The Fourth Transformation and the Trajectory of Neoliberalism in Mexico

Neoliberal Security

Neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s as a plutocratic offensive against the regulatory constraints and diminished opportunities for profitable investment associated with the crisis of Fordism (Harvey, 2005). Mexico’s business class was similarly aroused against the constraints of late import-substitution industrialization under Presidents Luis Echeverría and José López Portillo. Import-substitution industrialization reached an impasse with the Volker interest rate shock and the global recession (1980–1982) that it provoked, leaving Mexico without enough foreign currency earnings to service its international credit obligations. In Mexico—and in dozens of other debt-ridden Third World states—International Monetary Fund structural adjustment loans defused a looming international financial crisis. Formulated in conjunction with foreign-educated technocratic and neoliberal sectors of the PRI, these agreements resulted in rollbacks of tariffs, investment rules, subsidies, and state ownership of economic assets.

Emerging in developed and developing countries alike, neoliberalism enabled corporate capital to restructure itself transnationally. Restructuring also engendered progressively more severe forms of economic and social dislocation. By the early 1980s, Mexico had already developed a large informal economy (Cockcroft, 1983). The end of import-substitution industrialization via structural adjustment policies fueled the hypertrophy of the informal sector and an expansion of the criminal economy as organized crime groups were able to operate more autonomously from state regulation (Watt and Zepeda, 2012). Uprooted from livelihoods in the peasant sector, state-owned enterprises, and tariff-protected industries, some of the displaced joined an expanding criminal economy (Muehlmann, 2014). Drug trafficking expanded because U.S. interdiction efforts in the Caribbean rerouted drug flows through Central America and Mexico. At the same time, state regulation contracted, prompting drug traffickers to engage in violent conflict to control key trafficking routes.

By the early twenty-first century, this mounting armed conflict was perceived by both Mexican and U.S. policy elites as a criminal insurgency that challenged the state’s control over the strategic resource-rich territories in Mexico. This diagnosis prompted new flows of military aid in the form of the Merida Initiative, implemented by the George W. Bush administration and continued under Barack Obama. This initiative was modeled after Plan Colombia, a policy of engagement with Colombia and a blueprint for subsequent U.S. policies in the region. It was an alternative to decertifying Colombia in the U.S.-led war on drugs, an outcome that occurred in both 1996 and 1997. Plan Colombia substituted a combination of military aid and economic reforms for the threat of economic sanctions. Its implementation invoked the long-standing U.S. war on drugs by targeting drug trafficking operations linked to armed insurrections in Colombia, but it was not fundamentally geared toward supply interdiction. It was rather oriented toward deepening processes of capital expansion with respect to mining, energy development, and agro-export activities. Capitalist expansion proceeded under the auspices of the war on drugs as paramilitaries, supposedly mobilized by the state to fight the armed insurgencies, attacked rural communities whose lands were coveted by transnational mining and agricultural corporations (Paley, 2014; Bartilow, 2019).

The resulting violent displacement facilitated what David Harvey (2003) terms “accumulation by dispossession,” a process by which capitalist growth is renewed through expansion into noncapitalist peripheries. Ideologically, such expansion has proceeded under the rubric of the need for global security. The Pentagon adviser Thomas Barnett (2005) argues that regions disconnected from the global economy threaten U.S. national security. Security policy is supposed to integrate peripheral regions of the global economy with the functioning core. What Barnett suggests, in terms of a neoliberal security paradigm, is further amplified in Deborah Cowen’s (2014) discussion of logistics as an ordering of networks that facilitate transnational flows of money, goods, and people. With logistics, security becomes tied to the maintenance of global systems rather than national populations, an objective that is facilitated through the deepening of security cooperation between states. The United States is the hub of such security cooperation, which, as Obama’s Department of Defense explains, uses military aid and training to “bring peace and stability to troubled regions” (quoted in Stokes and Raphael, 2010: 56).

