On December 6, the MORENA movement demonstrated its strong popular support by filling Mexico City’s Zócalo — the world’s second-largest public square — and the surrounding streets beyond capacity. According to the official count, some 600,000 people turned out to celebrate the seventh anniversary of its rise to power, with the election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in July of 2018 and his inauguration the following December.
In an hour-long speech, and with that historical moment in mind, AMLO’s successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, began by making a clear demarcation with the past:
From that moment on, it became very clear that just as Church and State were separated in 1857 [with the Reform Laws], in 2019 the principal separation had to be that of economic power from political power; and so it has been, and so it must continue to be, for the good of the Republic. . . . Today it is clearer than ever before that the corruption and privileges of neoliberalism deeply damaged our homeland and our people; thirty-six years of that economic and political model left as a legacy poverty, inequality, the handing over of our natural resources to private interests both national and foreign, loss of sovereignty, violence, and corruption.
From there, she proceeded to rattle off a list of the movement-in-power’s achievements, including social programs, public housing, union reform and the curbing of subcontracting, labor protections for digital workers, the nation’s first judicial elections, and constitutional rights for indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples. Even more impressively, all was accomplished with a stable currency, low inflation, and low unemployment. Among the most recent measures: a progressive decrease in the workweek from forty-eight to forty hours by 2030; a new water law to curb the worst abuses of the eve-of-NAFTA 1992 counterreform; a 13 percent increase in the minimum wage for 2026, building on annual increases over the…
Auteur: Kurt Hackbarth
