Does voting in favor of the interests of foreign capital make someone a traitor? Mexicans have been asking themselves that question after a proposed constitutional reform last week failed to secure a needed two-thirds supermajority in México’s lower house of Congress.

What does this rejection mean for the once all-powerful PRI party?

If the proposed constitutional amendment had passed, AMLO/Morena would have successfully co-opted the PRI and broken the PRI-PAN opposition alliance. But with the vote’s failure, the PRI has just committed political suicide.

The PRI descends from political forces that a century ago drove the Mexican Revolution. The party once championed the very sort of moves AMLO’s constitutional reform was proposing. Indeed, before the PRI made its turn toward neoliberalism in the 1980s, the party had led the way to nationalizing both México’s oil and energy industries.

In the years since the PRI’s weak third-place finish in the 2018 elections, the party has been trying to rebrand itself as a progressive champion of social democracy. PRI leaders are even calling themselves “revolutionaries.” But now, with their vote against the electric power reform, they’ve betrayed that rhetoric to stand as junior partners in an opposition coalition with the right-wing PAN, a party more likely to pick up anti-Morena votes than the PRI! The PRI decision to stand with the PAN simply clarifies México’s core political reality: Voters have only two political projects available to them through the ballot box. 

Morena and its supporters, meanwhile, have taken to labeling the opposition as “traitors to the homeland” for favoring the interests of foreign energy firms. These foreign powerhouses engaged in a massive lobbying effort to stop the constitutional change. 

The opposition has reacted angrily to this “traitors” label, charging that it amounts to “political violence.” But the label seems to be sticking. A recent poll by Massive Caller found that 65 percent of Mexicans see the lawmakers who voted against the reform as traitors.

And what about the country’s lithium, widely seen as a critical resource in a world that’s transitioning away from fossil fuels? A few days after the constitutional amendment fell, the AMLO government managed to secure lithium’s total nationalization anyway, through an amendment to the Mining Law that only required a simple majority to pass.

José Luis Granados Ceja, a Mexican freelance journalist, is currently studying human rights and popular democracy at the Autonomous
University of Mexico City. His writings on democratic struggles in Latin America appear regularly online at his Antimperialistia site.