power over his presidency.
The President then decreed that the Mexican Election Institute that ruled against AMLO in the Presidential elections of 2006 and 2012 but declared him the winner in 2018 should be “reformed” and packed with his party’s “party hacks.” He needed a supermajority in Congress to make this happen but he lost that in the off-year elections. He then put forward a “Plan B” where he tried parliamentary tricks to diminish the institute. The Supreme Court ruled his “Plan B” invalid because his tricks did not follow legal procedure, or as we say, “due process.”
Now, Lopez Obrador has announced that the “neoliberal” outlaw Supreme Court that has devastated Lopez Obrador’s schemes to reimpose rule by Presidential decree must be destroyed as it coexists - that is, individual nomination by the President and confirmation by the Mexican Senate.and replaced by his model of nominations by political party and national votes by voters.
His Supreme Court proposal calls for a majority congressional vote which his party can produce for a “consultation” call in August, then would require a majority vote by the nation with a minimum turnout required to make the change, a procedure AMLO failed to meet in his last “consultation.”
One little problem that Lopez Obrador might not overcome without his Army and National Guard slaughtering Mexico’s large middle-class is that there would be no constitutional change to wreck the Court without the Court itself ruling that the “consultation” is legal before it happens.
Talk about a “Catch 22!”
Laugh out loud! AMLO. Laugh out Loud!
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Contreras is a United States Marine veteran, author, newspaper and magazine columnist and hosts the Contreras Report on YouTube and ROKU TV
