By Dan McLaughlin
Tuesday,
March 19, 2024
Last Thursday,
Chuck Schumer called on Israel to hold new elections and oust Benjamin
Netanyahu before his four-year term is up. Noah Rothman and National Review’s editorial both dismantled the errors in this
ham-fisted attempt to meddle in the democratic politics of an American ally
whose voters and politicians do not appreciate the effort. Netanyahu’s
predecessor as prime minister, Naftali Bennett, blasted Schumer’s meddling, and so did the current
opposition leader, Benny Gantz.
This,
from the same Chuck Schumer who has been busy in recent years posturing against Russian interference in U.S.
elections — only because it’s not in the direction he favors — while calling American elections a “rigged game,” threatening Supreme Court justices, allowing a paid foreign agent to lead the Senate
Foreign Relations committee for over a year, embracing mobs who shut down state legislatures, demanding that his critics be taken off the airwaves,
and spending money to help Stop the Steal and MAGA candidates win Republican
primaries. So, let’s just say that Schumer is not exactly in a position to be
lecturing anybody else about democratic norms or responsible leadership.
But
let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose that there was a foreign leader
of a democracy — a democracy over which America has a lot of influence by
virtue of its deep ties with the country. Now, suppose further that this leader
is autocratic, corrupt, anti-democratic, and openly plots to meddle in American
elections. Suppose that he and his government are hostile to America and
American interests. Suppose that this leader is doing nothing much to stop
violence and oppression from tearing apart big parts of his country, and to the
contrary, is exporting human trafficking, drug trafficking, and sex slavery to
his neighbors. Suppose further that this foreign leader was hoping to anoint
his successor in the upcoming election. Mightn’t that be an
occasion in which American leaders think it proper to weigh in on another
country’s elections — if the point of doing so is to advance American interests
and the causes of human rights and democratic norms, rather than to score
political points at home?
Of
course, I am describing Mexico under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
known commonly as AMLO. And most of what I’ve described is broadly acknowledged
even on the American center-left. If Schumer is sincere, he will direct the
same ire at AMLO and his effort to install his protégée, Claudia Sheinbaum — the Dmitry Medvedev
of Mexico — as its next president when Mexicans go to the polls in June.
But
Schumer is not sincere. His anger at Netanyahu is entirely about the fact that
Netanyahu is hated by much of the Democratic base, and personalizing criticism
of him allows the redirection of anti-Israel hatreds that divide that base.
AMLO, by contrast, may worry some sincerely liberal think tankers in D.C. and
some center-left editorialists, but Joe Biden and Democratic Senate candidates
face no particular pressure from within their electoral base to oppose AMLO.
So, they won’t.
AMLO
has openly pledged to interfere in American elections — specifically, to help
Democrats and hurt Republicans. From March 2023:
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador warned
Friday that his government would launch a campaign against the US Republican
party in the next election after their lawmakers pushed for American military
action on Mexican territory to combat drug cartels. . . . “So, if they continue
to offend Mexico, we will continue to denounce them and ask our countrymen not
to vote for them,” he said. “And I am sure that not only Mexicans and other
Latin American countries in the United States, but even Americans themselves will
be in favor of us.”
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard will travel
to the US to brief Mexican consulates and Mexicans living and working in the US
on the recent quarrel between the two North American neighbors, according to
Lopez Obrador.
Pro
Publica may
be a lefty outlet, but it did a major public service in January when Tim Golden
published a detailed exposé of the depths of AMLO’s indebtedness
to drug-cartel money, delivered in exchange for one of his closest aides
agreeing to lay off the cartels. And the Obama administration knew and let it
go: “In late 2011, DEA agents proposed a sting in which they would offer $5
million in supposed drug money to operatives working on López Obrador’s second
presidential campaign. Instead, Justice Department officials closed the
investigation, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would
be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.” That
pattern continues today: “The administration of President Joe Biden has been
steadfast in its refusal to criticize López Obrador’s security policies,
avoiding confrontation even when the Mexican president has publicly attacked
U.S. law-enforcement agencies as mendacious and corrupt.”
