Examining Mexican Politics, Pt. 1

In this episode, we talk with José Luis Granados Ceja and Kurt Hackbarth about politics in Mexico. The interview is divided into two parts, and part two will be released in two weeks. José Luis and Kurt are journalists and activists based in Mexico and the co-hosts of Soberanía: The Mexican Politics Podcast. José Luis has written for Venezuela Analysis, and Kurt has written for Jacobin, including a recent article, “Mexico’s Lessons for the International Left.” In part one, José Luis and Kurt discuss Claudia Sheinbaum’s victory in the June presidential elections, the reaction to her victory in Mexico and abroad, and the history of Sheinbaum’s party, Morena.

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Transcript

Luke: This is Class, the official podcast of the Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Education Committee. My name is Luke Pickrell. In this episode, we talk with José Luis Granados Ceja and Kurt Hackbarth about politics in Mexico. The interview is split into two parts. Part two will be released in two weeks.

José Luis and Kurt are journalists and activists based in Mexico and the co-hosts of Soberanía: The Mexican Politics Podcast. Jose Luis has written for Venezuela Analysis, and Kurt has written for Jacobin, including a recent article titled, Mexico's Lessons for the International Left. In Part 1, José Luis and Kurt discuss Claudia Schoenbaum's victory in the June presidential elections, the reaction to her victory in Mexico and abroad, and the history of Schoenbaum's party, Morena.

Thank you both for joining us. I was hoping you could introduce yourselves and explain a little bit about how you became politically engaged. José Luis, could you start?

José Luis Granados Ceja: I was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States and Canada. It was actually through my experiences as a migrant that I had that waking-up moment, realizing the complexities of living in a late capitalist country. At the time, I was living in Arizona. And I was lucky to have a professor who taught me about the intricacies of interacting systems of oppression.

At the time, I was primarily focused on trying to make sense of the world as a Mexican living in Tucson, Arizona. Thankfully, out of that experience, I started asking the right questions. Of course, there was a radicalizing moment, which was the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and I started getting involved politically more profoundly around that time and asking the same kinds of questions. And I think that was important because I began developing an anti-imperialist outlook. It's one of the critical pillars of my political analysis. And so, asking myself at the time, what do we do in the face of this aggression by the United States?

What is the difference between being in favor of peace and being anti-imperialist, right? And I would say the other critical moment was a trip to Venezuela. I went there in 2005 for the World Festival of Youth and Students, where I saw the masses participating in transforming their society.

I think that was when I realized that political work requires mass mobilization and that they must be the protagonists of any political change. There was a vital role for the charismatic leader at the time of Chavez, but obviously, his commitment to ensuring that the protagonists were the masses were the people, the working classes, and the most marginalized historically. And I think that informed my worldview. The only other thing I would add would be the landless peasant movements in Brazil, which have been a vital influence. I was thinking the other day, how was it that I first came across the work of the MST?

There is that language barrier. They speak Portuguese, not Spanish. And I remember, on a subsequent trip to the country, it was in Venezuela, where I was in the studio for Alba TV, and they were, oddly enough, using a stack of books to put up this projector so they could project some of the work that they were doing.

I think they were making stencils at the time. Then it was just like downtime, and I picked up the book and started painting through it, and it was what I was looking for. It was a guide that they'd prepared about how to do political organizing, how to hold a meeting, and how to take minutes.

Sometimes, we assume people know how to do all these kinds of concepts, like the nitty-gritty of organizing. I found it so helpful that I started looking into the MST and who put this together. Then, I discovered this incredible organization full of organized peasants. I saw what they were capable of and was heavily informed. Then, in 2011, I had the luxury of attending their political school in Sao Paolo, Brazil, which was a monumental moment for me.

Since then, I've worked as a journalist, but I always say I'm more of a political organizer and activist. First, I fell into journalism. It's also a way to express my political ideas through journalism. Today, I proudly say that I'm a grassroots anti-imperialist journalist. I'm committed to the emancipation of the working class, focusing on Latin America and Mexico in particular.

Luke: Kurt, could you introduce yourself and tell us how you became politically active?

Kurt Hackbarth: Yeah, sure. So, I grew up in coastal Connecticut, which is kind of a sheltered, small town. My first exposure to left ideas, like a lot of us, was in college. I studied poli-sci and philosophy, and I think what struck me at the time, this was in the mid-nineties, was learning about the incredible damage that the United States had done to Central America and the Reagan administration just before that. 

