Mexico Is Flashing Warning Signals to Washington
Time was when the US overlooked an undemocratic neighbor who ensured stability and stayed onside. But the Biden administration ignores President López Obrador’s attack on his country’s electoral watchdog at its peril.
Neighborhood bully.
Photographer: Alejandro Cegarra/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In the 1970s Washington didn’t seem to mind that Mexico was undemocratic. Enmeshed in the Cold War and engaged in Machiavellian (and not quite democratic) shenanigans elsewhere in Latin America and beyond, the US was content to see Mexico trundle along under the inevitable rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.
Mexican politics now appear headed back to the practices of yore. Last week, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador managed to pass legislation to hobble the country’s electoral watchdog, originally set up in 1990 to help put an end to the PRI’s stranglehold on power and bring about a fledgling multiparty democracy that is not quite 25 years old.