Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (born 13 November 1953) is a Mexican politician who currently serves as the 65th President of Mexico since 1 December 2018.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018

Quotes

• People are tired of so much damn fraud.
  • Statement during the daily press conference on February 04, 2019.

• If the price of imported gas rises, we will shift to using non-gas fired electric plants to provide needed electricity.
  • Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2022) cited in "World Reaction to the Invasion of Ukraine" on Wilson Center, 24 February 2022.

• 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.
  • Statement on the 2022 Peruvian self-coup attempt, taken from "Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia Back Peru’s President Castillo, Condemn ‘Anti-Democratic Harassment’". Scheerpost. December 14, 2022.

• 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.
  • "Mexico’s AMLO announces campaign against US blockade of Cuba, denounces neoliberalism", Geopolitical Economy Report, February 13, 2023.

• 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.
  • "Mexico's AMLO calls out US 'oligarchy' at Biden's 'democracy' summit", Geopolitical Economy Report, March 30, 2023.

Quotes about Andrés Manuel López Obrador

• 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.
  • Julian Castro responding to Juan González (journalist) asking "obviously, Mexico has to participate in this “Remain in Mexico” policy. And I don’t know if you saw the op-ed piece that Jorge Ramos, the co-anchor of the national Univision News had in The New York Times this week, where he said Mexico may not be paying for the wall, the Trump wall, but Mexico has effectively become the wall and is participating in this attempt of President Trump to prevent more people from coming into the country. I’m wondering about your sense of the Mexican policy under President López Obrador?" during Interview on Democracy Now (2019)

• 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.
  • Elizabeth Martinez, Oral History Interview (2006)

• 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.
  • Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World Economy (2021)