Golden’s
report notes the close connection between AMLO’s refusal to accept honest
electoral defeats and the drug cartels’ investment in him:
The 2006 presidential race was a dead heat.
When Mexico’s electoral tribunal declared Calderón the victor by half a
percentage point, La Barbie was furious, López Nájera said. The drug boss came
up with an impromptu plan to kidnap the president of the tribunal and force him
to reverse the decision. A convoy of gunmen was dispatched to storm the court,
turning back only when they discovered army troops guarding the area.
Having insisted he was the rightful winner,
López Obrador rallied thousands of his supporters to Mexico City for a
monthslong sit-in that covered a swath of the capital’s colonial center.
According to López Nájera, La Barbie donated funds to help feed the protesters.
Pro
Publica has
stood its ground under a relentless assault from AMLO’s government. As Jim
Geraghty noted of AMLO’s response, “If you are accused of being in
the pocket of a drug cartel and not really being committed to stopping
cross-border drug trafficking, I don’t think you bolster your reputation by
threatening to curtail bilateral cooperation on stopping cross-border drug
trafficking.” But that’s exactly how AMLO reacted. It’s not the first time:
Last spring, U.S. prosecutors announced charges against 28
members of the Sinaloa Cartel — including four sons of the notorious former drug lord Joaquín
“El Chapo” Guzmán — for smuggling massive amounts of fentanyl into the
United States. But López Obrador did not cheer the arrests; instead, he
publicly fumed that the case had been built on information gathered by U.S.
agents in Mexico, and said “foreign agents cannot be in Mexico.”
Under
AMLO, Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world for journalists,
and it has faced an epidemic of political assassinations, with six political candidates murdered so far this year as
the country approaches the June 2 elections. During the last election cycle,
between September 20202 and May 2021, 88 politicians were killed and five times that many
were targeted by one sort of crime or another. Mary Anastasia O’Grady noted in 2023:
On a trip to Sinaloa in 2020, Mr. López
Obrador went out of his way to greet the mother of the notorious drug lord
Joaquín Guzmán [El Chapo]. On June 7, 2021, at a press conference the day after
elections, AMLO said that criminal groups had behaved well. Now he wants to
slay the electoral watchdog, which may be one of the last lines of defense
against a narco-state.
As
O’Grady noted in January, “The Biden administration bows to
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on matters big and small” rather
than offend AMLO. Biden has described AMLO, along with Justin Trudeau, as
“partners — and, might I add, friends.” On a call in November, according to the White House’s own
readout, “President Biden recognized the essential partnership that we have
built with Mexico to manage unprecedented levels of migration across the
Western Hemisphere.” Sure, that’s going great. At the ensuing press conference, Biden buttered up the Mexican autocrat:
“I couldn’t have a better partner than you.”
The
Council on Foreign Relations, hardly a right-wing outlet, warned in 2022 that “Mexico’s Democracy Is Crumbling
Under AMLO.” For example:
He has weaponized the judicial branch with
politicized investigations and prosecutions. His attorney general threatened to incarcerate more than two dozen
professors and scientists in the notorious maximum-security prison Reclusorio
Norte on specious money laundering and organized crime charges that were
summarily shot down in court. Money-laundering charges against former Supreme
Court justice Eduardo Medina Mora were also later dropped for lack of evidence, though not before
he relinquished his seat to an AMLO appointee. And the
government continues to charge opposition politician Ricardo Anaya with taking bribes, even though in the
government’s parallel case against the alleged bribe-giver, Emilio Lozoya, it argues he never gave any of the money
away. More broadly, AMLO has repeatedly used the tax authority and financial
crimes unit to go after critics, for instance subjecting NGOs investigating
corruption to audit after audit.
Come
to think of it, I can see why leading Democrats wouldn’t want to focus on that part.
