TRANSCRIPT: Can AMLO Live Up to Mexico’s Critical Moment? Jorge Ramos Discusses
Jorge Ramos:
The message for killers and for the drug cartels is very simple; you kill in Mexico and nothing happens to you. Impunity is incredibly high. At least 9 out of 10 crimes go unsolved in Mexico. 34,000 people being killed every single year and nothing happens.
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World podcast. Here you'll find extended versions of the interviews from my show on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer and today a look at the road ahead for US relations with Mexico. Border security, busting up drug cartels and containing the Coronavirus Pandemic, just a few of the critical issues on the table. Will President Biden see eye to eye with the controversial, but still quite popular, Mexican president known as AMLO. And here in the United States, what will Biden be able to accomplish on immigration reform, with such a polarized and narrowly divided Congress? We're talking about that and much more today with Univision's. Jorge Ramos.
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Ian Bremmer:
Jorge Ramos, they call him the Walter Cronkite of Latin America. So happy to be with you today.
Jorge Ramos:
Thanks so much. Great to be here.
Ian Bremmer:
We don't have the Trump administration anymore, but there was certainly a presumption when Trump became president, that relations with Mexico were not going to be easy, and yet, at least from my perspective, didn't have many blowups. Talk to us a little bit about the relationship between these two and how it affected the country.
Jorge Ramos:
It was an incredibly strange relationship, because here you have the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a leftist, having an incredible relationship with this far right President, Donald Trump. And López Obrador has always had this idea that Mexico's issues have to be resolved only by Mexicans, that nobody should get involved. So right from the beginning, López Obrador just didn't want to fight with Donald Trump, and he was saying that openly; I don't want to have a fight with the United States and with Donald Trump. So what happened at the end, unfortunately, is that because this reluctance to fight with your northern neighbor, became a very unequal relationship in which Mexico, basically López Obrador, did everything that Donald Trump wanted. So Mexico at the end became the wall. That wall that Donald Trump had promised, Mexico became that wall, preventing hundreds of thousands of Central Americans from crossing, all the way from Central America to the United States.
And not only that, the newly created National Guard in Mexico, that was supposed to be created precisely to fight crime in Mexico, became Donald Trump's immigration police. So yes, there was not a fight between López Obrador and Donald Trump. They had a pretty good relationship. As a matter of fact, I still remember an anecdote when I was talking with López Obrador and he doesn't speak English. So I was telling him; so how are you going to talk to other presidents? Is it uncomfortable for you? He said; no, quite the opposite, because while they translate, it gives me time to think. Well, that worked very well between López Obrador and Donald Trump, and now the relationship with Joe Biden's going to change completely. We can talk about that later, but there's going to be a shift of responsibility on immigration from Mexico and Central America to the United States.
Ian Bremmer:
We'll get there, we'll get there. But it's interesting, because in the United States, the perception is that this wall that Trump keeps talking about, and of course even at the end of his administration, it was desperate. He had to go to the border and show the bits of the wall that were being built. It was actually seen as a failure, one of the promises that he couldn't deliver. And what you are saying is actually in a much more real, albeit not symbolic way, it was actually a success of Trump, at Mexico's expense.
Jorge Ramos:
Well, just see the numbers. On a regular year, Ian, the United States would have about a million legal immigrants, every single year. But with Donald Trump, those numbers went down to about 600,000. It's the lowest numbers in decades. So something was changing. And because of the pandemic, we have to remember that. And because of very unusual agreements between the United States, Mexico and Central America, the United States, the Donald Trump administration, they were able to establish this new program called Stay in Mexico, for immigrants, Central American refugees coming from Nicaragua, Honduras, and Salvador and Guatemala. And also the Trump administration, they were able to establish agreements with Central America, so that people would stay in their countries instead of coming all the way to the United States. So yes, Mexico didn't pay for the wall. Donald Trump built just a few miles of wall, not 2000 miles as he expected, but at the end, the end result is that less immigrants were able to come to the United States.
Ian Bremmer:
So now that Trump is gone, and you say the Biden relationship will be dramatically different, not a surprise, but to start on the immigration point, should we just expect that those numbers are going to go right back up after pandemic, to pre-Trump levels?
