Andrés Manuel López Obrador

"There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amidst the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial. For them climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand. In Mexico, the notionally left-wing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through. It was the managerial centrist types who were under most pressure. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the United States, or Sebastián Piñera in Chile, or Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an option. They were desperate to demonstrate that they were better than the 'populists.' To meet the crisis, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical things. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, but insofar as they managed to put a programmatic gloss on their responses—whether in the form of the EU's Next Generation program or Biden's Build Back Better program in 2020—it came from the repertoire of green modernization, sustainable development, and the Green New Deal."

"People are tired of so much damn fraud."

"If the price of imported gas rises, we will shift to using non-gas fired electric plants to provide needed electricity."

"We considerate it terrible that, because of the interests of economic and political elites, since the beginning of the legitimate presidency of Pedro Castillo, an environment of confrontation and hostility was maintained against him, leading him to take decisions that have served his adversaries to remove him."

"Such vision Commander Fidel Castro had! While the neoliberals [in Mexico] were preventing the training of doctors, in Cuba they were driving the training of doctors, and consolidating one of the best health systems in the world . . . Conservatives in Mexico and around the world can say whatever they want, but they will never, ever be able to counteract the teaching, the example of solidarity, of brotherhood that the revolutionary movement and its leaders have left Cuba."

"In our time, there is still a mixture of oligarchy and democracy, or a simulated and mediated democracy. That is to say, in some countries, the oligarchy reigns with the façade of democracy. For example, how can we talk about democracy if the elites dominate, and not the majorities? How can we talk about democracy if there is no separation of economic power and political power? How can we talk about democracy if, in recent times, there has been the most offensive concentration of wealth in a few hands in the history of the world? The fortune of a minority has increased without limits, without any moral concern, while there are a billion human beings who live on less than a dollar a day."

"I did not see that op-ed, but I think that Jorge puts it very well there, that — you know, that this was something that Mexico agreed to. And to me, that was surprising, given the history of López Obrador and what I thought he would stand for and do once he was in office."

"what did the Washington Post say about all this? It compared López Obrador to Josef Stalin, literally, in print, saying that he had used Stalin’s methods of terrorizing the population in order to get in power. Huh? What? And the New York Times editorial was not much better. It accused him of gross, grave irresponsibility. The man is demanding a count of the vote to prove who won, since even with the first election commission, it was still only at 0.5 percent, less than 0.6 percent — less than 1 percent. I mean, it doesn’t take a whole lot of cheating to do that...I don’t think López Obrador is any raging radical. I mean, his politics are not super radical. I think he’s probably a populist, more accurately described, but he certainly is leaning to the left, and he’s certainly, I think, a better — [he] would take more steps to end the poverty and so forth in Mexico than Calderón would."

"In the 36 years of neoliberal politics, they sold off the public companies, the nation’s banks, the railroads, the mines, the ports, the airports. They also carried out privatization of the electricity and oil industries. And they didn’t stop, not even in relation to education and healthcare. The so-called structural reforms aimed to put education and healthcare on the market, as if they were goods for sale, with the goal so that those who wanted to study or get medical attention had to pay. Fortunately, the people said ‘Enough!’, and, in a democratic way, decided to change these politics and carry out a transformation. Also to confront the tremendous decay that we suffered. The corruption brought about a process of gradual degradation in all of the fields of public life."