The Dirty Campaign Arrives Right on Cue

It’s election time in Mexico. The official campaign period won’t begin until the first of March but the opening salvos have already been fired. Headlines in both the US and Mexico have been inundated with sensational — but baseless — accusations seeking to besmirch President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The latest New York Times piece purports to link his previous election campaigns to dirty money from organized crime. While he’s not running, they want the tar from their brush to rub off on AMLO’s probable successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, and to raise doubts that her election will be honest.

As my co-host over on the Soberanía podcast Kurt Hackbarth noted, the smear campaign in the US media has already had three acts. The first was a piece in the Texas Observer asserting that anti-democratic AMLO would manipulate the results of the coming election. The second was a coordinated hit piece from ProPublica, DW, and InSight Crime, a fact-free attempt to link AMLO’s 2006 campaign to illicit financing. And Act Three hit the boards this past week when Alan Feuer and Natalie Kitroeff published a poorly sourced piece in the New York Times alleging links between organized crime groups and AMLO’s successful 2018 run. 

According to former Mexican foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard, the accusations are likely coming from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), as fallout over the contentious relationship between the US agency and the Mexican government after AMLO curtailed their ability to wantonly operate in the country. This fact raises the worry that more than just a smear campaign, we’re watching a destabilization effort unfold. 

While US government spokespeople have stated clearly that the US is not investigating AMLO, Ebrard said he was told that the DEA operates with a surprising degree of autonomy. It is not unreasonable to think that there are powerful interests willing to exploit the DEA’s grudge in order to advance their agenda. They want to defeat the Morena government, which has for the first time since 1938 taken back control over its own natural resources; they would love to return to business as usual under corporate candidate Gálvez.

The opposition and its allies in Washington know that Gálvez has no chance to win an honest election.  Instead they are trying to build doubt about the election as part of a broader effort to potentially overturn the results. The opposition’s gamble is unlikely to pay off. Despite weeks of negative headlines, and even foreign-funded efforts to inflate a hashtag critical of the president, poll numbers have hardly budged. 

True democrats and anti-imperialists must nonetheless remain vigilant, lest the opposition turn to more radical actions in their increasing desperation.