Through corporate media and whatever else, you get one perspective on what that means. But when you dive into what the Reagan administration did in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, it is a very unfortunate but necessary eye-opener. Fortunately, I got involved in college activism.

The 90s aren't known for being a high time of college activism, but this was shortly after the Gulf War, and we got involved in a group with some professors who, again, kind of along the lines of what José Luis is saying, we got our feet wet in learning how to organize. It is essential to learn how to manage beyond the book learning.

This was the time when the United States was sanctioning Iraq. The U.N. report came out that said that 500,000 children had died as a result of the U. S. sanctions on Iraq. And then Secretary Madeleine Albright, rest not in peace, said it was worth paying. It was a price worth paying: 500,000 dead Children on top of the horrors and destruction of the first Gulf War and then leading into the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which I was also involved in protesting. 

But what I think radicalized me in a fundamental sense was experiencing the Oaxaca uprising in 2006. I've lived in Oaxaca, the city of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, for 23 years. In 2006, there was an annual teachers' strike by the dissident section of the National Teachers Union called Section 22 of Oaxaca. That year, a governor who'd won by fraud from the PRI, who had governed Oaxaca for decades without interruption at that time, decided to repress the movement. They threw everything they had at them. 

The teachers pulled out of the downtown city center of Oaxaca, regrouped, and took the city center back. That set off a massive social movement in which a series of social grievances adhered to that movement, and for several months, there was no functioning state or federal government. In Oaxaca, they closed all the offices; some have called it the Oaxaca Commune. A people's assembly known as the APO, the Asamblea Oaxaca, governed an assembly format. 

This went on for several months. According to the Mexican Constitution at the time, the only way they could get rid of the governor was to declare that the state was ungovernable and have the Senate declare that the state was ungovernable. So, they had to set out to prove the state was ungovernable because the president wasn't stepping in. They got very close,

As we know, 2006 was a fraud at the national level. They installed Felipe Calderon by a supposed difference of half a percentage point. Felipe Calderon's first way of grabbing power was to repress the popular movement in Oaxaca weeks before taking office. Still, through Vicente Fox, who was then nominally in power, they sent in the federal police. It was a very atrocious repression.

They were rounding up left and right people who had nothing to do with it. They were taken by helicopter to a federal prison in Nayarit and the other side of the country. Their family members couldn't have anything to do with them.

Things in Mexico nowadays - you should have seen it when the conservatives were running the show. And I witnessed all of that. I witnessed the nighttime barricades that the people put up and how they were protecting their neighborhoods from paramilitaries and police, nonuniformed police.

I saw the violence, I saw the repression, and I saw what happened to some of these people; these people came back. Those who came back from Nayarit came back broken. This was a heady time in Mexico because of the Oaxaca struggle.

There was a struggle against the fraudulent election at the national level. This led to a sustained movement that then manifested itself in the next presidential election with a student movement called Yo Soy 132. Right, which is a student movement that articulated itself in a very grassroots manner to oppose the return of the PRI in 2012 with Enrique Peña Nieto, which is a purchased election.

That was also interesting because it was another example of how grassroots spontaneous organizing can occur. So, all of that informed my worldview and taught me many lessons about Mexico.

Luke: In June, Claudia Sheinbaum of the Morena party won Mexico's presidential elections by a landslide. She will be the next president of Mexico. I was curious: what's been the reaction to Sheinbaum's victory, both inside and outside of Mexico, especially around the question of enhancing democracy or not enhancing democracy? You both have written a lot about the reaction and the buzzwords that perhaps also get thrown around. Kurt, do you want to start off taking this one?

Kurt Hackbarth: So Claudia Scheinbaum won the presidential election on June 2nd. José Luis was covering it live that night in Morena HQ. And it was just funny and exciting to see the faces of the top brass in Morena. They knew they'd won but didn't realize they had won by that much. It was just an absolute crushing landslide — a 32-point difference. The final kind of mainstream media polls had her winning by a landslide. But there are landslides, and there are landslides. They had her winning by 15 to 20 points, and she won by 32. 

There was just one polling company that nailed it. Over the last weeks, they have always been criticized for being the outlier, and the outlier got it. The outlier got it there. So it was a very heady night for Morena in that sense. What has the reaction been? 

