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Journalist and novelist Nicholas Medina Mora joins co-host VV Ganeshananthan and guest co-host Matt Gallagher to talk about Mexico’s president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum is Mexico’s first woman and first Jew. Medina Mora discusses the history of current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, his influence on Mexico’s political imagination, and how his connection to Sheinbaum, who is attempting to amend 18 amendments to the Mexican Constitution in his final days in office, may affect future policy. Medina Mora, editor of Mexican Magazine, NEXOSreflects on his writing about Lopez Obrador through both fiction and journalism. He details a pre-election article he wrote for the New York Review of Books and also discusses his writing about Lopez Obrador through his novel, North AmericaThis work expertly deals with the relationship between fiction and non-fiction.
Check out video excerpts from the interview on Lit Hub’s Virtual Books Channel , the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube channel , and our website This podcast episode was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.
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From the episode:
Matt Gallagher: Claudia Sheinbaum was elected President of Mexico on June 2nd. We’ve talked about her status as Mexico’s first female president and first Jewish president. She’s also a scientist and previously served as Secretary of Environment in Mexico City. She had the support of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO. We’ll talk about Sheinbaum in a moment, but can you tell our listeners a little bit about AMLO, the political parties that they both belonged to, and why he was such a beloved figure? Basically, what was the context like at the time the election took place?
Nicolas Medina Mora: Sure, AMLO was elected president by a landslide in 2018. Not as many votes as Sheinbaum, but Sheinbaum got 5 million more votes than him, which is really remarkable.
AMLO campaigned as a leftist under the banner of a party he founded called “El Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional,” or “Morena” for short, and defeated candidates from the traditional parties that had dominated Mexican politics for the first 18 years after the end of one-party rule in 2000. It’s important to remember that Mexico didn’t have true democracy until 2000. I remember the first democratic elections, and although AMLO campaigned as an outsider because he left the traditional parties, he has had a long career in Mexican politics.
He was mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2006. Before that, he was a full member of the only political party that ever existed, the Authoritarian Party of Institutional Revolution, or PRI. So he’s a complicated character. I don’t doubt his leftist beliefs when he governed Mexico City. He was an entirely rational social democrat. Passing welfare policies like old-age pensions made him beloved and popular. And he generally rejected the traditional pomp and circumstance, and implicit deception, that people have come to associate with Mexican politicians. He got around in a Nissan Crane, not an armored SUV.
And then in 2006 he ran for president and lost by just one percentage point to the right-wing candidate, Felipe Calderon, and he and many of his supporters believed that the election had been rigged. So AMLO became disgusted at this point with the institutions of what was called the transitional democratic period, this period of transition from a one-party state to a fairly paternalistic democracy. And so, at least from my perspective, he became bitter in some ways.
As a president, he was very popular. His approval rating is in the 55-70% range, depending on which poll you listen to. But his policies as president were not always left-wing, and I think they were sometimes, frankly, reactionary. He empowered the military. He refused to raise taxes. And he went into the election as a very popular president. He was a man who, while he rhetorically claimed to be left-wing, he governed in a complicated way. More on this later. And he named as his successor Sheinbaum, who was the mayor of Mexico City at the time. Everybody thought she was going to win. Nobody who was thinking seriously really predicted the magnitude of her victory, the margin by which she won. More on this later, but I think that’s pretty much how it went.
VV Ganeshnanthan: I didn’t realize the difference was that big. So when I first read about Sheinbaum, I thought, “Oh, she’s a Jewish woman who’s also a progressive climate scientist! This is good news! I hope it’s good news!” But in the article he wrote, New York Review of BooksIn your book, A Revolutionary History of Afghanistan, which was published on April 7 before the election, you give a more complex view of her, which I was really happy to read. Can you tell us a bit more about her background, and what are your questions about her relationship with AMLO?
Nonmal: Yes, Scheinbaum is the granddaughter of Jewish refugees who fled the Holocaust. She grew up in an upper-middle-class family of academics in Mexico City. Both parents were scientists, and she was raised in a left-wing, secular rather than religious way. There was a video that was distributed by her campaign that showed her performing and singing this genre of left-wing Latin American songs when she was about 8 or 9 years old. I forget how old she was exactly.
And she got into politics as a college student in Mexico. Campus politics are different from the US, they’re more about national politics than the university itself, and she joined a group that later became the youth wing of the left-wing political party that AMLO left and founded Morena. There’s a photo of her protesting the North American Free Trade Agreement when she was doing her graduate studies at Stanford. So she’s been involved in left-wing politics her whole life, from a young age, and she associated with AMLO from very early in her career.
Her first office, her first position in public life, was Secretary of Environment in the AMLO administration in Mexico City, and then she was elected mayor of Tlalpan, a borough in the south of Mexico City, which is like a borough mayor in New York, and then when AMLO was elected president, she was elected mayor of his hometown, Mexico City.
And the reason her relationship with AMLO makes me hesitate is because, yes, Scheinbaum sounds great on paper and everyone I know who has worked with her thinks highly of her and thinks she shouldn’t be dismissed as just a puppet of the president. But the problem is that the party they share is a conglomerate of contradictions. It’s like the Indian National Congress in India. It’s a giant thing with different factions, different regions, some pure communists and some just refugees from other parties that were destroyed by their electoral success. And the only thing holding it together, at least so far, is loyalty to AMLO. That may change.
The problem is that Sheinbaum seems to really believe in this guy, and I worry that he may not be able to deviate from some of his, so to speak, reactionary policies, because to govern effectively you need not be declared a traitor to your country. AMLO is obsessed with oil. In Mexican politics in the 1930s, there was an old conventional wisdom that oil was the blood of the nation, because the only socialist president of the old regime, Lázaro Cárdenas, confiscated foreign oil interests, and Mexico enjoyed really impressive economic growth for years thanks to oil. But that’s not the case anymore. The state oil company is totally decrepit.
And yet AMLO continues to build this refinery, this new oil refinery, which is costing an incredible amount of money and has yet to produce a single barrel. But all the fuss about the construction of this facility aside, I have to wonder if anyone in their right mind would build an oil refinery in 2024. Given what we know about climate change, this seems completely suicidal.
So it seems like we’re faced with this contradiction. We just elected a climate scientist to be president, and yet she’s unlikely to shut down this refinery or move away from an oil-first energy policy. Part of the reason is because she seems to be a true believer in AMLO and AMLO’s ideology. And also, from a more pragmatic standpoint, she can’t afford to alienate him. So I think that’s one of the reasons why I hesitate. We have a candidate who is likeable in many ways, the president-elect, but the situation in which she gets into the Oval Office is that she’s not necessarily going to govern the way that her more progressive supporters would expect her to govern.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Abridged and edited by Keillan Doyle.
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Nicholas Medina Mora
North America • What’s your next destination in Mexico? | Nicolás Medina Mora | New York Review of Books • NEXOS
others:
Fiction/Nonfiction Season 7, Episode 32: “Claire Messado on Blurred Family History and Fiction” • Fiction/Nonfiction Season 7, Episode 17: “Ed Park on Korea’s Past, Real and Imagined” • “Mexico’s Outgoing President Pushes Forward with Plan to Fire 1,600 Judges” by Christine Murray | Financial Times • “Mexico’s bloodiest election yet draws new asylum seekers to U.S. border” by Caitlin Stephen Hu, David Culver, Norma Galeana and Evelio Contreras | CNN • Netanyahu family Joshua Cohen
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