In the context of Mexico, bringing “peace and stability to troubled regions” has assumed the form of what William Brownfield of the U.S. State Department refers to as “citizen security”: “In every society, citizen security underpins economic stability and allows for trade, investment, energy development, and educational exchanges to flourish” (quoted in Paley, 2014: 88). Transnational flows and exchanges are a security interest not only of the state but of any presumably law-abiding citizen. Brownfield’s nexus between transnational exchange and security points to a contrast between desirable and undesirable forms of life, with desired lives unfolding in the transnationalized spaces that U.S.-Mexican security cooperation seeks to defend. Everyone else is consigned to being what Javier Sicilia (following the philosopher Gregorio Agamben) calls “bare life”’: “life that is not protected, the life of an animal, of a being that can be violated, kidnapped . . . and assassinated with impunity” (2011; and see also Eisenhammer, 2014). Paley (2014: 114) offers an example of this point in an interview that she conducted with a member of the Chihuahua Human Rights Commission, who remarked, “The majority of those killed .. . . are malandros, people of no value . . . whose death has no meaning except as part of . . . a social cleansing.”

The official discourse of security cooperation seeks enhancement of Mexican state capacities, suggesting that insecurity exists because of the underdevelopment of the state. The U.S.-Mexico Security Task Force (2019) notes, in this regard, that the Mexican criminal justice system is underfunded, underprofessionalized, and overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of criminal activity it is tasked with controlling. In this context, the Merida Initiative resembles the initiation of the U.S. federal government’s war on crime in the late 1960s through the transfer of federal training and resources to beleaguered local police forces. By these means, Lyndon Johnson sought to strengthen the sinews of local law enforcement and, more generally, the state (Simon, 2007). With Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative, this is happening on a transnational basis through the development of transgovernmental networks that typically involve the training of policy makers and security forces of subaltern states like Mexico. Following William Robinson (2012a), we might think of drug-war security cooperation as strengthening the sinews of transnational state apparatuses. In this sense, transgovernmental networking is about the construction of transnational state apparatuses that can orchestrate the agendas and capacities of different states, prying open spaces of capitalist circulation and folding these spaces into an officially mandated discourse of neoliberal progress.

This is how the Merida Initiative functions as a state-building activity. In the parlance of neoliberal international relations theory, security cooperation produces positive-sum outcomes. Through the Merida Initiative, “the INL [the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law] funded programs such as the professionalization of the Mexican Migration Institute. U.S. authorities trained their counterparts in intelligence gathering and the Mexican government now shares biometric information of migrants crossing the Southern border of the United States” (U.S.–Mexico Security Task Force, 2019: 13). This sort of transnational security apparatus cannot be understood in its own terms because it ignores the experiences of displacement and dispossession in Mexico by focusing on the construction of spaces of secure circulation. A recent study produced by the Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de Derechos Humanos (Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights) suggests that the number of forcibly displaced internal refugees in Mexico averaged 1.2 million per year from 2011 to 2017 (Camacho Servín, 2019). Violent displacement is a predicate for the construction of officially sanctioned spaces of circulation and security cooperation between Mexico and the United States. The question that arises here is how, given the reality of displacement, it is possible to construct and maintain spaces of secure circulation (Miller, 2019).

At stake here is the regulation of authorized movement or what Alan Bersin (former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement) (2012: 400) terms “legitimate trade and travel as a security regime.” In the framework of such a regime, displaced people figure as “security events” that disrupt normal processes of circulation (Graham, 2011: 94) but not as security problems or issues in their own right. The referent object of security, observes the geographer Stephen Graham, is not the displaced but the spaces of circulation that are besieged by “risky anti-citizens.” Their exclusion is articulated through the opposition of law and criminality. Paul Gootenberg (2009) points out that drug prohibition generates particular languages of control that are concerned with distinguishing between licit and illicit substances and flows or between citizens—the beneficiaries of Brownfield’s “citizen security”—and criminals. In either case, control is about establishing and policing boundaries between a state-associated domain of legality and a hostile world of criminality that it is continuously attempting to keep at bay. The work of prohibition, as Michel Foucault (1979) argues, is to create zones of illegality and thereby problematize reality in ways that enable corporate and state managers to better control it. This is an imaginary in which the United States and its partners (Colombia, Mexico, Central American states) dutifully work to construct transnational spaces of progress while ignoring their dependence on paramilitary and state violence (Paley, 2017).

The Obama administration during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state ramped up arms sales to the Mexican military through the Merida Initiative. Wikileaks-published embassy cables revealed that the State Department knew about systematic human rights abuses on the part of the Mexican military but nonetheless cleared assistance to military, federal, and local police implicated in human rights abuses (Franzblau, 2016). Clinton, commenting on the Merida Initiative, asserted that “good leadership, proactive investments, and committed partnership can turn the tide” (quoted in Paley, 2014: 30). A turned tide is the reassertion of law and order that neoliberal globalization aspires to secure. This is how neoliberal security is imagined—it is a positive world of human connection that must somehow extricate itself from a criminal underworld that surrounds it. The reality that Clinton and other national security managers refuse to acknowledge is far more problematic.