The public response has been very positive. I mean, it was an apparent electoral victory. And I think as we'll talk about maybe a little bit later in this program, a morning is wasting no time trying to push through a series of constitutional reforms to truly reshape the country, even before Lopez Obrador hands over power. The general reaction in the country was very positive. People are excited about this. People are excited. They knew Mexico had dug itself in by 30 years of neoliberalism, right? Plus, everything that came before would not permanently be remedied in one six-year term. Right? And Claudia was evident. Okay. In her campaign, she envisions the next step to be what she calls the second floor of this transformation, right? These constitutional reforms are part and parcel of that, but she was very clear. And she didn't take the bait that conventional media tried to get her to take that.

She had to distance herself from AMLO and create her own brand and individual look. She said, "No, because I'm part of this movement. This movement won this big victory in 2018, and we want to continue." So, she was very explicitly a continuity candidate. And I think that was the correct reading of the situation. 

So, from the public. Who is not happy about this? Well, The conservatives in Mexico and the international press represent international financial and political interests. So, the global media, in the days and weeks following the election, tried to play up the idea that investors were worried. Investors don't like what happens. The peso declined slightly after the election, which is normal, right? They tried to play that up. The stock market took a tumble after the election, and they tried to, basically, the essential black financial blackmail. Which they always do with Latin American progressive governments that when your currency is going to go down, your stock market's going to tumble.

There's going to be a capital flight. There's going to be an investment flight. Right. So they tried to play that card. Right. They tried to play that card. Right. The New York Times, the usual suspects, right? New York Times, right after the election, Mexico's leftist win, big investors are worried, right? So this was the international press, but it's funny that it didn't work. Right. And it didn't last particularly long, so they moved on to something else. They'll be back. They'll cycle back, of course, but the standard playbook of scare tactics and financial blackmail didn't work. The peso stabilized, and the stock market stabilized.

The stock market is not an indicator of the real economy. We know that, but just as a means of saying, right, the major macroeconomic indicators stabilized. The peso had another blip when the stock markets tumbled about a week ago and has stabilized again. So, that didn't work.

What have the conservatives in Mexico tried to do? They've been attempting to call into question the results, not whether Sheinbaum won or not; it's hard to argue with a 32-point blowout. However, Mexico has a mixed representation system in Congress where single-member districts allocate some seats, while single-member districts allocate some seats. Some seats are allocated by proportional representation. The Constitution has a limit that the number of seats you get by single-member districts and the number of seats you get by proportional representation can't exceed eight percent of your national vote. This was a law by conservative governments in the past to try to give a majority bonus and cement their power in Congress.

Morena passed electoral reform a few years ago, which would have eliminated it. But the conservatives raised a hue and cry, and this electoral reform was terrible. They took it to the courts, and it was eventually ruled unconstitutional. So, it's hilarious that this election was carried out under the old rules that Morena had tried to change. So, it now benefits Morena. It now benefits Morena. And so they went to the electoral tribunal to try to say, Oh no, that over-representation clause applies to the coalition as a whole, not to the independent parties that make up the coalition. 

So, not to get into the weeds with technicians, but all of this was a way to try to deny Morena and its coalition from getting the supermajority in Congress—two-thirds of the seats. Imagine having two-thirds of the seats in the lower house, in the chamber of deputies, and just about there in the Senate. So, it was a question of fighting about how the seats would be allocated. And they lost. Of course, they lost because of the Constitution. And electoral law is apparent. 

But, to answer your question, this was the reaction of general public contentment. It's interesting to see Lopez Obrador's popularity has increased to 80%. It's like where Lula was when he left, proper, his second term, but the attempt from the international press to play the financial blackmail card and Mexican conservatives' attempt to influence the electoral institutes not to give Moreno the seats they wanted. Are legally entitled to on Congress, both of which have failed. I'm happy to say 

José Luis Granados Ceja: The only thing I would add to that is first. To underline what Kurt is saying, we've seen this deliberate effort to try to drive a wedge to say that. Oh, Claudia needs to separate herself from Lopez Obrador. And she's been very disciplined about that message, saying, no, we are part of the same movement.

The movement has specific aims. And I think if you had to say it, Morena represents a democratization or an authentic democratic transition for Mexico. In Mexico, in the year 2000, there was finally the end of the pre, and that was seen as an opportunity to consolidate Mexico as a modern democracy, et cetera.

