AMLO Has a Project to Transform México

Interest in anti-corruption crusades…tends to fall off when it is being performed by a government that is not to the liking of the international elite that determines media framing. But even more to the point, tracing the trail of corruption in Mexico would mean uncovering US complicity every step of the way: through financing, weapons, rogue intelligence operations, and the daily fact of playing nice with officials, like former security minister Genaro García Luna, who they knew to be highly compromised by organized crime.

The long arm of the United States has been on display in another way during the midterm election campaign: in helping to fund the political opposition. By means of the United States Embassy in Mexico, and as reported by the magazine Contralínea, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are financing the organization “Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity” (MCCI), founded by Claudio X. González. Not only is González leading the charge against MORENA in this year’s election, organizing the coalition of parties arrayed against it and financing its candidates, he has also been an active figure in the war of attrition seeking to block the key pieces of the president’s agenda in the courts.

Far from representing a passing check, the millions in funding from the US agencies amounted to nearly 20 percent of the organization’s revenue in 2019 and 2020. And while MCCI is not directly a political organization, the United States has effectively been chipping in a healthy salary (González received the equivalent of some $375,000 dollars from the organization over the previous three years) to the chief organizer of Mexico’s opposition.

Spurred by the revelations, Mexico sent a diplomatic note to the United States on May 6 asking it to clarify the matter. At his press conference the following morning, AMLO classified it as a form of golpismo, or coup promotion, and compared it to the participation of US ambassador Henry Wilson in the overthrow of President Francisco Madero during the Mexican Revolution. “It’s an act of interventionism that violates our sovereignty … Our Constitution forbids it. You can’t receive money from another country for political ends.”

The case raises the specter of USAID’s dark history throughout Latin America, from its promotion of “fiscal reform” and “competitive business climates” to its clumsy attempts at regime change in Cuba to its support of the mass sterilization of the poor in Peru. In its Cold War heyday in the 1960s and ’70s, USAID helped to bolster dictatorial regimes throughout the region by training their police officers in counterinsurgency, riot control, explosives, public relations, and “enhanced interrogation techniques” carried out in soundproofed cellars.