In early March, Mexico’s lower house of Congress approved a bill to legalize and regulate recreational cannabis. The bill, now under consideration in the Senate, is expected to pass with some changes, and ultimately be approved by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. “The law should meet two goals,” Senate Majority Leader Ricardo Monreal said in April. “Reducing criminality and eliminating the prohibition that has led to thousands of people being imprisoned for having a few grams of marijuana.” How likely are these two objectives to be met? Of the two, the second goal is the more easily achievable, even if [...]
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,” [...]
Ties between the United States and Mexico took a hit in October, when Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, a former Mexican defense minister, was arrested in Los Angeles on federal drug trafficking and money laundering charges. U.S. investigators had allegedly identified him as a high-level collaborator with Mexico’s powerful drug cartels, known to the cartel members as “El Padrino”—The Godfather. Mexico’s government was outraged at Cienfuegos’ arrest, with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador—or AMLO, as he is widely known—decrying it as a violation of the country’s sovereignty, even reportedly threatening to expel U.S. drug enforcement agents from Mexico if the charges weren’t [...]
