July 1, 2018

Andrés Manuel López Obrador Wins Mexico’s Presidential Election

AMLO has pledged to fight the corruption, waste, and criminality endemic in Mexican institutions.

Jose Pazos/Notimex/Newscom via ZUMA Press

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Mexican voters on Sunday elected leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador as their next president, sending a strong rebuke to Enrique Peña Nieto, the country’s current president, whose popularity has tanked amid rampant violence and corruption. Exit polls had López Obrador winning a “landslide victory,” according to the New York Times, far ahead of the second place Ricardo Anaya, who was the candidate of an unusual coalition of parties from the left and right. Juan Antonio Meade, the candidate of the currently ruling PRI party, finished third.

López Obrador, widely known as AMLO, will take over on December 1, 2018. The election was the largest in the country’s history, with roughly 3,000 seats up for grabs at the local, state, and national levels.

Some have drawn parallels between AMLO, who is 64 years old, and President Donald Trump. Both campaigned as populists, displaying nationalist tendencies. Obrador, like Trump, has painted himself as an outsider who is singularly positioned to purge the Mexican government of corruption and waste, and vows to fight the criminality endemic in Mexican governmental institutions. And AMLO has advocated a Mexico-first style policy he refers to as mexicanismo. But the two are ideological opposites—AMLO is a leftist who has pledged to re-think foreign corporations’ oil contracts, discuss amnesty for those in the drug trade in pursuit of peace, and better protect Central American migrants as they move north through Mexico toward the US border.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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