Fragmented Mexico

One of the key ideas of Gilman’s (2014) account of the twin insurgency is social modernism. We can equate social modernism with the processes of cultural homogenization associated with modern state formation. These had the effect of creating a historical bloc of people drawn from diverse class, regional, and ethnic backgrounds into a space of pacified amicability associated with the modern state (Hallsworth, 2005). In the case of Mexico, the association of a long peace with the formation of the postrevolutionary state was tenuous. Rural informal violence linked to struggles over land reform continued into the 1950s. Internal security operations on the part of the Mexican military imposed order on restive regions throughout the twentieth century (Gillingham, 2012). Still, what matters here is the image of a unified Mexico associated with the ideology of mestizaje (Mexico as a nation of mestizos born from the conquest), the production and display of muralist depictions of the Mexican people engaged in revolutionary struggle, and the PRI as, quite literally, the revolution institutionalized.

The twin insurgency has eviscerated the historical bloc associated with the formation of the Mexican nation-state. This happened because of the ways in which the plutocratic insurgency demolished the structures of import-substitution industrialization and deepened economic marginalization in Mexico. Gilman (2014: 11) writes, “Opening the economy was meant to unleash entrepreneurial energy, and indeed it did.” Small-scale criminal organizations scaled up operations, drawing into their orbits people who were displaced by the plutocratic offensive (Grillo, 2016). These processes were accelerated by the decline of the PRI’s political dominance in Mexico. Fiscal austerity associated with structural adjustment policies dried up resource flows that sustained networks of patron-client relationships. The loss of these financial resources was compounded by the rise of political challengers to the PRI, a development that strengthened the rising power of drug trafficking groups by disorganizing the patronage networks that had previously regulated their activities (Watt and Zepeda, 2012). Similarly, law enforcement structures hierarchically focused on the interests of PRI presidents, fragmented with democratization, enabling prosecutors to sell impunity to powerful political and economic actors, including drug traffickers, with minimal political constraint (Magaloni Kerpel, 2016). The disintegration of these structures coincided with the success of U.S. interdiction policies in the Caribbean and South Florida, which pushed South American–based cocaine transshipment routes westward through Central America and Mexico.

One key manifestation of these developments was the increased firepower of the major cartels. Felipe Calderón’s 2006 mobilization of the military to fight the cartels was an attempt to downgrade them from a threat to national security to a problem of public safety. His prosecution of the war on drugs decapitated the leadership structures of the major cartels but also instigated violent struggles for succession within them and multiplied the number of organized crime groups in Mexico. These conflicts unfolded alongside community resistance movements to both criminal violence and neoliberal extractivism. As Guadalupe Correa (2017) argues, these different axes of conflict became absorbed into a complex pattern of paramilitary contention. The new paramilitaries were (and are) heterogeneous in composition. As Correa (2017: 109–112) observes, they are not simply loyalist paramilitaries, even though many receive weapons and personnel from the government. They are composed of community self-defense groups and fighters from other organized crime groups. The Mexican state plays an active role in shaping the composition of these groups by providing them with intelligence and arms and incorporating them into the formal security structures of the state (Fazio, 2018a; Grillo, 2016).

This dispersion of informal violence unfolds within the shadow of the Mexican military, which remains deployed throughout Mexico’s national territory. Consider, for example, an assault by Zetas on the town of Allende near the U.S. border in retribution for the betrayal of two Zeta-affiliated traffickers who operated an important plaza (drug marketplace) on the border. The Zetas disappeared 300 residents of Allende, disintegrating their remains in barrels of diesel fuel. The assault lasted for several days without prompting a response from the nearby military base (Osorno, 2014). As a consequence of the attack, Allende and the region around it have become depopulated. This area is a source of freshwater springs in an otherwise arid region. It is also located within the Burgos Basin, which contains rich deposits of natural gas that can be extracted through fracking. But fracking requires large amounts of water. In this respect, the depopulation of Allende works to the advantage of transnational energy investments, which have been authorized by Mexico’s 2014 energy reforms.