Jorge Ramos:
I think so, because the situation in Central America and in Mexico are not only bad, but it's becoming worse. The problem is that you still have violence in Central America, you still have gangs. We still have to remember that they went through two horrible hurricanes. There was an earthquake. So the push factors in Central America are older, and then the pandemic. So if you put everything together, that means that for hundreds of thousands of people, their only alternative for a better life is to come to the United States. Now, Joe Biden has a plan. He wants to invest $4 billion in Central America. The Mexican president has exactly the same idea of investing in Central America, so that people over there don't have to come to the United States.
But that's a long term, Ian. The reality is that in the short term, and we are already seeing those numbers increasing right at the border, in the short term and without the agreement for the refugees to stay in Mexico, it is not that we are going to see, it's that we are seeing right now, as we speak, more immigrants coming to the United States, and it is the United States responsibility. At the end, all these refugees from Central America, they don't want to stay in Mexico. They don't want to stay in Guatemala, they don't want to stay in Honduras. They want to come all the way to the United States. And we have been a country that has been very generous with immigrants and with refugees. And now things are going to change.
Ian Bremmer:
Clearly the United States is by far the most important country for Mexico, economically, from a security perspective, you name it. It felt a little surprising to me that one of the last leaders to call Biden, to congratulate him on winning the election from anywhere around the world, was actually President López Obrador. Why did that happen?
Jorge Ramos:
Well, because we still have to remember that it's a little bit of Mexican history here. López Obrador believes that the first two times that he ran for president in Mexico, he believes that he won and that there was fraud, and that because of fraud, he was not able to become president. And he's very resentful of the fact that many governments, including the United States government, recognize his opponents on those days. So in a way, what López Obrador didn't want to do is to congratulate Biden before the whole process ended. And that's why he waited. He waited so long. Of course, on the other hand, we have to remember that he had a very close relationship with Donald Trump, and he just didn't want to upset Donald Trump and then to get economic sanctions or to be reprimanded in public or to be tweeted by Donald Trump. So it was both the relationship with Donald Trump and the fact that because of his personal history, López Obrador was being incredibly, extremely careful, not to say that Joe Biden was going to be president before the whole process ended.
Ian Bremmer:
But we shouldn't expect any hangover from that, in terms of the relations between these two presidents now?
Jorge Ramos:
I don't think so. I don't think so. But the truth is that at the border, we are seeing the beginning of a new crisis, and it is going to be very similar to what happened during the Obama administration. We're going to be seeing thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of immigrants. Remember that right before Donald Trump established these anti-immigrant policies at the border, we already had more than 60,000 Central American refugees waiting on the Mexican side, waiting to come to this country. And now, even though it is not the message, and I do understand that the Biden administration is sending a different message, and I spoke with Ambassador Roberto Jacobson recently, and she was telling me very explicitly the message, it is not for them to come to the United States. Despite that you still have tens of thousands of refugees, Central American refugees, waiting on the Mexican side to come to the United States. And now that Mexico police, that the National Guard is not anymore the US Immigration Police, it is going to be increasingly easier for immigrants to cross to the American side, because Mexico is not putting any resistance anymore.
Ian Bremmer:
So what would a successful US trajectory on immigration policy look like, that would work for both the Americans and the Mexicans? Because as you and I both know, a comprehensive immigration reform in the United States is virtually impossible in this divided environment.
Jorge Ramos:
Yeah, let's start with that. For immigration reform, we've been waiting for immigration reform here since 1986, 35 years, and nothing has happened, because there has always been this idea that we get everything, that we legalize everybody or that we don't legalize anyone. So from my point of view, I would start with those who are already here. It is, as you mentioned, very difficult to get 10 Republican senators to go along with Democrats, to approve immigration reform and legalize 11 million as Joe Biden promised. Joe Biden promised that he was going to send a bill to Congress, and he has already, to legalize 10, 11 million undocumented immigrants. But to get 10 Republicans is going to be close to impossible. So either you do it in parts, through a body reconciliation process, and then you legalize a few million DREAMers and a few million farmers and a few million essential workers, or we might not get anything.
