Referendum in Mexico asks whether five former presidents should be prosecuted for corruption

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Mexico celebrates this Sunday (01) an unprecedented and controversial popular consultation promoted by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to prosecute his five immediate predecessors for corruption and other crimes.

The Supreme Court erased their names from the question to protect the presumption of innocence and left an open question, but many Mexicans will vote with the former presidents in mind.

In order for the result to be binding, at least 40% of the Mexican electorate must cast votes; according to some news agencies, it is highly unlikely that this threshold will be achieved. Early returns showed a turnout of less than 8% of the eligible voters.

Read also: Check out our coverage on Mexico

Although López Obrador will not participate because he says that his “forte is not revenge”, these are the reasons why he proposed to prosecute the presidents of what he calls the “neoliberal period”.

CARLOS SALINAS DE GORTARI (1988-1994)

During the government of Salinas de Gortari, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), “the economic and social differences between rich and poor grew more in our country”, according to López Obrador.

He also singled him out for privatizations since “an unprecedented amount of public assets were handed over to national or foreign private individuals.”

Salinas de Gortari, signatory of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has historically been accused by the Mexican left of benefiting from electoral fraud in the 1988 elections.

ERNESTO ZEDILLO (1994-2000)

Zedillo, also from the PRI, “continued the privatization policies of his predecessor and took them to their ultimate consequences”, according to the current president.

In addition, “he awarded to all Mexicans private debts for an amount of 552,000 million pesos (US$26.2 billion) within the framework of the ‘bank rescue’ of 1998.”

The government also accuses him of the Acteal massacre of 1997, in which 45 Tzotzil Indians died at the hands of paramilitaries.

VICENTE FOX (2000-2006)

From the conservative National Action Party (PAN), Fox was the first president to oust the PRI from power after seven decades of hegemony.

However, at the end of his term of office, he “unduly and illegally intervened in the electoral process to prevent the triumph of the opposition,” that is to say, of López Obrador himself, who has since then maintained that electoral fraud was committed against him in the 2006 elections.

FELIPE CALDERÓN (2006-2012)

Calderón, from the PAN and an alleged beneficiary of the fraud, is accused by AMLO of causing the violence crisis suffered by Mexico due to the war against drug trafficking.

López Obrador pointed out that Calderón embarked the country in “a military strategy supposedly oriented to ‘fight drug trafficking’ that exacerbated violence and multiplied the areas of the national territory under the control of criminal gangs”.

In addition, he recalled that the former Secretary of Security of Calderón, Genaro García Luna, is today in prison in the United States accused of drug trafficking.

ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO (2012-2018)

López Obrador also lost the 2012 presidential election to PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto amid accusations of electoral fraud.

His direct predecessor was singled out for receiving “large amounts of money of unknown origin in the presidential campaign” and his involvement in bribery in both the Odebrecht case and the energy reform.

Since his third attempt at the presidency in 2018, López Obrador has sought to dismantle Peña Nieto’s energy reform that opened the sector to private initiative.

THE GREAT ABSENTEE

Another former Mexican president is still alive but never appeared in the consultation promoted by López Obrador. Luis Echeverría, who governed between 1970 and 1976, is now 99 years old.

Echeverría is considered one of the darkest characters in Mexico’s history for his alleged involvement in the student massacre of 1968 when he was Secretary of the Interior and in the Corpus Christi Thursday massacre of 1971 when he was president.

However, Echeverría belonged to the statist PRI that had not yet made the turn towards neoliberalism that López Obrador, who began his political career in his native state of Tabasco as a PRI militant, condemns so much.