Ultimately, we saw the emergence of a two-party state similar to the United States. In a sense, there was a kind of a center-right party and then a party further to the right. I'm not going to argue and say the Democrats are our central left at all. And so, similarly, the pre-occupied that center-right space.

And he had the PAN, which was further to their right. And it was a new liberal consensus. And I think what Morena represents with 2018 and 2024 is what Kurt was talking about: a rejection of that neoliberal model and an acceptance by the population that something needed to change and that this was the vehicle to do it. And I think, for people exposed to some of the columnists and opinion makers in the United States, when it comes to Mexico, that that is a thoroughly democratic process. That's about. It is deepening the democratic promise. 

The last time we talked, we talked about the 1917 constitution here in Mexico, which is the one that's in force today. It's been heavily modified, but it is very social. I would even say a socialist constitution. It was born out of revolution. There were a lot of promises that haven't been kept, but in a lot of ways, trying to work for building a welfare state, attending to the needs of the population, redistributing wealth, and ensuring land is available for campesinos.

Right? Improving conditions for workers, et cetera, et cetera. There's a long list of things that can get into deeper details about how they're putting it into practice. But for me, that's democracy, right? The only other thing I would say, too, in terms of the international reaction, has been this effort to try to label Mexico as an autocracy or going down the authoritarian path precisely because it is following through on its mandate.

These opinion makers and think tanks are not very honest when they talk about Mexico's autocratic slide, but let's take it at face value. What they're upset about is that there are all of these kinds of people. Transformations, economic transformations, and political transformations happening in Mexico are about deepening trust in institutions and optimism. I mean, you can look at the polling numbers.

 I don't have them in front of me, but generally, there's a renewed confidence in Mexican institutions and opportunities, like young people feeling optimistic about their country's future. And I think that, arguably, that is more democratic than these technocratic, neoliberal modes that they sold us as democratic. The final thing I would add is that there's also been a very problematic campaign because they see that the population is enthusiastic and have developed and delivered a stronger mandate to Morena to try to undermine the legitimacy of Morena as a project by saying that it's tied to organized crime. There's been this deliberate campaign before the election, during the election, and now after the election, trying to force and make it seem like Morena is in cahoots with organized crime that was true of the PAN, the National Action Party, under Felipe Calderón here in Mexico, so it's pretty extraordinary to people who are familiar with Mexico that this be the line of attack, but that is what they're going for to try to delegitimize Morena as a political project.

We'll get into this later, but Mexico is the home of the parliamentary left. There are different expressions of left in the country. Still, those who believe in taking over state institutions or trying to win government are where the left has very much settled, with All of its contradictions. But I think if you look at the rank of the file if you look at the materials put out, this is, if you look at its record, this is a project that is firmly seated on the left and is firmly interested in defending the interests of the marginalized working class of the Campesinos of this country.

And yeah, that reflects. I mean, Kurt mentioned at the end that his approval ratings are going up, and I think a lot of it is because of this sense that things are getting better and where there will be more of these kinds of things. And I'll close on this whole issue of this, this phrasing that Claudia uses around the second floor of the transformation.

It was ambiguous. And I remember when I first heard it, I was a little bit like, okay, what is she going with this? What does she mean? And so far, I think it points to a deepening of the process. That's the way I'm interpreting it now. He said of a more profound transformation of going even further when he was elected; what we need to do is, in the first half of my term, is kind of rescue the state's place in our society to rebuild everything they dismantled. In the second half, we will put in some locks, like some ways of guaranteeing that we don't return to the old neoliberal order. And so I think we could evaluate his progress on those terms. He has realized that. We've seen the next step now.

 Now, it's not just about making up for lost ground but going further and promising things. One thing we discussed on the podcast is the autonomy for Indigenous communities and Afro-Mexican people in Mexico, about getting control over their territories back to them, that they have the legal standing in the Constitution collective. That's extraordinary. That's very far-constitutiond when you think about what that represents- a revolutionary state transformation. And so this, if this is what the 2nd floor of Mexico's 4th transformation looks like, I'm very, very encouraged. I think it represents a people's democracy here in Mexico, where the population has a protagonist role and decides what happens in the country instead of just deferring to the functions of a liberal democracy and its institutions.

