Mexico Archive

In July 2018, Leo Hernandez, a 23-year-old law student at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, joined millions of other millennial and Generation Z voters in helping Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador secure a landslide victory in Mexico’s presidential election. Hernandez was excited about the possibility of helping to elect the country’s first leftist president in recent history. And given his plans to return to his home city of Tijuana after graduation, he was particularly attracted to the attention Lopez Obrador was paying to state-level politics. “He was moving away from acting like Mexico City was the only place that matters,” […]

Pro-democracy activists once held up Latin America as a crowning achievement, a region notorious for 19th-century caudillos and Cold War military strongmen that was almost universally electing its leaders by the early 1990s. In 2001, the Western Hemisphere’s premier political institution, the Organization of American States, adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which commits members to uphold and defend democracy. Nowadays, it is more common to hear about Latin America as a cautionary tale, a flashing red light reminding us of the fragility of new democratic institutions and the allure of old habits. The overachiever of what Samuel Huntington called the […]