Guadalupe Correa and Daniel Gutiérrez’s (2019) discussion of organized crime and the expansion of hydrocarbon investment in Tamaulipas shows that criminal violence did not impede the deepening of neoliberalism in northeastern Mexico. Conflict between the upstart Zetas and the Gulf Cartel (for which the Zetas worked until 2004) disrupted the logistics of drug trafficking and obliged criminal groups to rely more heavily on extortion, kidnapping, and energy theft as revenue sources. The national government responded to this conflict with the deployment of military forces to the state, but its role has been primarily to guard the oil fields, not protect civilians. Shielded by the deep corruption networks historically cultivated by the Gulf Cartel, informal armed groups have been able to coexist with state security forces. While these developments have not harmed the energy sector, civil society has been crushed as criminal groups have targeted activists, often with the assistance of local police. Surging criminal violence, much of it directed at citizens, has led to population displacement, particularly on ejido lands in close proximity to the U.S. border (Correa and Gutiérrez, 2019). At issue here is not whether organized crime is an instrument of transnational capital but the effects of organized criminal violence on the region. As Correa and Gutiérrez remark, while “it is not clear who is fighting with whom in the different regions of the border,” the key point is that “the violence is concentrated in zones rich in hydrocarbons or where strategic energy infrastructure is being built or will be constructed” (188).

The war on drugs has given rise to the emergence of what Saskia Sassen (2014) terms “predatory formations” that facilitate transnational investment and the displacement of people from highly valued regions. These formations are not hierarchical command structures but assemblages of transnational, state, and criminal groups whose objectives tend to converge. For example, Goldcorp’s mining facilities in Guerrero form an emerging gold belt in which it pays royalties to ejidos for the use of the subsoil. These payments have piqued the interest of organized crime groups that compete in order to establish their authority over peasants (Correa, 2017: 184–185). The result of this violent competition is the progressive depopulation of the region, which leaves the mining companies freer to exploit it.

Ana Del Conde and Heriberto Paredes Colonel (2019) sketch out similar dynamics with respect to the iron ore mining operations of the Ternium Corporation in Michoacán. In other parts of Mexico, assemblages between transnational, state, and criminal groups assume different forms. In Coahuila and Michoacán, cartels have displaced small and medium-sized firms while becoming part of commodity chains dominated by transnational corporations and Mexico’s empresario class (Correa, 2017: 186–238). In Michoacán, the productivity of these mining operations has increased because of the capacity of criminal groups to ignore environmental regulations (Del Conde and Paredes Colonel, 2019). These commodity chains straddle the supposed divide between law and criminality, which the official discourse of the state loudly reifies but which is, in practice, superseded by a more complex and variegated reality. The criminal insurgency constitutes a set of practices and strategies that enable “peripheral rural societies to embed themselves within the global economic system” (Alvarado Portillo, 2019: 207). So-called nonhegemonic globalization has been an alternative through which “marginalized people have been able to access some sort of the social mobility under a neoliberal state.”

We can understand the combination of hegemonic and nonhegemonic globalization in terms of the relational conception of the state espoused by Nicos Poulantzas (1978) and Bob Jessop (2015), according to which the state is a material condensation of class relationships. In Mexico, however, these relationships have become highly fragmented, involving ambiguous and contested ties between organized crime, security forces, political elites, and both Mexican and transnational business elites. This fragmentation renders the unity of the Mexican state problematic in terms of its operational effectiveness and its capacity to maintain social cohesion and political legitimacy. These outcomes call for the formulation of a unifying state project that can function within a framework of these centrifugal forces. This is what the 4T is about.

But the limitations of this project are evident in conflict-ridden Guerrero. In 2018, the PRI governor Héctor Astudillo Flores was defeated, but according to the Mexican journalist Ezequiel Flores Contreras (2018) “the 46 local deputies for the next legislature and the 80 mayors elected come from the same state political class, plagued with compadres and caciques that bequeath these positions to their wives and children. And some are noteworthy for their presumed connections to organized crime.” Flores Contreras adds that “candidates of all parties had to pact with regional drug lords and with the bosses of armed cells in order to be able to travel, run a campaign and win the election in exchange for giving them roles in municipal administrations, and also as the beneficiaries of public works and contracts.” An election cycle that signaled political renewal was, at the ground level, mired in criminality and corruption.