Kurt Hackbarth: To add very quickly to that as an exciting footnote, José Luis covered a significant rally a couple of years ago to celebrate the anniversary of the takeover of Mexico's oil in 1938, on the eve of World War Two. This came as a result of a worker's movement and a series of strikes by workers and then a Supreme Court ruling that the transnational oil companies refused, which gave Mexico's arguably last left-wing president, Lázaro Cárdenas, the pretext he needed to oust Mexico's petroleum in 1938, which is a massive historical moment. And that was around the time when the money, the government was nationalizing Mexico's lithium stores, right, right around that time. 

Lopez Obrador gave his keynote speech at that rally. He mused historically on the election of 1940, which was the election following Lázaro Cárdenas. There were two choices at that time - how the then-emerging PRI could go with Manuel Ávila Camacho, the conservative choice, or Este Francisco Mujica, right? Which would have been more of a left-wing choice, in general, to carry on Carnismo. They chose Manuel Ávila, the stage for decades of the PRI co-opting the revolution for their ends. We all knew the contradictory idea of an institutional revolution in becoming the hegemonic party. How can you have that institutional revolution? That was the name of the party. 

I'm alluding here that it would be a Mujica and not an Avila Camacho this time. There were two primary choices in this election for Morena. One was Claudia Scheinbaum, clearly more to the left, and another was the foreign relations minister Marcelo Ebrard, who was a very able chancellor but was more to the right. And this time, it wasn't a presidential choice. It was made by opinion polling, but it was interesting that the idea is not to repeat the 1940 situation that led to decades of the movements being co-opted and repressed. 

José Luis Granados Ceja: What's the situation on the ground? Why did Morena vote for the left candidate? I think because they felt confident, right? They knew that they could bet on a candidate that represented more of the rank and file of the party, as opposed to that tack to the center. I liked that Kurt broke that up, but there's more; there's a recent example in Ecuador. So, the citizen's revolution movement there, formerly led by Correa, who was president for nearly a decade, had to make that shift to the right. Right. He picks his first vice president, Lenin Moreno, who turns out to be a traitor and destroys the movement and their possibility of winning government.

They're still struggling to recover from that nearly fatal mistake of choosing the wrong candidate. Well, here in Mexico, the story played out differently. And I think a lot of that concerns the weak opposition in this country. They have not been able to adequately respond to the situation as it presented itself in 2018.

They also chose the wrong strategy in selecting a cartoonish candidate, an inferior candidate from whatever perspective you want to look at it, from electability, popularity, and charisma. There was nothing there when it came to Xóchitl Gálvez, and I think they are now further and further marginalized, right?

They had pretty massive demonstrations. It was called the Marea Rosa or the Pink Wave. They were talking about defending the electoral authority, and they filled the Zocalo.

Kurt Hackbarth: to be confused with the Pink Wave.

José Luis Granados Ceja: Yeah, yeah. Different pink wave, different pink wave. They also filled out the Zocalo, a big square where the left has historically manifested itself. And so, kudos to them for mobilizing. I think it's under dubious, questionable criteria, but suffice it to say they showed up. They've lost all of that momentum. They held a rally just this past Sunday to address this issue of overrepresentation again, and basically, nobody turned out.

And the people that did turn out were those kind of fringe elements. You could say they're kind of like the MAGA types. There was even the token racist woman railing against migrants at this demonstration, right? A tiny turnout, very poor political messaging, not a lot of kind of credibility, even amongst media that is favorable to them. And I think it just shows how marginalized and displaced the opposition is, which I believe opens up the possibility of Morena becoming truly hegemonic in this country.

Luke: So we've talked about Morena a lot, and it's interesting to reflect on the rise of Morena to the position they're in now, especially as we've talked about, given how dominant the PRI was for so long. But what is Morena?  What's its history? How did it become so powerful?

José Luis Granados Ceja: Absolutely. So, Morena is a big tent party. There are different perspectives within it, but I think you, looking at its history and statutes, will see that it's very much a left-wing party. So, to understand why Morena is a dominant force, I remind your viewers and listeners that it's barely a 10-year-old party, right? It barely turned ten years old this year. So, going from an upstart to a hegemonic is quite an extraordinary feat. I think it speaks to many of the correct decisions they've made. 

So, a lot of it has to do with Lopez Obrador himself. Lopez Obrador, in a lot of ways, became the standard bearer of the parliamentary left in Mexico after Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, took backstage to things and retreated.

