Mexico is Sepia: The (Too) Democratic State Next Door
Mexico, contra David Frum and others, is not a failing state because Claudia Sheinbaum and the MORENA-led coalition that backed her won big in Mexico’s latest elections.
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“I think, as you know, initially, the President of Mexico, [Abdel Fattah Al-]Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to humanitarian material to get in [to Gaza]. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.” — Joe Biden
Reading and watching mainstream US media coverage of Mexico’s recent elections reminded me of two infamous albeit hilarious moments in American presidential history. During his 1976 presidential campaign, Gerald Ford made a stop in San Antonio, Texas to visit that mythical cornerstone of Texan identity, the Alamo. When someone handed the president a plate of tamales, he quickly took a bite—without removing the cornhusk. “He nearly choked,” a CBS correspondent recalled. The mayor of San Antonio would later comment that “it was obvious he didn’t get a briefing on the eating of tamales.”
At least Ford avoided an international incident, his faux pas committed on US soil. Three years later, the candidate who defeated him for the presidency found himself in Mexico City during a tense moment in US-Mexico relations caused by oil prices and migration. The trip did achieve some notable successes. Jimmy Carter addressed the Mexican Congress in Spanish, acknowledging that the US was “the fourth largest Spanish-speaking nation” in the world. Taking Leonard Bernstein with him to conduct the Mexico City Philharmonic and lead a concert described as “pure magic” also proved quite popular. In private, both Carter and Mexican president José López Portillo “got along well.”
But during a luncheon upon arriving in Mexico City, Carter erred. After his Mexican counterpart bluntly levied a series of grievances and criticisms during a toast, the one-time peanut farmer from Georgia responded by recounting the time he got “Montezuma’s revenge” during a previous trip to the country. Sitting next to Carter, his wife Rosalynn “blushed and covered her face in embarrassment.”
“It’s not easy living next door to a superpower,” Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote in 1987, particularly when “twin sisters, ignorance and arrogance, characterize a general American attitude toward its southern neighbor.”1 Ignorance and arrogance, alive in the past as demonstrated by Ford and Carter, continue to thrive in the present. And not just because Todd Richman—co-chair of a Zionist Democratic Party advocacy group—tweeted that President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum “is not involved in the Jewish community and thanked Jesus for her victory.” Sheinbaum indeed thanked Jesus for her victory: Jesús María Tarriba, her husband.
On a more serious note, the 2024 elections demonstrate, yet again, that key segments of US media—those writers and commentators consumed most by policymakers and political elites—look at our southern neighbor through ominous sepia-colored lenses. Similar to some movies—perhaps most famously in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2001)—the view of Mexico they offer is darker and hazier than the reality. “Everything in the United States is technicolor, it’s neat and beautiful, while Mexico is sepia, old, and shadowy,” Mexican politician Dulce Maria Sauri remarked after that movie’s release.
Sticking to the Script
While much of mainstream media focused on President-elect Sheinbaum’s identity as the first woman and Jewish president of Mexico, some commentators relied on old tropes and framings in their attempt to understand her victory—and that of the MORENA-led political coalition, “Let’s Keep Making History,” that backed her. MORENA, allied with the Labor and Green parties, scored big victories in congressional and gubernatorial elections.
How could a country wracked by violence and narcos vote for more of the same? If Mexico is sepia and democracy has spent six years dying at the hands of incumbent President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), why did Mexicans overwhelmingly choose continuity? As David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick wrote in the 3 June edition of “The Morning Newsletter” for The New York Times, “when foreigners hear news from Mexico, it can often sound chaotic, involving cartels, crime or migration surges.” I wonder why. In their defense, Leonhardt and Prasad Philbrick did attempt to understand the seeming contradiction by interviewing knowledgeable reporters and researchers on the ground in Mexico (but not without the usual, flattening identification of AMLO as a populist “like Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the U.S.”).
In contrast, David Frum is peak sepia. Writing in The Atlantic the day after the elections, the Axis of Evil speechwriter argued that our southern neighbor is on the verge of simultaneously becoming a failed and an authoritarian state. Mexico, he warns, is “heading fast toward authoritarianism and instability.” He’s been on this beat for the last year or so. Frum attributes this slide into state failure and authoritarianism to AMLO’s single-minded effort to end “the multiparty competitive democracy” that Mexico “achieved in the 1990s.” In this formulation, the current president is the cause—not the effect—of the failure of the country’s decades-long “democratic transition.” What remains unexplained is why AMLO and the social movement-turned-political-party MORENA he founded has generated overwhelming electoral victories in two presidential election cycles. Instead, we get an image of a country about to fall into the hands of criminal insurgencies, ruled by a supportive narco-president who’s about to hand over power to a successor whose lack of charisma or political skill will force her to be authoritarian. Taylor Sheridan may have found his script for Sicario 3.
Frum’s arguments are not new nor original. The election results seemingly intensified the sort of failed state, narco state representations that US commentators have trafficked for more than a decade. Frum’s colleague Anne Applebaum took a break from Saving Western Civilization in Eastern Europe to report on AMLO’s destruction of democracy “from the inside” in early 2023. The Wall Street Journal’s resident Pinochet fan Mary Anastasia O’Grady has offered a grave assessment about “socialist” AMLO and Sheinbaum, thereby threatening us with a good time. New York Times Op-Ed author Bret Stephens has long written about the country in these terms. Raised in Mexico as the son of a wealthy US chemical company executive, he has argued that the country is on the road to becoming the next Venezuela. To avoid a “fast track to failed state,” he even advocated an “Iraq-style surge” to defeat “drug-cartel insurgents.”
