National regeneration movement rewarded with second term
Stepping into AMLO’s shoes
Yuri Cortez · AFP · Getty
Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency comes after decades of grassroots activism fighting on issues that affect the lives of ordinary Mexicans, as well as her predecessor’s popularity.
It was against this backdrop that much of the left dedicated itself to hands-on advocacy through associations like AB, which assumed an increasingly central role for citizens (especially in Mexico City) as the government embraced neoliberalism. Their local branches offered access to basic services and became the breeding ground for a new form of activism – often feminist, always working-class – anchored in Mexico City’s daily life.
President Claudia Sheinbaum at the High Level Summit between Mexican and US leaders and businesspeople, Mexico City, 15 October 2024
Yuri Cortez · AFP · Getty
At first the yellow façade looked like all the neighbouring homes, but a small crowd of women at the door showed we were in the right place. It was a spring morning in 1999, and they had gathered for a meeting of the Asamblea de Barrios (Assembly of Neighbourhoods or AB) in the Venustiano Carranza neighbourhood in northeast Mexico City.
The association had been founded 12 years earlier by leftwing activists, some of them former guerrillas, to fight for earthquake victims’ right to resettlement. After the 19 September 1985 disaster, in which 10,000 died, people left out of official reconstruction programmes gradually learned that AB was offering support, picking up the slack for a state that had let them down.
Those waiting outside that morning, mostly mothers, had come to hear updates on the completion timetable for council housing: the government had delegated part of its estate management responsibilities to AB and other local organisations, which sometimes even coordinated construction efforts.
At the session, activists helped attendees put together housing applications and follow up with the relevant administrations; they also documented residents’ complaints. Then a longtime member went over the summer activities available for children and the services the organisation offered: legal advice for domestic violence victims or women navigating a divorce, free medical care and more. But the discussion soon moved on from immediate needs to broader social issues: the student strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the causes people were currently taking up around the country – in a word, politics.
That meeting 25 years ago was part of a long history of political legwork – relationships patiently built between social movements and Mexico’s political left through thousands of encounters like this one – that gradually paved the way to national wins, first for Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), Mexico’s president from 2018 to 2024 (see Mexico’s AMLO leaves mixed legacy), then for Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office in October.
History did not favour the left
To understand this process, one needs to know the Mexico of the late 1990s. History had not been kind to progressives: since 1929, the rightwing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) – its name a contradiction in terms – had ruled the country. In the 1988 presidential election, change had seemed imminent as votes were tallied and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a former PRI member who had left the party because of its shift to the right, appeared to be taking the lead. The tallying system suddenly broke down; when counting resumed, PRI protégé Carlos Salinas de Gortari had been propelled into first place, denying Cárdenas the presidency.
By the time that the PRI’s reform-minded presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who had questioned the party’s leadership, was assassinated on 23 March 1994, the country was already reeling from two other blows: NAFTA, which had made the Mexican economy a cog in the American wheel, had come into effect on the first of the year – the same day the Zapatista Army of National Liberation began their uprising in Chiapas (1).
She didn’t come to lecture people; she was there to listen Javier Hidalgo Ponce
It was against this backdrop that much of the left dedicated itself to hands-on advocacy through associations like AB, which assumed an increasingly central role for citizens (especially in Mexico City) as the government embraced neoliberalism. Their local branches offered access to basic services and became the breeding ground for a new form of activism – often feminist, always working-class – anchored in Mexico City’s daily life. Over time, the shared experiences of activists, local leaders, civil servants and ordinary residents forged the vast network of associations into an operation which the left could count on.
In the early days, this proved a useful talent pool for the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) which Cárdenas founded in 1989 after his election defeat the year before. When he became Mexico City’s mayor in 1997, many of those elected as local representatives or appointed to his administration had roots in the local groups. Years later, after widespread fraud stopped AMLO winning the presidency in 2006, he decided to install a ‘legitimate’ local government in his hometown, transforming neighbourhood organisations from a scattered collection of service providers into the core of a coordinated political force.
Mobilising on a national scale
The relationships he had built with them during his mayoral term (2000-05, as a member of the PRD) enabled AMLO to mobilise large numbers of people, eventually all across the country, including a movement against the privatisation of the state oil company.
Since its nationalisation in 1938 under President Lázaro Cárdenas (father of Cuauhtémoc), Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) had symbolised the Mexican government’s independence and commitment to a welfare state. In April 2008, some 10,000 women, in 20 brigades of 500, took turns camping out in front of the legislative chambers for nearly three weeks to block the privatisation.
Most of these ‘Adelitas’ – named in homage to the female combatants of the Mexican revolution (1910-20) – were involved in some way with the housing rights groups, and their victory provided a blueprint for AMLO as he worked toward launching the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) in 2014. This was the party that would carry him to the head of the executive branch. The vast network of advocacy groups and associations gave him access to material resources, policy planks and party organisers.
It also brought Claudia Sheinbaum, who led the Adelitas and had been part of AMLO’s municipal administration, onto a national stage. When she followed in his footsteps, becoming Mexico City’s mayor in 2018, she too devoted herself to progressive policies via independent local organisations.
Launched by the mayor’s office in 2019, her PILARES (‘pillars’) programme (2) created 300 community centres citywide where everyone from the young to seniors could attend free workshops on digital literacy, urban agriculture, green roof construction (to cool low-income housing) and more. Sheinbaum made a tradition of visiting sites each Thursday. ‘She didn’t come to lecture people; she was there to listen,’ said Mexican politician Javier Hidalgo Ponce, explaining Sheinbaum’s recent ascent to the nation’s highest office – an accomplishment built, brick by brick, over nearly 30 years.
Hélène Combes
Dec 2024
Hélène Combes is a sociologist and research director at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the author of De la rue à la présidence: Foyers contestataires à Mexico (From the streets to the presidency: centres of dissent in Mexico), CNRS Éditions, Paris, 2024.
Translated by Jeremy Sorkin
(1) See Subcomandante Marcos, ‘The fourth world war has begun’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 1997.
(2) Acronym of the Spanish