AMLO’s
anti-Americanism and populist demagogy has caused his share of heartburn even
among official liberal Washington and its press flacks. In 2022, he boycotted the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in
solidarity with the regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua after the Biden
administration shut those governments out of the summit, although he did send
his secretary of foreign affairs, and then met separately with Biden, whom
he harangued publicly with a half-hour speech in Spanish.
You
can chart the difficulty that AMLO’s antics have created for earnest American
liberals through his coverage in the Atlantic. In November 2017, as
AMLO was ramping up his campaign, J. Weston Phippen tamped down just a little on
enthusiasm: “Mexico’s Populist Savior May Be Too Good to Be True.” In June
2018, just before his election, Mexican political opponent Jorge Guajardo was
given a platform to brand AMLO “Mexico’s Answer to Donald Trump,” a sure
negative signal to Atlantic readers. Once he was in office,
Krishnadev Calamur asked, “Who’s Afraid of Mexican Populism?” and reassured
readers that the problem was Trump, not AMLO: “Trump was not an issue in this
election. The American president’s derogatory language to describe Mexicans has
ensured that he is universally reviled in the country; that anti-Americanism, a
strain within Mexican politics, that had virtually disappeared in the country,
has returned; and Mexicans are keen they don’t end up, in their view, losing in
any renegotiation of NAFTA.” In November 2018, Andrés Martinez warned that things could get rocky, but it still had
to be Trump’s fault due to “the so-called border crisis”; there was potential
for conflict because “Trump seems far more eager to exaggerate the migration
problem for political gain, and AMLO, a fellow grandstander, seems unlikely to
turn the other cheek.”
In
November 2020, ALMO refused to congratulate Biden on his election, mainly
because he didn’t want to undercut his own preferred election-conspiracy
narratives by attacking Donald Trump’s, leading Christian Paz to describe AMLO as “The World Leader Backing Trump’s
State of Denial.”
The
pretense that Trump was the whole problem dropped once AMLO was becoming a
headache for Biden. In February 2023, David Frum called AMLO “The Autocrat Next
Door” and sounded the alarm that AMLO was “scheming to end the
country’s quarter-century commitment to multiparty liberal democracy.” Frum
marshaled the extensive and undeniable evidence of the threat and what it
portends for the United States. But he reassured readers that “any attempt to
fit López Obrador into a left-right spectrum is futile and misleading.” The
following month, Anne Applebaum concurred, “Mexico’s president is destroying democracy from
the inside” by efforts to corrupt the already-dubious Mexican electoral system.
But don’t worry; Jacobin defended AMLO.
Here’s
where the rubber really hits the road: AMLO fears a return to Trump-era
immigration policies or tougher drug enforcement. But he recognizes that Biden
needs to calm the border ahead of our own November elections, and that takes
priority for now even over AMLO’s anti-Yanqui stance. As David Leonhardt of
the New York Times detailed:
On the Thursday before Christmas, President
Biden called Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and asked for
help. The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. — about 10,000 per day —
had reached the highest level of Biden’s presidency. The surge was creating
major problems. . . .
López Obrador responded by telling Biden to send a delegation of top officials
to visit him in Mexico City. The next week, that delegation, led by Secretary
of State Antony Blinken, arrived for talks. Partly in response, Mexico soon
began to enforce its own immigration laws more strictly, making it harder for
migrants from other countries to use Mexico as a route to the U.S. Among other
things, López Obrador’s government has increased deportations of migrants to
their home countries and disrupted bus networks run by cartels that funnel
migrants from other countries toward the U.S. border.
The crackdown has made a noticeable
difference, too.
Migration flows at the U.S.-Mexico
border fell more than 50 percent in early January, according
to data that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency released last week.
The numbers have since risen somewhat, officials have told me, but are still
well below the December levels.
These
are, of course, not permanent changes to Mexican law; they are discretionary
enforcement decisions, and they can change on a dime if they are no longer
useful to AMLO (or his handpicked successor) — or no longer politically
necessary to Biden.
So,
it won’t do for Biden or Schumer to treat AMLO the way they have treated
Netanyahu. How would that help turnout in November?
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