So what I'm proposing is plan B, instead of just getting everything together, which seems almost impossible in the center, let's legalize first the DREAMers. There's already a plan, with Lindsey Graham and Senator Durbin, that might provide legalization to about 2 million DREAMers, and maybe we can get their siblings and their parents, and then farmers and then essential workers, instead of just waiting to get enough votes to legalize everything. So that would be the first step and the second step, and we are always missing the second step, is that there has to be an immigration plan that includes the fact that 1 to 2 million immigrants are going to be coming every single year to this country. Those are the facts, like it or not, but legally, we get about 1 million immigrants every single year, except during the Trump administration and then illegally, we might get from 500,000 to another million immigrants. So we have to understand that the US, especially in the middle of the pandemic, people are coming to this country for a reason. So we have to adapt to it and we don't have a plan for it.
Ian Bremmer:
It is so interesting that so many countries, people across Central America, see Mexico itself as such an incredible success story compared to their own. And yet so many Mexicans are living illegally, without benefits, in the United States, can't be fixed. How does this make Mexico feel about itself, in terms of national identity, in terms of awareness, in terms of the future of the country?
Jorge Ramos:
Lately, there has been a reverse migration. More Mexicans are leaving the United States than Mexicans coming in, and that's really interesting. And it has to do with many different reasons. First, that they've waited for decades and they are still illegally in this country. And to be undocumented in this country is increasingly difficult. Some of those families, they've already sacrificed their future. I call them "la familia sacrificadas", because those parents, they sacrifice their lives, so their kids could stay in this country. And then on the other hand, also we have to say that, there has been economic progress in Mexico, finally after 71 years of the perfect dictatorship, as one of the greatest writers describe Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa, saying that Mexico was "la dictadura perfecta", because from 1929 to the year 2000, there was no democracy at all. I still remember when the president would choose his successor in what Mexicans, we call it, "el dedazo".
We didn't have democracy. Now, Mexico has a democracy with many faults. It's not perfect, but there's a democracy. So you have economic progress, you have democracy, you have an increasingly energetic and open media. You have "Las benditas redes sociales", the social media. If you put everything together, Mexico is becoming a country increasingly more attractive to those immigrants that were in the United States. So even though it is imperfect, and even though it has a huge problem with violence and with the pandemic, and we can talk about it later if you want to, despite that, Mexico is growing, and so we are seeing this reverse migration of Mexicans going to Mexico instead of the opposite way.
Ian Bremmer:
It's a very important point and it leads directly to talking about some of these challenges in Mexico itself. First and foremost, Coronavirus. I see that Mexico now has more deaths from Coronavirus than India. How much of that is direct mismanagement by the president, by the government?
Jorge Ramos:
I think it was the wrong strategy, if there was a strategy. On Monday, February 8th, Mario Vargas Llosa who got infected by Coronavirus, and after two weeks of not being president in his morning press conference, he came back. And let me just say, it is incredible. Just imagine any president in any part of the world giving a press conference every single year, every single day, for about an hour to two hours. Every single day. López Obrador believes that he can control the message. He can control his agenda by going to "La Mañanera", which the translation would be to the morning one. So he has this press conference every single day of the year. He has had it for the last two years. So he got infected with-
Ian Bremmer:
Weekends, doesn't matter. Every day. Christmas, it's happening.
Jorge Ramos:
Actually, on weekends, he's taking a break, but on weekends then he sends messages to the people through social media. So he's present, constantly present, I would say overwhelmingly present every single day in Mexico. And he understood that he didn't have the support of many people in the mass media. So he said; well, let's just jump over there and use all the power that he has and social media to send his message. And that's exactly what he's doing. But going back to the pandemic, you're right, before we started this interview, I checked the numbers, 165,000 Mexicans have died of coronavirus, more than, as you mentioned, in India. And I don't think it is a coincidence that the countries that have the most people dying of coronavirus, which are the United States, Brazil, in Mexico, those three countries had a president, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who publicly didn't want to wear a mask.