These local realities suggest the extent to which Mexico’s twin insurgency has dissolved the social space of the nation-state. There are still broad constituencies of people that continue to align themselves with the project of the Mexican nation-state, but they are increasingly beleaguered by criminal and plutocratic insurgencies. These are the broad communities of the working and middle classes employed within the formal economy, who are disposed to play by the rules of the legal order to the extent that it functions for them. As Gilman notes, these middle sectors are fraying along the edges. In spite of all this, the middle zones of the nation-state are by no means political dead zones. They are still rich with the symbols of a shared national identity and history that enterprising politicians can mobilize.

The 4T and the Nation

The election of AMLO illustrates the possibilities—and also the limits—of a national resurgence in the face of sustained disintegration of the Mexican nation-state. Karl Polanyi’s (1944) analysis of nineteenth-century market civilization offers an interpretation of the 4T. While neoliberalism exercised a disintegrative impact over the society by treating its essential components (land, labor, and money) as if they were commodities, countermovements to the establishment of market society offered a respite from these processes. Countermovements against the excesses of commodification can, as Polanyi recognizes, take a variety of politically mediated forms. The contemporary emergence of populist forms of rule illustrates that opposition to neoliberalism takes the form of a nexus between leader and people that aims to recapture some lost or suppressed national greatness. This new political conjuncture, however, is not a rejection of neoliberalism so much as it is a nationalist reencoding of it.

The central ideological characteristic of the 4T is its effort to rearticulate the relationship between nation and state. With the advent of neoliberal restructuring in 1982, revolutionary nationalism had become consigned to the regrettable rather than glorious past. The 4T has revived a popular nationalist historiography of the Mexican people struggling for freedom and justice against foreign domination. The sequence of struggles leading to the present includes the fight against Spanish colonialism, then against Mexican conservatives aligned with European monarchies, then against the Porfirian ruling class backed by foreign investment, and finally against neoliberalism, which AMLO views as a recrudescence of the Porfiriato (López Obrador, 2013). This view of the people in history is accompanied by a series of policy proposals that aim to bring Mexicans back into the fold of the nation.

Noteworthy in this respect are amnesty programs directed toward low-level participants in organized crime and crop substitution programs for farmers previously dependent on growing marijuana or poppy. Along similar lines, AMLO is proposing scholarships to finance the education of young people who are neither in school nor employed (so-called ni-nis) and might otherwise become involved in organized crime. In AMLO’s terms, these mildly redistributive policies—funded by cutting the budgets of existing social programs (social security, press subsidies, funding for autonomous national commissions and institutes)— draw the marginalized back into the space of the nation and away from the criminal insurgency. As he remarked in an interview with the editors of La Jornada on the first anniversary of his electoral victory, “What we are going to do is to take this reserve army that they have had away from them [organized crime]” (La Jornada, July 1, 2019).

This formulation illustrates AMLO’s interest in skirting the antinomies of drug-war Mexico. Thus, he stated in February of 2019 that there is no longer a war on drugs (Najar, 2019). During his campaign, AMLO promised to demilitarize security in Mexico, arguing that the war on drugs had only increased criminality and violence. The work of security, he argued, should be centered not on fighting a war on drugs but on wringing corruption from the state (Zavala, 2018). Unlike his predecessors Enrique Peña Nieto and Felipe Calderón, AMLO is not using the military to pursue criminal organizations unless they happen to be engaging in natural-resource theft (Johnson, 2019). Beyond this, AMLO maintains that the drug traffickers are part of the people. In place of force to restrain them—as crime rates soar toward record highs in 2019 (Justice in Mexico, 2019)—he employs moral suasion, instructing narcos “that they should behave well and not make their mothers suffer” (Moreno, 2019).

AMLO formulates similar terms of reference for his newly created National Guard. In responding to accusations that government-supported narco-paramilitary groups killed indigenous community leaders in Guerrero, he is dismissive (La Jornada, July 1, 2019). Such violence, he responds, is a reflection of the legacies of the neoliberal era. The 4T is, among other things, a categorical distinction between then and now. Now, corruption and violence are not tolerated because they are inimical to the 4T. Now, “the armed forces are not going to receive any orders to massacre, torture, disappear, or repress the people.” Nor are the armed forces repressive; rather, “they are the people in uniform”; “they can be reconverted to respect human rights” under the new dispensation of the 4T. AMLO’s sternest critics—the Zapatistas and the Congreso Nacional Indígena (Indigenous National Congress—CNI)—fail to recognize AMLO’s break with the neoliberal past. “Many [indigenous people] believe that we are equal” [that the 4T is no different from previous governments]; they agree with Subcomandante Marcos that Morena is a “serpent’s egg” and “it would be better not to vote.”

