“Leftist Wins Mexico Presidency in Landslide With Mandate to Reshape Nation,” proclaimed the headline in the New York Times late Sunday. The leftist is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO, and his landslide victory “upended the nation’s political establishment and handed him a sweeping mandate to reshape the country.”
Some are hailing AMLO as a “messiah,” and he says he wants to maintain close relations with the United States. On that theme his pre-election pronouncements need attention.
In late June, López Obrador said that soon after the victory of his National Regeneration Movement, “we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world.” Immigrants, he said, “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States” and this was “a human right we will defend.” So the new Mexican president wants to dictate policy for the United States, no surprise given the dynamics driving illegal immigration.
Previous waves of immigrants entered the USA legally and none from Poland, Italy or Ireland thought their nation held a claim to Vermont or Massachusetts. Mexicans tend to enter the USA illegally because they believe that the American southwest was “stolen” from them, and so they are only entering their own country. For the record, in 1848, a full 170 years ago and 13 years before the Civil War, an outnumbered American force defeated Mexico, which duly signed a treaty ceding those lands.
Previous generations of immigrants did not believe they were racially superior to Americans. That is the view of La Raza Cosmica, by Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former education minister and a presidential candidate. According to this book, republished in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal State LA, students of Scandinavian, Dutch and English background are dullards, blacks are ugly and inferior, and those “Mongols” with the slanted eyes lack enterprise. The superior new “cosmic” race of Spaniards and Indians is replacing them, and all Yankee “Anglos.”
As the New York Times noted, AMLO’s opponents compared him to Hugo Chavez, the former socialist leader of Venezuela. The socialist Chavez took over the richest economy in South America, with the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Venezuela since has become a nightmare of hyperinflation, violence and poverty. Food is so scare that, as the Independent notes, “three in four citizens report involuntary weight loss, averaging 19 pounds in a year.”
AMLO may make great promises but like Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro his leftist policies are certain to be malo for the Mexican economy. That will prompt more Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States,” which AMLO believes is a “human right.”
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