So in the last mañanera, the last press conference of López Obrador, he came back, he said that he was feeling good, and then a reporter asked him, which is by the way, incredible, because you have access to the president every single day. And then a reporter asked him; so are you going to be wearing a mask finally? And he said, no, because I am not contagious. She says; wait, wait, wait. Your medical advisors are telling you and are telling everyone that it is risky, that everybody should wear a mask. And he said; no. So yes, I think the crisis was mismanaged. In Mexico, even though they've announced hundreds of thousands and millions of vaccines, most Mexicans have not been able to be vaccinated. And I still remember when López Obrador not only refused to wear a mask, but openly, he was saying to families; go out and go to the restaurants, because the economy needs that. And at some point he even said; embrace each other. It is needed, right in the middle of the pandemic. So it was clearly mismanaged, it just didn't work and now Mexicans are suffering the consequences.
Ian Bremmer:
And again, as you're saying, even the fact that he got the disease himself, no learning taking place, but are we at least getting good advice from the president and his government on the vaccines?
Jorge Ramos:
Today, he was asked about the vaccines and they've only have a few... Even though they've announced millions of vaccines, some of them coming from Russia to Mexicans, up to 24 million vaccines, the vast majority of Mexicans haven't been able to be vaccinated. And yes, absolutely he's suggesting that the vaccines can help. But at this point, Mexico is in a terrible situation. And then when you have the president, giving the bad example, just as Donald Trump did or Jair Bolsonaro did in Brazil, when they're telling you; no, I'm not going to wear a mask, just imagine what that kind of impact and having a population of 120 million, 130 million.
Ian Bremmer:
So that's one massive problem, that's been quite publicly mismanaged by the president. Another one that, of course everyone talks about and you see the polls and Mexicans are all saying; violence across the country is one of their principle concerns. López Obrador, when he became president, promised hugs, not bullets, that he was really going to address this issue and yet we see record levels of violence this year under his leadership. Why?
Jorge Ramos:
Well, because Mexico is a country in which the government and authorities lack control of portions of the territory, because the cartels, the drug cartels, control many areas of Mexico. It was with President Felipe Calderón that Mexico declared, a little more than 10 years ago, the war on drugs and Mexico has lost the war on drugs. Not only has it lost the war on drugs, but the people dying in Mexico are reaching levels that we've never seen before since the revolution in 1910, since the so-called "Guerra Cristera", a few decades later. In 2020, 34,000 Mexicans were killed, 34,000. The year before, in 2019, it was exactly the same number. And there seems to be no strategy that is working. López Obrador promised that he was going to tackle this problem in a different way, so he created the National Guard about two years ago, and it really hasn't worked.
So in Mexico, Octavio Paz, in one of his most famous books, the Mexican poet and writer, he said that to kill and to die is very easy in Mexico. And it is indeed, not only of because of the pandemic that we talked about, but the message for killers and for the drug cartels is very simple. You kill in Mexico and nothing happens to you. Impunity is incredibly high, at least 9 out of 10 crimes go unsolved in Mexico. So you have 34,000 people dying, 34,000 people being killed every single year, and nothing happens. So right now, I would say those two problems, the pandemic and the violence are two of the most important challenges facing Mexico and López Obrador.
Ian Bremmer:
And yet, despite all of that, in the United States, big impact on mishandling Coronavirus, on Trump's approval ratings. In Brazil, same thing is true. In Mexico, López Obrador is well over 60% in his approval ratings right now. How do we explain that?
Jorge Ramos:
Well, because of the past. Because of la dictadura perfecta, because we have more than 70 years with no democracy, because of fake news. It is funny when we talk about fake news here in the United States, I usually tell my friends; stop, wait, I come from the creators of fake news. I come from Mexico, I come from a country, I still remember when I was younger, that the government would say; well, Salinas de Gortari won the election, or Ernesto Zedillo won the election. And you knew it was a fraud, a huge fraud. And so we were well-prepared journalists, who have worked in Mexico, in Latin America, we were well-prepared for Donald Trump, because we were aware on how politicians would push fake news. So I come from a country that created fake news, by telling you that they had won elections, one after the other after another, when it was a complete fraud.