The 4T and the Southeast

The central tenet of the 4T can be summarized in a single word: progress. In the historiography of the 4T, Mexican history moves in one of two directions—either becoming subject to foreign domination or freeing itself from it. What progress means operationally, though, is economic growth. One of AMLO’s central complaints about the neoliberal era in Mexico has been its low levels of economic growth compared with that of the period of “stabilizing development” (roughly 1940 to 1970). Alfonso Romo Garza Laguera, AMLO’s chief of staff, a biogenetics magnate and AMLO’s key bridge to the Mexican empresario class, recently organized a business-oriented task force charged with reaching his target of 4 percent annual economic growth (Bello, 2019). Romo contemplates several avenues toward this objective. One is increased foreign investment; Brazil received US$60 billion per year as compared to Mexico’s US$30 billion in 2018. Additionally, Mexico needs to orient investment toward the South and Southeast. When one disaggregates these regions from Mexico’s record of economic growth, he observes, its growth rate rises to a respectable 3.8 percent (Bello, 2019). For AMLO, the 4T establishes the context for a project of rapid economic growth: “Without corruption and with austerity, development [in these regions] can be financed” (Flores, 2019). Other economic elites back AMLO’s contention. Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest man, recently affirmed that the “private sector has supported, since the start, the principles of the 4T” and suggests that all that is lacking is mass investment, particularly with regard to Mexico’s Southeast (Intolerancia, 2019).

The 4T’s orientation toward the Southeast evokes Vicente Fox’s (2000–2006) advocacy of the Plan Puebla Panamá, which Romo, then a major financial backer of Fox’s, also supported (Fazio, 2018c). Central to both that plan and the 4T is the development of an industrial corridor across the Isthmus of Tehuántepec. AMLO’s support for this project is not new: he advocated it in his 2004 and 2006 campaign documents (instigating a conflict with the Zapatistas) and again in 2012 (Muñoz Ramirez, 2019b). The most recent antecedent for these policies is Peña Nieto’s creation of special economic zones in the Port of Chiapas, the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, and Ciudad Campeche (Fazio, 2017). AMLO’s economic policies are moving on the same well-trodden path of internal colonialism, which operates through dispossession of peasant and indigenous communities in order to generate “development.”

Special economic zones were promoted by Peña Nieto’s government as development. In the media, paid advertisements from the Secretaria de Hacienda promised “productive development, better jobs, improved welfare” (Fazio, 2018b). AMLO embraces a similar understanding of development. Arguing for the Tren Maya (Maya Train), a megaproject on the Yucatán Peninsula, AMLO remarks that “the people want this for the Southeast because, if we look at a map, we can surmise that for the last 30 years, development in the Yucatán has centered on the Mayan Riviera . . . with the rest of the Southeast left in abandon” (quoted in Orajasca, 2018). This view of development as a cure for economic marginalization misses the consequences of such development in the form of uprooted communities, rising crime, drug trafficking, and human trafficking, all associated with the expansion of tourist enclaves in Yucatán (Rosado and Vera-Herrera, 2019).

To his indigenous critics, the economic zones that AMLO is proposing are no different from the maquiladoras of northern Mexico. Carlos Beas, the coordinator of the Unión de Comunidades Indígenas de la Zona Norte del Istmo (Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus), anticipates “an avalanche of development projects—mines, gas ducts, and maquiladora zones” (González, 2019). At the end of the day, Beas concludes, Tehuántepec is slated to become the new Ciudad Juárez. Gustavo Esteva (2019) observes that government cash cards have begun to appear in the Isthmus (in May 2019); the cantinas are full, and cell phone sales have exploded. The distribution of these cards preceded a visit by AMLO to the region. These resource transfers are popular, and they provide genuine economic relief to poor families, but, as Silvia Ribeiro (2019) suggests, it is important to take note of their wider context. They have been disseminated in conjunction with consultas ciudadanias (referenda on key policy initiatives) intended to legitimate megaprojects in Yucatán, Tehuántepec, and elsewhere that have failed to meet international standards for securing the consent of indigenous peoples for development in the regions that they inhabit (Ribeiro, 2019). According to the International Labor Organization, such consultations should be prior, free, informative, conducted in good faith, and culturally adequate. Of the 1.6 million people who consider themselves indigenous in Oaxaca, a state that makes up a large part of the Isthmus, only 3,397 were consulted, and many of these were Morena militants (Muñoz Ramirez, 2019a). At a meeting in Juchitán, Oaxaca, AMLO proposed to carry out a consulta by a show of hands from the audience—governing by acclamation rather than deliberation (Muñoz Ramirez, 2019a). Why deliberate when the leader and his people can simply act on the basis of the common sense that unifies them?

