President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and his wife, Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, during Independence Day celebrations in Mexico City this month.
Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times

A Transformative Leader Steps Down in Mexico. What Will His Legacy Be?

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador lifted millions out of poverty while eroding democratic norms, allowing his nationalist political movement to expand its sway.

by · NY Times

To some, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico is a reformer who steered the country toward progress during his six-year presidency. To others, he’s a bulldozer who eroded democratic institutions, and is leaving a host of problems for his successor.

Still, as he comes to the end of his term, his critics and supporters largely agree on one thing: Mr. López Obrador transformed his nation — more so than any other leader in the country’s recent history.

“This is definitely a watershed presidency that has changed the direction of the country,” said Andrew Paxman, a historian at Mexico’s Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, who is writing a biography of Mr. López Obrador.

Blending populist rhetoric with hard-line tactics, Mr. López Obrador expanded his own influence. Over the last decade, he has forged a political movement that mirrored his own personal grievances and tapped into the public’s desire for change. Fusing nationalist and leftist ideals, he vowed to bring change to this country of 130 million.

And in many areas, he then delivered on that pledge, and is now leaving office with approval ratings above 70 percent.

On Tuesday, Mr. López Obrador will step down and hand the mantle to his longtime protégée, Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City. The landslide win in June by Ms. Sheinbaum — Mexico’s first female president — was seen by many as a clear vote of confidence in Mr. López Obrador and Morena, the party he founded in 2014. June’s elections also gave Morena large legislative majorities unseen in Mexico since the transition to democracy in 2000.

“We laid the foundations for the transformation that the country needed,” Mr. López Obrador told a crowd of supporters in his last State of the Union address this month. “We made it clear that power only makes sense and becomes a virtue when it is placed at the service of others.”

Mr. López Obrador nearly tripled the minimum wage and raised millions out of poverty. In making inequality a major topic of national conversation, analysts and his supporters say, he also empowered millions of Mexicans who felt they had been disregarded by the political establishment for decades and infused them with a sense of validation.

At the same time, he was exceptionally divisive, facing criticism for seeking revenge against his critics, eroding democratic checks and balances and failing to impede widespread cartel violence.

He plowed billions of dollars into infrastructure projects in the country’s underdeveloped south that created jobs and lowered unemployment, but his initiatives also created huge cost overruns, caused major environmental damage and incurred serious legal challenges.

In one of his final acts as president, Mr. López Obrador overhauled the judicial system, which had thwarted some of his most ambitious proposals, such as hobbling the electoral watchdog agency that helped shift Mexico from one-party rule. The measure will shift the judiciary from an appointment-based system grounded in training and qualifications to one in which voters must now elect judges.

The change was needed to modernize the courts, the president and his supporters said, and to instill trust in a system plagued by corruption, influence-peddling and nepotism.

But the proposal was met with fierce resistance from judicial workers, law experts, investors, opposition legislators and others. Mr. López Obrador’s determination to push it through kept financial markets on edge and caused a diplomatic spat with the U.S. and Canada’s ambassadors.

Critics warned that the plan would do little to rid the judiciary of its problems. Instead, they said it would erode judicial independence in a country where running for office can be a death sentence and enable Mr. López Obrador’s political movement to concentrate power.

‘The Poor Come First.’

If Mr. López Obrador governed like an outsider, it is because he was one.

In a political culture where scions of prominent families have long occupied positions of power, he came from a small-town family of shopkeepers in Tabasco, a state in southeast Mexico. His contact from a very young age with some of the poorest people in Mexico shaped his approach to politics, analysts say.

After college, he spent years living and working with the Chontal Maya, an Indigenous people, to improve their living conditions before going into politics.

By 2000, he was elected mayor of Mexico City and began promoting social programs like old-age pensions and financial support for single mothers. He first ran for president in 2006. After losing by a razor-thin margin, he refused to accept the results and held a huge public ceremony to inaugurate himself as the “legitimate president” of a parallel government.

Mr. López Obrador ran again in 2012 and lost. Two years later, in 2014, he founded his own party, the National Regeneration Movement, or Morena. He rode that movement to a presidential landslide victory in 2018, pledging to improve the lives of the poor, reduce violent crime and eradicate corruption.

Reviving a slogan from his 2006 campaign, “For the good of all, the poor come first,” Mr. López Obrador quickly set about doing what previous governments could not — or, some Mexicans say, would not — do.

Over six years, he nearly tripled the minimum wage and more than doubled old-age pensions, distributed every two months to anyone 65 and older.

“He did a very huge thing: pulling us out of the abyss of poverty,” said Gilgenio López Aguilar, of Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacán in the southern state of Chiapas. Mr. López Aguilar, 76, said he no longer has to sell dried horse manure just to earn enough for beans and tortillas.

Along with the more than $300 pension Mr. López Aguilar receives every other month, his family also gets a school subsidy for his grandson and a disability pension for his granddaughter, who was born with a metabolic disorder — all benefits introduced by Mr. López Obrador.

The number of households covered by at least one of the president’s social programs climbed to record levels during his administration, and roughly 5.1 million people were lifted out of poverty, government data shows. The money transfers helped shrink the income disparity gap.