So this is what Mexicans remember, this is the kind of Mexico where there was no democracy. The Mexico where, because of mismanagement and corruption, the Mexican Peso would de-evaluate from one day to the other. What you would see, you would actually see, politicians, poor politicians, becoming incredibly rich. And then after one term in government, they would be buying homes and you would see their pictures all around the world. So because of corruption, because of mismanagement, because of lack of democracy, because of censorship, because there was direct censorship from the presidential palace, Los Pinos, to the mass media, because of that, Mexicans remember. So they just did not want to have the old politicians, the old guard staying in power. So in 2018, Mexicans said; enough, we don't want, we want something completely different. And they chose someone completely different. They chose López Obrador whose main message, and he has been very consistent on that, whose main message has been no to corruption.
Ian Bremmer:
End the corruption, yeah.
Jorge Ramos:
Exactly.
Ian Bremmer:
Yeah. And is this something that we're starting to see more of, across all of Latin America right now?
Jorge Ramos:
Populism, yes. Because, as you know, from all the world, from all the planet, this hemisphere, Latin America is the most unequal of them all. In this hemisphere, that's where you see incredibly rich people. Well, you have in Mexico one of the richest men in the world. And then in the lower half of the population, incredibly poor people. This inequality is still growing and because of this inequality, certain messages like; I am going to be fighting against corruption, or I'm going to be fighting against los gurgezes. As it happened with Chávez in Venezuela, and it's happening still with Nicolás Maduro, or the message that if I become president, I would fight those who were corrupted and those who took your money. Those messages work for a reason, because it is true that Latin America has been a land of inequality and corruption and poverty, and for many people, they see these candidates and presidents as saviors.
Ian Bremmer:
And it does seem like he is trying, at least to make good on that anti-corruption pledge. I saw that they opened the presidential grounds to the population, to come in and trying to auction off the president's plane. Okay, that's a little bit for show, but in general, would you say this has been a clean administration? This is a president who in no way is trying to enrich himself on the basis of power?
Jorge Ramos:
Let's put it in perspective. I still remember when the former president, Enrique Peña Nieto, when an incredibly brave journalist, Carmen Aristegui, she'd announced that he had bought, who knows with which money, that he had bought a house for millions of dollars, and then he just couldn't explain how come he had got this White House, they called it. No, we have not seen from the President, López Obrador, those examples of corruption. No, he's been very consistent with his message, his anti-corruption message. Even though he lives in the National Palace, as you said, he opened the Los Pinos, which used to be the presidential housing or the presidential palace, for the people. It would be as strange as saying; the White House, I'm not going to be living, as President Biden or President Trump saying, I'm not going to be living in the White House, it's going to be open to the public. I'm going to be living somewhere else. Well, that's exactly what he did.
And we have to remember, I've been very critical of López Obrador, because of his policies against violence and his policies against the pandemic, but on the other hand, I do understand that millions of Mexicans still support him, as you just mentioned. He's very popular, because he's fighting the old guard, because he's fighting corruption, because at least people see him as fighting those that took their money away, those who are living rich lives, because of their years in government. So I do understand why he's so popular. Yes.
Ian Bremmer:
No, I think one of the most interesting things, as you'll see people watching this show from around the world, is that anti-establishment sentiment can manifest in very different characteristics, in very different types of leadership in different countries. And Mexico's a very interesting example of that.
Jorge Ramos:
Yeah, and this morning he was asked; why and how did you get infected with Coronavirus? And he said; because I had to work. Like millions of Mexicans, I got infected because I'm in touch with people. We cannot be in lockdown all the time. And so I got infected, because I'm one of you. That's what he was saying. And he was, for instance, he was very critical of the presidents, who in other countries, who already got the vaccine. And he was making joke and laughing of them, because he was saying, the message that he was sending to Mexicans said; I could have gotten the vaccine, he said, but I didn't, because how can I get the vaccine if you cannot get the vaccine? So that kind of message is definitely percolating in Mexican public opinion. Again, he's criticized for many other different things, but the fact that he's communicating directly to the people through las mañaneras and through social media, bendita redes sociales he calls them, it's working for him so far.
Ian Bremmer:
Jorge Ramos, thanks so much for joining us on GZERO World.
Jorge Ramos:
Thank you.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, signal.
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