In 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador­­—known as AMLO—won election to the Mexican presidency in landslide fashion. AMLO, a leftwing populist who on the campaign trail cast himself as a champion of the poor, has denounced Mexico’s “monstrous inequality” and pledged to redistribute wealth and eliminate political corruption. His victory, cheered by progressive leaders across Latin America, was heralded as a “political earthquake” that handed “a sweeping mandate” to “the most left-wing government in [Mexico’s] history.” In his inaugural address, AMLO promised to transform the Mexican political economy and espoused what would serve as the orienting principle for his ascendant administration: “por el bien de todos, primero los pobres” (“for the good of all, the poor first”).

Slightly over two years into his presidency, AMLO’s approval rating remains one of the highest among global leaders. Nonetheless, the Mexican president has at times found himself subject to withering criticism from voices on the left, much of which is far from baseless. AMLO’s administration has declined to increase taxes on the rich while introducing harsh austerity measures. Moreover, he allied himself with Donald Trump and, at the behest of the disgraced former President, deployed the Mexican military to suppress illegal immigration. He has also largely disregarded the suffering precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, refusing to impose lockdowns to control the virus (or even wear a mask). What’s more, AMLO’s administration recognized and even praised the updated version of NAFTA—a hallmark of the neoliberal regime that ravaged Mexican workers.

In short, AMLO’s decades-long crusade against poverty and corruption has long rendered him simultaneously one of Mexico’s most admired, derided, and, all told, controversial public figures. Consistent with this reputation, his administration has so far been beleaguered by conflicting tendencies.

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Following the Mexican Revolution in 1910, which transformed the country’s feudal economic order into a nascent capitalist system, Mexico was ruled for several decades by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or the PRI, an authoritarian and endemically corrupt political party controlled by the nation’s plutocrats. Devastating neoclassical economic reforms descended upon the Mexican polity in the early 1980s, as ruling elites deregulated industry, privatized state-owned sectors of the economy, dismantled existing social services, and endorsed trade agreements that privileged capital while subjecting Mexican farmers and workers to intense exploitation at the hands of transnational corporations.

Three decades of this free-market fanaticism has to a large extent destabilized what was already a highly oppressive society. Today, Mexico has become one of the most unequal countries in the world. Indeed, one percent of Mexicans own more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, while nearly half of the country’s population is poor—including millions who subsist on fewer than $2 per day. Mexican workers are subjected to the longest hours and nearly lowest wages among OECD nations. Organized criminal syndicates entirely control some regions of the country, while systematic political corruption scandals have become strikingly routine.

AMLO emerged into this political landscape as an outspoken opponent of the reigning neoliberal regime, to which he attributed much of Mexico’s socioeconomic degradation. “The neoliberal economic policy has been a disaster,” he asserted in blistering campaign speeches. “Because of the tremendous concentration of income in a few hands, the majority of the population has become impoverished.” Exhausted and embittered following decades of rising poverty, violence, and corruption, Mexican voters, particularly the young and the poor, surged to the polls in unprecedented numbers to repudiate the reactionary ideology that had orchestrated the dismemberment of their economy and to embrace AMLO’s promise of progressive rejuvenation. This wave of popular disaffection swept AMLO into Los Pinos, while his newly formed political party, MORENA, attained majorities in both federal legislative chambers.

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In his first two years, AMLO’s administration has adopted measures far more ambitious than any of his predecessors aimed at reducing the country’s staggering levels of economic inequality. In his first month as president, for example, AMLO’s government raised the national minimum wage by fifteen percent—and then, a month later, doubled it for workers on the northern border. Moreover, his administration restructured the national budget to introduce a slate of new social programs. As a result of these, and other, progressive policies, the aggregate income among Mexican workers increased nearly six percent during AMLO’s first year in office—more than double that for the entire term of his predecessor. Indeed, even more dramatically, the poorest twenty percent of Mexicans increased their income by nearly a quarter. Perhaps most significantly, in early 2019, AMLO engineered passage of a major labor law statutory reform bearing the potential to reshape the Mexican political economy.

Prior to the overhaul, Mexico remained one of the few countries that failed to guarantee collective bargaining rights to its employees. Following the Revolution, leaders of the ascendant PRI were determined to control the restive labor movement, which they viewed as a threat to the newfound social order. To that end, they established a pro-government labor federation to subdue the nation’s working class. The Confederation of Mexican Workers, as it was called, sharply restricted which unions it recognized, and for decades PRI elites appointed loyal officials to lead employer-dominated labor organizations, derisively dubbed “charros,” who colluded with management to implement illegitimate “protection contracts” designed to suppress wages. Many U.S. firms exploited this arrangement to secure ghost contracts covering new plants they were building in Mexico prior to even hiring a single employee. Nearly 90 percent of the CBAs governing Mexican workplaces were negotiated absent any involvement or consent on the part of employees. And labor activists attempting to challenge this system were subject to intimidation, arrest, and even assassination.

The reform law, enacted in May 2019, affords Mexican employees the fundamental labor rights to elect union officials by secret ballot and ratify negotiated CBAs. Moreover, the statute mandates that all existing CBAs must be submitted to a legitimation vote, establishes an independent federal agency to oversee union elections, and ordains a new system of specialized labor courts. Mexican labor leaders celebrated these provisions as “a huge opportunity to bring democracy to the union movement in Mexico.”

In its interim report, released at the end of last year, the Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board (IMLEB) recognized the “substantial progress” made toward implementing the labor law reforms, but acknowledged that the efforts have been inhibited by inadequate resources, official mismanagement, and the pandemic. Indeed, some Mexican labor activists have cautioned that supplanting the politically-entrenched charros is likely to prove an arduous task, and the existing progress is less than reassuring. So far, fewer than one percent of Mexico’s extant CBAs have undergone legitimation votes, and most Mexican employees remain disabled from electing their union leaders. One of the first major attempts at invoking the reform law to displace a traditional company union may expose the statute’s limited capacity to inaugurate a new era of democratic Mexican unionism. At a Bridgestone tire factory in Monterrey, employees were subjected to threats and harassment, officials bungled the election, and the independent union was, ultimately, decisively defeated. As IMLEB’s report conceded, “many of the changes promised to improve the lives of workers … remain to be implemented.” Nonetheless, the report concludes, the Mexican government has “continued with its efforts to build the institutions required … and to begin to put new and expanded rights into the hands of Mexican workers.”