A threat to democracy in Mexico rings familiar to the US

The United States’ relationship with its southern neighbor has always been fraught. 

In 1848, at the height of the age of “manifest destiny,” the Mexican-American War ended with Mexican land in Texas, California, Arizona and Colorado transferred to the United States. 

Monuments of the war dead remain today on the streets of Mexico City. We Americans remember the Alamo, but Mexican memories are of even darker times and territorial losses. 

In this modern world, the two nations face difficult challenges that neither nation can resolve alone: drug cartels, migration, conservation of water and land and interrelated economic systems. Despite our history, cooperation has been enhanced in the past three decades thanks to common democratic values brought about by a reformed Mexican electoral system. 

Today, democracy is being challenged in both countries, as we saw in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but perhaps potentially just as acutely in Mexico.  

In nearly every other area, from the joint effort to manage COVID-19 to the challenge of migrant caravans, to near-shoring economic cooperation and ongoing threats to both countries from rapidly evolving drug cartels, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly referred to as AMLO, has managed relations with the U.S. carefully. He has walked a narrow balance beam, maintaining the demand for recognition of Mexican sovereignty while trying to accommodate U.S. legitimate interests.  

However, on democracy, López Obrador is proposing reforms that would undermine the independence of his National Electoral Institute and deny it the resources necessary to run a free and fair election. This would not only undermine the multiparty democracy Mexico has become it would also make more difficult Mexico’s relationship with its Northern neighbor. 

While López Obrador’s constitutional reform proposal to replace the National Electoral Institute (INE) with seven directly elected partisan councilors was not initially adopted,  it remains an objective of his administration. The fallback “Plan B” law adopted last month at the government’s request still contained restrictions on INE’s operations, including sharp reductions in staff and budget that raise questions about its ability to conduct and monitor candidate financing in the coming 2024 national elections. This would undo years of democratic progress. 

The evolution to multiparty democracy in Mexico may have begun with a visit to Washington in 1991 by the new secretary general of Mexico’s ruling party, Luis Donaldo Colosio. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (the PRI) had controlled all aspects of political life in Mexico since its creation in 1929.  

Colosio’s visit came after the 1988 presidential election fiasco when the government stopped the electoral count and simply announced that PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari had won. That came when early results showed Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas leading. His party, the Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD), was the ideological predecessor of López Obrador’s left-leaning and populist Morena Party. 

The fallout from that stolen election and a growing global democratic movement inspired a new generation of PRI leaders like Colosio to reform an electoral process that most Mexicans knew was thoroughly compromised. The PRI was looking for legitimacy. 

The National Democratic Institute (NDI) had by 1991 observed elections in the Philippines and Chile. Colosio took a courageous step by inviting an NDI delegation to visit Mexico City to review the electoral system and recommend improvements. 

What NDI found on that visit was an election system that was purposely complex, non-transparent and oriented solely to assuring that the ruling party prevailed. We recommended extensive reforms and shared techniques such as the parallel vote count that had been successfully employed in other countries to verify the official vote count. 

Within a few months, a gubernatorial race in the Mexico City jurisdiction was held. With the approval of the government, two citizen monitoring groups observed the election and used the parallel vote count. Interestingly, the PRI candidate won and the citizen monitors substantiated the victory.  

The young, attractive Colosio became the presidential candidate for the PRI in 1994. In March of that year, he was gunned down on the campaign trail in Tijuana. Many believe that he became the victim of those in the PRI who opposed his reforms. But that would only inspire the reformers to persist. 

In 1996, an independent Federal Election Institute (IFE) was created. This gave hope to other political parties. In 2000, Vicente Fox of the Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) was elected president of the Republic. In subsequent years, an empowered election commission would adjudicate disputes and investigate violations. 

In 2006, López Obrador’s party challenged the official results showing that he had lost the presidency to the PAN’s Felipe Calderon by less than 1 percent. In 2014, the new INE was given full authority to investigate illicit financing, and it subsequently found violations by all parties, including specific allegations against López Obrador’s Morena party.  

The widespread public outcry against López Obrador’s proposal to replace INE brought the sharpest attacks against his administration since its inception. Hopefully, that will convince him to pursue only reforms that strengthen INE’s capacity to monitor illicit financing, including from cartels.  

The president of Mexico retains his popularity, but the Mexican people appreciate the multiparty system that has evolved. They want an accountable government.  If López Obrador moves to compromise this progress, he risks losing the people’s support. Moreover, relations with the United States could become more complicated than they already are.  

Brian Atwood is a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute and served as president of the National Democratic Institute and administrator of USAID in the Clinton administration.  

Mark L. Schneider is a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Pan American Development Foundation and served as USAID’s assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean.