Mexico City, Mexico – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador presented his sixth and final report on Sunday, a month before he leaves office. In front of thousands of supporters, the outgoing populist leader made contradictory claims about his administration’s achievements.
The 70-year-old also known as AMLO, who first came to power in December 2018, loaded his government’s latest conference with patriotic sentiments and constant references to Mexican history such as his signature, praising leaders of past, revolutionaries and social warriors while denouncing those who for too long kept the country in a state of poverty and corruption – his political rivals.
AMLO claimed that his political project, called the Fourth Transformation, laid the foundations for much-needed change in Mexico.
“We are inheritors of a glorious past and an extraordinary and fruitful history. This largely explains why it did not take us long to reverse the decline caused by neoliberal policies and how we were able, relatively quickly, to lay the foundations to begin a new phase that is now known and identified as the Fourth Transformation of public life of Mexico. “, said the president in the main square of Mexico City.
However, the achievements lauded by AMLO are deceptive at best and hide the challenges that Mexico and its people still face.
Better than Denmark
One claim made by López Obrador that surprised many was his assertion that the Mexican health system was among the best in the world, continuing his long-standing slogan that his government would provide a better health system than countries like Denmark .
“This public health system is already the most effective in the world. I said it would be the best, that it would be like Denmark. No, it’s not like Denmark; it’s better than Denmark,” he told thousands of supporters.
Indexes like the one compiled by CEOWORLD magazine have ranked Taiwan as the country with the best healthcare system in 2024, placing Denmark in 24th place and leaving Mexico’s healthcare system in 45th place. to.
While international standards may not bother Mexico’s patriotic leader, the local journalistic media does Political animal have documented how the AMLO administration, for example, left 6 million children under the age of six without vaccination.
The paper reported that 575,000 children were not vaccinated in 2018, while the number reached 3.4 million in 2020.
Furthermore, as the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval) reported, the number of Mexicans who did not have access to health services went from 20.1 million in 2018 to 50.4 million in 2022.
In addition, during the Lopez Obrador administration, Mexicans paid up to 30% more in health care, mostly affecting lower-income families.
Security, Organized Crime and Human Rights
Regarding security, López Obrador shared that crimes in the country have “decreased by 24.8 percent and homicides by 18 percent,” highlighting a downward trend in crimes such as kidnapping, theft and intentional homicide.
Overall, however, López Obrador’s government will end up as the most violent in Mexico’s history, with 196,438 murders during his tenure. Although government data shows that the upward trend has reversed with his administration, the data presented by AMLO is misleading.
Animal policy fact-checked the numbers presented by AMLO and found that official homicide figures show a decrease of 8.01% between the first half of 2018 and the first half of 2024.
The president also overlooked the crisis of disappearances that has engulfed the country, with nearly 50,000 disappearances occurring within AMLO’s administration, almost half of the 115,000 reported disappearances since the 1960s.
AMLO highlighted the change in human rights and security in the country, directly accusing his predecessors of governing Mexico under a state controlled by drug trafficking.
“Unlike what happened in the neoliberal governments, now the people are not oppressed, there are no massacres, no torture, no one disappears, human rights violations are not tolerated and there is no narco-state like the one that was configured during the administration previous,” he asserted.
However, AMLO’s security strategy, which has relied heavily on the military, has not been impervious to human rights abuses.
Throughout his presidency, serious human rights violations have been reported by federal forces, namely the military and the National Guard; torture, extrajudicial executions, harassment and intimidation have been widely reported throughout the country.
In 2022, officers of the National Guard, a body created by AMLO in 2019, tortured a man in Quintana Roo in southeastern Mexico, wounding him with a bladed weapon to extract a confession.
Similarly, the National Guard has been accused of engaging in the indiscriminate killing of civilians during confrontations with suspected criminal groups.
Widespread violence in Mexico still leaves political power vulnerable to criminal organizations, which attempt to influence and control the country’s political power.
During the recent general elections on June 2, where 34 political candidates were killed, the Mexican people witnessed firsthand how criminal groups tried to take over local government by force, leaving some areas without elections due to a wave of violence.
Likewise, recent reports of police officers arrested for their ties to criminal groups such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel highlight how Mexican democracy remains vulnerable to the influence of organized crime.