Frum, et al. are joined by a few elite Mexican commentators who act as native whisperers for gringo audiences. Shuttling between wealthy Mexico City neighborhoods, television studios, and New York City/Washington DC, these commentators have demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to seriously and critically engage the electoral results. Instead, they forecast the end of democracy and the return of the “perfect dictatorship” as Enrique Krauze recently argued; in other words, democracy has suffocated democracy. Writer and professor Jorge Castañeda did at least acknowledge the key role of minimum wage increases and social welfare programs for MORENA’s overwhelming victory after decades of inequitable neoliberal economics. Yet in an essentialist turn, he explained Mexicans’ preference for short-term cash handouts over improved public services and infrastructure by citing the country’s “traditional ethos of individualism and skepticism.” The voting poors simply do not know what’s good for them.
A prolific writer in numerous English-language outlets, political scientist Denise Dresser echoed that paternalism when she provided some sort of historical explanation during a television roundtable the night of the elections. Distressed, she lamented that Mexicans had chosen, “to once again put on the chains that we had liberated them from, in the 1980s and 90s.” In this mythical, top-down rendition of the history of struggles against the decades-long dictatorial rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), it was the enlightened elite few who conquered democratic reform for the working masses. “Mexican Khaleesi,” breaker of chains and bringer of democracy, was betrayed by the very people she sought to liberate. This rendition not only marginalizes the role of everyday people and popular movements in challenging PRI rule. It also flattens the very “democracy” that they fought, sacrificed, and in many cases, died for—an array of definitions that was sometimes socialist, mostly social democratic, but always more than a nominal, bare exercise of voting for the alternance of political parties in power.
Moving Beyond the “Bolshevism-Iran-Venezuela-Failed-Failing State Next Door” Narrative
It’s long past time to remove the sepia filter and to understand Mexico within its own complex historical and political terms, its own promises and contradictions, to move beyond the long list of labels that Americans have deployed to characterize our southern neighbor. What purpose do these labels serve? As future president Plutarco Elias Calles told The New York Times in 1921, the American charge of “Bolshevism made against the Mexican government is a ‘mere term of political reproach’ and a ‘phantom to scare fools.’”
This is not to deny that the country and the incoming Sheinbaum administration face crucial challenges when she assumes office in October. There are many open questions:
How will they manage US-Mexico relations? Will Sheinbaum and MORENA continue to serve as a de facto Border Police for the Americans? Migrants subject to brutal state and cartel violence say they “would rather cross the Darien Gap 10,000 times than cross Mexico.”
How will the president-elect, an environmental scientist by training, tackle the catastrophic consequences of capital-induced climate change in the form of drought and the lack of water, in a country where export-oriented agriculture consumes most of the water resources?
Will Sheinbaum maintain the current militarized, lethal approach to violence, organized crime and drug trafficking that only generates more violence and has politically and economically empowered the Mexican military?
Can MORENA implement a progressive taxation and redistributive model that raises taxes on the country’s wealthiest citizens, including the twenty or so billionaires (some of whom are quite friendly with the current administration)?
Will Sheinbaum’s brand of capitalism with a human face—what she terms “conscious capitalism”—reduce poverty rates amidst low economic growth and looming public deficits? How will her government calibrate its proposed, far-reaching reforms package—including a controversial overhaul of the country’s judicial system—with the disciplinary power of foreign capital and USMCA (NAFTA 2.0) nation-states?
Sheinbaum has a mass democratic mandate. What will she do with it?
Reducing such complex, deep-rooted issues to the whims of “populist” leaders with authoritarian dreams and failed state results is not only intellectually dishonest. It’s also politically dangerous. The framings and tropes advanced by US commentators like Frum tend to generate disastrous US policy proposals—and even popular American support for them. In the last two years, representing Mexico as some sort of failed narco-state willfully poisoning Americans with fentanyl has allowed GOP presidential candidates and politicians to advocate for an absurd laundry list of military actions against our southern neighbor. Throughout 2023, opinion polls consistently and unsurprisingly showed high support from GOP voters for military intervention (regardless of party affiliation, a majority of Americans supported such action, though the number tended to drop if the US intervened without Mexican permission).
Moreover, such reduction ignores the transnational nature of these pressing issues. Mexico could implement the most progressive, cutting-edge approaches to illicit drug trafficking (an actual “hugs not bullets” approach) and yet still fail because it shares a nearly 2,000 miles-long border with the world’s largest narco-state, awash in military-grade weaponry. The Biden administration does recognize the interconnected dimensions of these issues but their solutions remain superficial, militarized, and punitive. Its hard-right tack on so-called border security—a euphemism for the system of migrant brutalization and torture that currently exists at the US-Mexico border—depends on Mexico willingly acting as colonial Border Police while refusing to address the factors that rob migrants of the right to stay home. Latin American and Caribbean migrants, past and present, remain the “harvest” of the US empire.
An irony of this US sepia filter approach to understanding Mexico is that these two countries possess a multitude of deep, strong connections: historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic. And yet Mexico seemingly remains, in the words of my Arizona State University colleague Andrés Martínez, “the stranger next door.”
Octavio Paz, “Realidades y espejismos,” El Universal (5 July 1987).
"Poor Mexico, so far from God. So close to the United States"