He was a three-time presidential candidate. He'd won in 88, but there was fraud, and then there were the subsequent elections. He couldn't be as competitive as he was in 1988. And so he takes a step back. Lopez Obrador fills those shoes. He became famous for always accompanying social movements, particularly in his home state of Tabasco, where the oil industry is very prominent—even being the victim of state violence. There's a very famous picture of him bleeding. And that is kind of what made him have a national profile. 

He became Jefe de Gobierno, governor of Mexico City, in the year 2000 and then ran in the year 2006 under the banner of the PRD. So, the PRD was born out of that experience of 1988, which was kind of a first breakaway from the PRI. First, the PRD was called the National Democratic Front, the more progressive element of the PRI and those who had never been members. However, I sympathized and identified with the people who were seen as supportive of that project. Then, formally constituting a political party, it becomes the PRD. 

The PRD was the home of the left for many, many times. But I think it made some pretty fatal mistakes regarding how it wanted to operate with Mexico's political machine, the institution of politics in this country, and choosing to play the game instead of being that protest party, that party of the streets. They were inheritors of the original party registration for the Communist Party of Mexico. 

They make all kinds of mistakes. None the less, Lopez Obredor ran again in 2012 after being a subject of fraud in 2006, ran for president, that's the election that Kurtz said was bought, ridiculous overspending, the electoral authority never really did anything about it, arguably an illegitimate result. But afterward, the PRD, its leadership - a very kind of neoliberal leadership (called the Chuchos because both leaders are named Jesus) - reached an accommodation agreement with the government. The state signed the Pacto for Mexico, a neoliberal promise of constitutional reforms consolidating the neoliberal project during Peña Nieto's government. 

And that means the left was orphaned. So we didn't have a home anymore. There was nowhere to go regarding those who believed in contesting for state power. And that's where Morena starts to be born, very much led by López Obrador. There is a massive gathering where they ask the rank-and-file supporters: Do you want to become a political party? Should we join, move away from being a movement, and become a party? The party votes yes. It starts to compete for elections. And very quickly, as we saw, it started winning its first election in 2016; if I'm not mistaken, I could have that date wrong, but they began to win seats in Congress.

They start to win governorships. They're very competitive in places like Estado de Mexico, which I've talked about and has been ruled by the PRI for a hundred years. They don't win on that occasion. But then everything changed in 2018, right? Lopez Rador wins by a landslide, and I think it is consolidating its place.

I think the reason is what we were discussing, right? Morena is promising a different one. You could call it post-neoliberal if you don't want to call it socialists, but a post-neoliberal political-economic program, which is embraced, right? And they're, they follow through on that, which I think is a crucial thing. They, the population, and the voting population see a difference. That is a very marked difference between previous regimes and this regime. 

And Lopez Obrador's charisma can't be understated, either. He's toured the country, every single municipality, at least twice. People have a personal connection with him and sense that this person, this president, Lopez Obrador, represents them.

Of course, there are actual fundamental differences that this government has been able to deliver. That's why it's able to get reelected and increase its place in the political landscape. Like Kurt said, there are landslides, and then there are landslides right there. If we had the political system that Canada does that the U.K. does, they would have won over 80 percent of the seats in Congress. I mean, just an absurd amount of that kind of Power hegemony is little seen in politics, actually, right?

It was able to tap into the angst and discontent that existed in Mexico, the frustration of feeling like you're falling further and further behind. Finally, I saw somebody come into power with a different program and actually implement it. Right. Not just kind of riding the victory and doing more of the same, but actually delivering that change.

This is why Morena is as powerful as it is today. Its supermajority was delivered by voters democratically through the ballot box.

Kurt Hackbarth: Yeah, so to round that out. So, we left it historically at the 1940 election when the emerging PRI went with Camacho. The first major break in that pre-facade of the co-opted revolution was the rail workers' strike in the 50s. The severe repression of the rail workers with Demetrio Vallejo in the late fifties, which then led to the student movement of 1968 and the massacre of Tlatelolco (which I think many of us have heard of right on the eve of the Olympics, the students were out protesting the big year of 68, protests around the world) and they were mowed down. 

