A closing 🧵on #Mexico-US relations during 2021. From the outset of the Lopez Obrador Administration, the gravest danger lurking over the horizon was always going to be the president’s vision of an imperial presidency and the whittling away of the checks and balances and ...1/10
..autonomous institutions that a generation of Mexicans painstakingly spent more than three decades building to deepen and widen democracy. The president is now doubling down on that threat, revealing a deepening split in Mexico over the very nature of its democracy. 2/10
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Regulators (telecoms or energy) and autonomous institutions (the Comptroller General’s Office and the independent National Electoral Institute and National Institute for Access to Information) have all been targeted -tarred and feathered from the presidential bully ...3/10
Regulators (telecoms or energy) and autonomous institutions (the Comptroller General’s Office and the independent National Electoral Institute and National Institute for Access to Information) have all been targeted -tarred and feathered from the presidential bully ...3/10
..pulpit- as mechanisms built to favor "elites", "toffs" and the status quo ante, notwithstanding the paradox that many of these institutions paved the way for Lopez Obrador’s landslide electoral victory in 2018. State institutions, capabilities and bandwidth, civil ...4/10
..service bodies and bureaucracies have all been eviscerated And as #Mexico moves into the halfway mark of Lopez Obrador's term, his “hugs, not bullets” paradigm has claimed more lives than Calderon’s "war on drugs", militarising public policies in a way not seen since ..5/10
..the post-revolutionary era in the late 1920s, and his honesty threatens to be more onerous to the viability of the Mexican State than Peña Nieto’s corruption. Moreover, during his three years in office, the president has sought to weaken Mexico’s institutions so that ...6/10
..they cannot constrain him. But that also means he cannot rely on them to generate growth, mitigate the pandemic, resolve social conflicts, tackle public insecurity, take advantage of #Mexico’s geostrategic assets or even facilitate his eventual exit from office. And the ..7/10
..U.S. needs to start paying attention. The Biden Administration, likely hamstrung by the imperious need to secure Mexican support regarding transmigration flows headed to the border, has fallen into an “Erdogan Trap”; seeking concessions and support in stemming migrant ...8/10
..flows it has been turning -one would certainly hope, temporarily- a blind eye to the growing erosion of Mexico’s democracy and its critically important -but still fragile- checks and balances. What happens in #Mexico in 2022 will not only profoundly affect the ...9/10
..bilateral agenda; it will also have a profound impact on the United States' security and wellbeing. By the end of Lopez Obrador's term in 2024 policymakers and pundits in Washington might well end up asking themselves, when, who and how did we lose #Mexico? 10/10
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