But the strategy had unintended consequences: The government’s policies reached fewer of Mexico’s poorest families, according to several studies. At the same time, the number of wealthy households benefiting from government social programs tripled.

Today, Mexico remains highly unequal. Under Mr. López Obrador, the wealth of Mexico’s richest individuals surged, while 46.8 million people still live in poverty, according to Oxfam Mexico.

Still, Mr. López Obrador’s focus on the poor helped explain why tens of thousands of people streamed into the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, this month to see him deliver his last State of the Union address.

Some sobbed while he spoke; others sang or chanted in adulation. “Who says that nothing changes in this country?” asked Vanessa Romero Rocha, a lawyer and political commentator, in an essay in El País.

“The changes from 2018 to 2024 are in plain sight even if some prefer not to see, much less understand them,” Ms. Romero Rocha said.

Weakening Checks and Balances

Mr. López Obrador will leave office with one of the world’s highest approval ratings. Yet, his critics say his tenure has left the country vulnerable.

He sought to hobble the nation’s electoral agency, dealing a blow to an institution that helped push the country away from one-party rule at the start of century. He moved to weaken Mexico’s antitrust commission, the agency that upholds freedom of information laws and the national commission on human rights.

And he gave a military with very little oversight and a long history of human rights abuses far greater responsibility in public security and entrusted it with managing the nation’s ports and customs, the construction of a 1,000-mile train line and even the distribution of medicine.

“It is a strategy that delegitimizes the work of the public administration, generates long-term dependence and pockets of power that are later difficult to dismantle,” Fernando Nieto Morales, a professor specializing in government and public administration at The College of Mexico, said of the responsibility given to the military.

Mr. López Obrador’s gamble on overhauling the judicial system exposed Mexico’s economy to aftershocks, marked by a 16 percent plunge since early June in the value of the currency, the peso. Many investors worry about how the measure could affect the judicial impartiality needed to resolve disputes between businesses and the government.

Other concerns are building over Mexico’s economy. Mr. López Obrador’s huge bet on fossil fuels transformed Pemex, the state-controlled oil giant, into the world’s most indebted oil company, stirring fears that it could unleash economic chaos if it defaults — unless it keeps getting multibillion-dollar bailouts.

And although Mexico benefited from manufacturers’ relocating from China in a “near-shoring” boom, the country’s economic growth averaged just 0.9 percent annually under Mr. López Obrador — the weakest performance of any president in the last 30 years.

In one of his shrewdest tactics, Mr. López Obrador held daily televised news conferences, harnessing his charisma and gift for communication to strengthen a personal connection to his supporters. He also used the forum to steer the political narrative, frequently distorting facts to suit his agenda, such as falsely claiming that Mexico produces no fentanyl. At times, he intimidated journalists, human rights groups and politicians, sometimes exposing their private financial or contact details, sparking harassment from his supporters.

Carlos Loret de Mola, a well-known Mexican journalist, drew Mr. López Obrador’s ire after reporting on his sons, including a story about a mansion occupied by López Obrador’s oldest son in Houston. Mr. López Obrador publicly disclosed Mr. Loret de Mola’s income and photos of his home, and a special unit of Mexico’s Finance Ministry began investigating LatinUS, where Mr. Loret de Mola is employed, for allegations of money laundering and corruption, the head of the unit said. No charges have been filed.

“It sends a message to other journalists or anyone who dares to question him: ‘Now you know what happens to those who mess with me,’” Mr. Loret de Mola said.

Mr. López Obrador had less success in other areas, especially in combating crime. In 2018, he vowed to overhaul the country’s approach to insecurity, with an emphasis on addressing the poverty that drives young people to join gangs rather than aggressively confronting the cartels in the streets.

The plan, which he called “hugs, not bullets,” coincided with a decline in the mass killings resulting from security forces clashing with armed groups — although recent reports show there have been exceptions. Homicides modestly declined and surveys show that people in cities feel safer.

But drug cartels retain their sway over large swaths of Mexico, marked by mass displacements of Mexicans run out of their towns, an election season in which dozens of aspirants for office were killed and the resilient flow of fentanyl into the United States. Just in the last week, turf battles between cartels turned areas in the states of Michoacán and Sinaloa into what looked like war zones.

The ongoing violence underscores a grim perception that some things never seem to change, especially for those mourning loved ones lost in Mexico’s crisis of disappearances, with about 100,000 people still missing.

This figure includes the 43 college students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were shot at by the police, forced into patrol cars and handed over to a drug cartel a decade ago in southern Mexico in 2014 — a case that rocked the country and became emblematic of enduring impunity.

When he campaigned for the presidency in 2018, Mr. López Obrador vowed to solve the case and bring closure to the families.

“I was full of hope, I told myself, ‘This is it, this is our guy, he comes from the people, he’s going to solve what happened to our boys,’” said Clemente Rodríguez, 56, the father of one of the disappeared students.

That hope soon turned sour. A decade later, the families of the 43 students still have received few answers.

“He failed us, and I am completely disappointed,” Mr. Rodríguez said.

Miriam Castillo contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Argenis Esquipula from Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacán, Mexico.

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