Later, as we moved forward, it seemed like the PRI had its hegemonic control the whole time, but the emerging left won some victories that would prove to be important later on. One of them was the public financing system. The left won public financing of elections and parties. All were to prove important in 2018. When Morena was founded in 2014, it was able to use its public financing to escape the fate of the Green Party in the US as chronically and constantly marginalized. Public financing allowed Morena to become a contender very quickly the following year. The following year, the congressional elections and PR seats allowed them to get a foothold in Congress. I mean, that's just fundamental. 

Let us not forget that Morena is an acronym. It means the national regeneration movement, Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, but it's also a very clever acronym representing a dark-skinned woman, una morena. Not only a woman but a dark-skinned woman. And that's very clear; it's an apparent reference to a country that remains, 500 years after the conquest, significantly polarized along class and racial lines. 

If you're in the if you're in the lower class, you tend to be mestizo and Indigenous, the lower economic strata, and the very scant middle class, which is an upper middle class, is much whiter. And then you get to the upper crust of elites, totally white. And you see some people who were out of these Maria Rosa marches; it was just a sea of white faces, right? Older and whiter, the conservative demonstrations. And it was very significant that at one of these demonstrations, a worker, a working-class guy, clearly a more dark-skinned guy, stuck his arm out the window and showed his muscle at one of these conservative rallies from the bus window and said, "The working class is back. It's back. We built this country right." 

There's a video that went viral across the country because it was all the white conservatives marching outside, and this guy from the window saying this is showing up and saying, "We built this country." Neoliberalism everywhere tries to erase the idea of class. And in Mexico, they wanted to do it by erasing the idea of the people and the public and calling it civil society, right? Civil society means groups easily manipulated by the foreign press and foreign NGOs. 

And not just the National Endowment for Democracy, the Ford Foundation, and all of these, right? So, it renewed the debate in Mexico about how NGOs are a regime change. They are an advanced army for the U.S. Government, just as in Georgia, which has anywhere from 10 to 25,000 NGOs for a tiny country. They tried to pass a registry law, and boom, U.S. Actions. That's a scorching topic in Mexico at the moment, right?

So, regarding Morena, I think it's fair to say. You may have to say it's one of the most successful political parties in the last 100 years, and not just in Latin America. They were founded in 2014. They fight the congressional elections the following year and win some seats. Four years after their founding, they won the presidency with a landslide and a majority of Congress. They've picked up, I think it's now, 25 or 26 of the 32 governorships in the country. It's just a handful of governorships, and now they want an enormous landslide, this time with supermajorities in both houses of Congress effectively. 

I recently published a piece in Jacobin about why I think Morena has been successful. One of them is very similar to what Jose Luis said. They followed through; they didn't just do what the Democrats did after they won 59 seats in the Senate in 2008 and fritter it all away, blow it all away. So, we see outsourcing reform and a 100 percent rise in the minimum wage over six years; we see union reform that provides for secret ballot elections, and all contracts must be renegotiated. A doubling of vacation days increases profit-sharing social programs, from a universal pension to an apprenticeship program to tree planting and farm support. I could go on. And now they're in the committee stage right now, passing these constitutional reforms one after the other, which we can talk about afterward. 

I think There have been many disputes about Morena accepting some very unsavory candidates from other parties who have parachuted in, taking advantage of the fact that Morena has become a trendy party, right? So, it's very likely to win. So it's a young party, and it's still finding its feet with its internal statutes and candidate selection process, which parties worldwide struggle with. And Morena has accepted some people that it should not have. It should not have been received. Also, I have to say Morena at the state level has not governed anywhere near as well as Morena at the national level. You've seen some impoverished Morena governments at the state, particularly local levels. And that's something that the party has to work on. 

But that said, you can't deny that a ten-year-old party is winning two presidential landslides in a row, winning a supermajority in Congress, and working to reshape the country legally and constitutionally. It's a massive victory. It shows the way, I think, for this idea of this post-neoliberal world.

You see here a realignment where the working class comes home to Morena. So you see Sheinbaum sweeping, I think, 71% of people with elementary or no schooling in this election. Sheinbaum also won the upper middle class by 49 to 41%. She won women, men, and people of all classes.

You want people of almost all professions except business owners. So what we're seeing here is an exciting cross-class coalition anchored in the working class that can also attract middle and upper-middle-class votes. A surprising number of people said they identified with the right. I think 40 to 50, 40 percent, something like that. I'll check the number here in a second. People who identified with the right voted for Scheinbaum. And I think that's worth analyzing further.