At issue here is the common sense of people addressed as individuals rather than as members of ejidos or indigenous communities. This is typical of AMLO’s disdain for the institutions of civil society, whether they are autonomous government commissions like the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (National Commission of Human Rights), nongovernmental organizations like the CNI, or community organizations like the self-defense groups with which AMLO has refused to dialogue because they do not adhere to the law or the Constitution (San Martín, 2019). The closure of AMLO’s government to civil society contrasts with his appointment to top positions in his government of business leaders such as Romo, who promises to turn Mexico into “a paradise for foreign investors” (Bello, 2019). In this respect, the 4T aspires to become a growth juggernaut that uses individualizing assistance programs to align the leader with the people and in opposition to the corrupt, the fi-fis (pretentious urban intellectuals who object to his austerity policies and his populism), the conservatives, and the extreme leftists who stand outside this nexus.

Proyecto Integral de Morelos

The conflicts that are unfolding in Yucatán and the Isthmus are also raging in Morelos and in other rural areas adjacent to Mexico City. One central point of conflict is the completion of a thermoelectric plant in Huexca, Morelos. This megaproject has several components (Grieta, n.d.). One is the construction of a 160-kilometer-long gas duct that passes over the volcano of Popocatépetl and through 60 peasant communities in Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcala. Both the gas duct and the project’s two thermoelectric generators have been contracted to foreign firms. Another component is a 12-kilometer-long aqueduct that will draw 50 million liters of water per day from the Río Cuautla for the operation of the plant. The Proyecto Integral de Morelos is slated to contribute to a larger pattern of regional development that will feature the construction of new highways and the improvement of existing railways to link Morelos to a corridor extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. The project aspires to commercialize and industrialize the pueblos and ejidos that currently blanket the region.

More than two decades after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s agrarian counterreform measures of 1992, ejidos remain a pervasive form of land tenure in Mexico. Combined with the holdings of indigenous peoples, they account for slightly more than half of the nation’s territory, and therefore they stand directly in the path of neoliberal development (Morett and Cosío, 2017: 128). Social property makes up most of Mexico’s national territory and contains most of its crucial environmental resources (Morett and Cosío, 2017: 144). Social property could provide a basis for sustainable development, but instead it is being dismembered by the combined forces of organized crime, extractive investment, and AMLO’s pursuit of accelerated economic growth. This point becomes very evident when considering the scope of regional development contemplated by the project: control of water resources via aqueducts and dams in order to generate power for the fabrication of new commodities (Grieta, n.d.); concentration of indigenous and rural populations in rural cities—there are already 58 of these in the state of Puebla—in order to facilitate mining, hydroelectric plants, road construction, and real estate projects (Rojas, 2012); construction of “social interest” low-income housing projects surrounded by malls and convenience stores but typically lacking vital infrastructure such as water, sewerage, roads, and public spaces (Marosi, 2017); repression of informal commerce by the police in favor of the expansion of transnational chain stores and commercial centers (Coughlin, 2018a); and foreign and national touristic development centered on the 19 pueblos mágicos located in the vicinity of the satellite cities that surround Mexico City (Coughlin, 2018b).

In 2014, AMLO had spoken out against the Proyecto Integral de Morelos, declaring, “We are going to defend the pueblos as much as we can; we do not want this gas duct, this thermo-electric plant, nor do we want the mines that destroy the land and contaminate the water” (quoted in Ameglio, 2019). As president he dismissed protests against the project with the statement that “the radicals of the left, for me, are nothing more than conservatives. If we don’t use this thermoelectric energy for the CFE [Federal Electricity Commission]—for an enterprise of the nation—then we will continue to buy electricity from foreigners” (quoted in Sicilia, 2019). Days earlier, on February 19, a prominent opponent of the project, Samir Flores, had been assassinated as he left his home.

