Mexico’s Left Turn?: Mexico’s Election and Beyond in the Trump Era

Despite fierce opposition from big business and the media, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was elected by an overwhelming majority as President of México on July 1 and has won majorities in both houses of Congress. How did this rejection of the major parties come about? Is he a “leftist,” or “populist” as widely purported in the North American press? What kind of change can be expected? How might this affect the future of NAFTA and the immigration crisis? What obstacles will the new government face?

Moderated by: Paloma Villegas is a researcher, teacher and artist who works at the intersection between migration, citizenship, race, and gender.

Presentations by:

• Colin Mooers is co-founder and co-host of MexElects. He is a professor of Politics at Ryerson University and has published a number of books as well as many articles, including Imperial Subjects: Citizenship in an Age of Crisis and Empire (Bloomsbury, 2014); The New Imperialists: Ideologies of Empire (Oneworld, 2006); Restructuring and Resistance (Fernwood, 2000) and The Making of Bourgeois Europe (Verso, 1991).
• Tania Hernandez has been involved throughout her life in women and youth human rights organizations in Mexico and human rights campaigns in Canada against violence in Mexico. She has a doctoral degree from York University and is affiliated with CERLAC (Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean) at York University.
• Anna Zalik is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and a leading scholar on extractive industries and resistance in Canada, Mexico, and Nigeria. Her many articles and chapters include: “Rethinking the Extractive/Productive Binary under Neoliberalism”; “Wealth and Oil, No Change There”; “Displacement and Denationalization”: “The Mexican Gulf 75 Years after the Expropriation”; “Marketing and Militarizing Elections? Social Protest, Extractive Security, and the De/Legitimation of Civilian Transition in Nigeria and Mexico.”
• Richard Roman is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, an Associate Fellow of CERLAC, and co-author of Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America (PM and Fernwood, 2015), now in an expanded Spanish edition, La Gran Cazuela en América del Norte: Gran Capital, Trabajadores y sindicatos en la época del TLCAN (CISAN-UNAM).

Recorded in Toronto, 15 July 2018.