Ana de Ita (2019) argues that AMLO’s support for the Morelos project represents the priority that he assigns to the nation over the rights of indigenous peoples. In the program of the 4T, the nation is fundamentally concerned with the recovery of its energy independence, which mandates support for the rescue of PEMEX and the CFE. In the wake of Flores’s assassination, AMLO refused to postpone the consulta for the project. The human rights activist Pietro Ameglio (2019) remarks that AMLO lost an opportunity to send a strong message against impunity. Flores’s organization, the Frente de los Pueblos de Morelos, Puebla y Tlaxcala (Peoples’ Front of Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcala), contends that his murder and his opposition to the project are related. Morelos’s attorney general believes that Flores was killed by organized crime for reasons unrelated to the project (Ameglio, 2019). Flores’s assassination is, in any event, hardly an aberration. Since 1996, 117 leaders of the CNI have been murdered, 10 since AMLO took office. In none of these recent killings have arrests been made, nor have official investigations of these crimes advanced in any significant fashion (Lopez y Riva, 2019; Camacho, 2019).

The 4T and Mexico

The 4T is entrenched in long-term processes of state transformation. The essential direction of change here has been a disintegration of the bureaucratic/clientelist hierarchies that organized territorial rule in Mexico and the emergence of blended forms of formal and informal control and violence. What we see here, as a recent collection of scholarly articles suggests (Panster, 2012), is movement along a continuum from centralized rule to fragmentation. What is new with respect to the recent past is the centrifugal role of transnational forces acting from above and below. The plutocratic revolution from above has transformed Mexico (and all of Latin America) into a landscape of transnational flows associated with globalized systems of production and consumption (Robinson, 2012b). The implantation of these new circuits of capital accumulation has entailed massive disruption of previous livelihoods but also the resurgence of a neoliberalism from below that has expanded organized crime networks and absorbed new cohorts of displaced people into them.

The apparent conflicts between these two modes of neoliberalization obscure their underlying affinities. This combination of conflict and collusion can be understood as a new mode of state making in Mexico (Paley, 2017) that blends formal and informal modes of violence, co-optation, and control. Two results follow from these processes: the erosion of autonomous spaces of civil society, paralyzing resistance to both wings of the twin insurgency, and the deeper incorporation of peripheral rural societies into the global economic system, an outcome that, as we have seen above, is central to AMLO’s strategy of achieving accelerated economic growth in Mexico.

The 4T adds a new layer of complexity to these processes. It projects a façade of integrative nationalism over the disarticulation of civil society. The façade is centered on AMLO’s speech and actions. There have been numerous grand gestures: cancellation of the new Mexico City airport, the elimination of the Presidential Guard, conversion of the presidential mansion (Los Pinos) into a museum, the use of referenda to ratify key policy decisions, and AMLO’s use of commercial flights, among many other initiatives. These actions, reinforced by AMLO’s combative morning press conferences, project a transformation of existing political realities in Mexico even as economic growth slows to a crawl and crime rates continue to rise. What matters is that AMLO is enacting widespread aspirations for national unity—acknowledging inequalities, affirming the dignity of all Mexicans, and denouncing political privilege and corruption. Ricardo Raphael (2019) observes that around of half of all Mexicans listen to his morning news conferences. According to the polling firm Buendia y Laredo, AMLO has a 67 percent job approval rating, and 71 percent of respondents polled in September of 2019 were either somewhat or very optimistic about Mexico’s future (Zissis, 2019).

The 4T is an ongoing narrative of unity adapted to constraints of neoliberalism while still attempting, ideologically, to differentiate itself from the legacies of neoliberal Mexico. But this process of populist-democratic will formation is limited by the realities of the Mexican state and its complex territorial articulations with Mexican society. These include the lack of hierarchical control over police and military security forces, the penetration of corruption networks deep within the state and its new ruling party, Morena, and the demands imposed on Mexico by the United States for controlling migration flows and maintaining the integrity of transnational supply chains.

What we are left with is an emerging ensemble of Gilman’s twin insurgency entwined with AMLO’s 4T. This assemblage is the complex framework of political control and territorial rule that presides over ongoing processes of capital expansion in Mexico. In the end, what it represents most clearly is the mutability of neoliberalism. As Karl Polanyi (1944) has taught us, capital accumulation entails the commodification of land, labor, and money. These are evident in the megaprojects that have been reviewed here. The 4T functions as a countermovement oriented toward reasserting the existence of society—in the form of the Mexican nation-state as the 4T conceives of it—that stabilizes society so that it can absorb even more neoliberalism.