The situation in Mexico is a shockingly fitting application of Chomsky`s and Herman`s "Propaganda Model". There are "enemies" and "allies" - enemies are smeared as despots, and allies are considered "on their way to democracy", no matter what (one subtle example: Bolivia, a stunningly robust democracy given its tribulations with right-wing coup, was excluded from Biden`s Democracy Conference, although states like Mali were (Mali was under the rule of a junta after a coup in the spring that year)). Now AMLO is one guy who is constantly smeared as a despot. Why, might you ask? I will give the lazy leftist answer - Because he is a challenge to capital (not a big one either, but a challenge nonetheless). If you`re familiar, you know, here is a walkthrough. If you`re not familiar, here is a quick little walk through - maybe it`ll incentivize you to peek at Chomsky`s work! I won`t get into the nitty gritty, just interesting remarks.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is the current president of Mexico, and is a member and founder of the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (MORENA) party, currently with a majority coalition in their version of Congress. They are largely popular, and are running on reform and helping the poor (among other things). The opposition is a gamut of very corrupt parties (for example, the US ambassador admitted that the 2006 election was likely rigged in favor of the [winning] PAN candidate Calderón (which AMLO lost), and the NYT got enraged at him (even conflating the debacle with Trump`s conspiracism over the 2020 election (imagine playing down allegations of election fraud in Russia as "Trumpism" - allegations of election fraud are far from Trumpism in all cases)); in addition, the recent Garcia Luna case highlights potential direct connections between the drug cartels and the party PAN at the highest levels), many with deep ties with the drug trade. AMLO himself can be very brash - and that has brought on rather unwarranted comparisons with Trump in the US media - and says dumb things (and does dumb things). There is a lot to be critical on (his handling of COVID was famously bad). On the whole though, it can be difficult to tell what is smear, and what is not.

AMLO seems like a very interesting guy, to say the least, and as president of Mexico (considering the US), he is naturally in an awkward position, especially when he is challenging capital, even a little bit. And he has had shining moments as well (such as giving refuge to then Bolivian president Evo Morales when a right-wing coup deposed him in 2019). He is very popular and won a self-imposed recall last year (NYT claims he is a propagandizing demagogue (this is news reporting, not an Op-Ed!); AMLO claims he wants to strengthen Mexican democracy by putting an electoral check halfway through Mexico`s long 6-year presidential term, along with other reforms (claims you will never even satirically referred to in NYT - its very possible the situation is like this: A US president replaces Obamacare with Universal Public Healthcare, and NYT would only cover that the President is getting rid of Obamacare, which many Americans really do rely on... and thus he poses an authoritarian threat, just like Maduro!... conveniently leaving out that this is touted as a reform, not a gut (under the aegis of the IMF, this would be totally fine for NYT, ofc). Okay here is some fun - the FIRST headline said "Guts"! You see it, right? Well the current headline says "hobbles", so does NYT tell you that it changed the title? Yes - but it`s not that simple! At the bottom, it says "A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 23, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mexico Shrinks Watchdog Role Over Elections.". It`s too beautiful - they changed the title, and then lied about the title they changed it from (I imagine they never physically printed the headline with "Gut", is what they mean, conveniently by that point it was barely "top news" anymore (it appears to be gone within ~24h from the entire main webpage), so why bother? - and if you have anal sex you`re still a virgin!)!.

What are AMLOs claims? His plan is to democratize the electoral institution, so it is less beholden to the sclerotic old parties, which is apparently a big money sink. I`m not crazy about austerity cuts for its own sake, but it seems for AMLO this is just icing on the cake as well: the big "agenda" he has here is democratization. Hopefully he goes through with it (and of course, budget cuts of unnecessary, and especially damaging, programs, are good - I support cutting the military budget in the USA, for example (at very least, stop expanding it!)).

Whether this is actually the case we will see, but NYT doesn`t even tell you what AMLO`s policy`s are here (it would be like covering Biden in a bad faith way, while never quoting him, nor anyone from his party, AND virtually excluding any media voices that are favorable to him (and cherry-picking them when you do include them) - and cherry-picking quotes from his supporters on top. Then when the opposition to the president - say, Biden - comes marching into town en masse, they are uncritically covered as democracy protesters (Imagine if the Republicans were given this amount of generosity...). This would make you a MAGA person.)).

Lets briefly go over some NYT! (I started my journey here, although have done more exploring since)

1 - now hold the phone; there`s two things worth noting. First, fearmongering that AMLO will push the electoral changes in question "by other means before the end of the year" (ie by presidential decree?? It`s left ominiously vague... like he is a dictator in waiting!). Lo and behold, AMLO did not - the law was passed in the normal way that a majority coalition would: debate, compromise, and votes (an overview of the politics here. While the NYT said AMLO didn`t have the votes (thus validating their fears over a resort to authoritarianism), it turns out he actually does have the votes. Wow! Just like in the USA, but more functional - perhaps the NYT interprets "authoritarianism" as a properly functioning constitutional republic. Democracy is when nothing happens in "the People`s House", but rich people get their bailouts! Second, note this quote from the article:

"“What the march shows is the fear of the president and his administration: that is, to lose power in the 2024 election,” said Claudio X. González Guajardo, a member of the political opposition who helped organize the protests earlier this month. “I believe that we are faced with an authoritarian man who seeks to preserve power at all costs, is willing to bypass the Constitution and laws to achieve this.”a

Although Mr. González agreed that the president maintained high approval ratings, he pointed to the loss of seats in Congress the ruling party suffered during the elections last year.

This isn`t just any opposition guy though; he is the founder of "Mexicans against Corruption and Impunity", which is funded, among others, by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED was spun off from the CIA in the 1980s, so it could more explicitly intervene in the "democracy" or "promotion of democracy" abroad, to do what it used to do, but now "out in the open". Here they are supporting democracy by spreadng lies in the so-called "free press" about our neighbor, who we are lead to believe is authoritarian. As we will soon see, one reason? He is helping poor people. This all isn`t just an interesting factoid though... (and a very interesting one it is!)

2: In this article, the NYT makes an implication that AMLO is pro-Trump and anti-Biden (consistent with their general implications that AMLO is Trump-like, a demagogue, an authoritarian, and the next Maduro). Notice however the following:

In the run up to the last meeting between the three North American leaders, in November 2021, Mr. López Obrador attacked the Biden administration for funding Mexican media groups that he described as “opposition publications” and called the long-running American embargo on Cuba “vile.”

Ahh! So AMLO isn`t just making things up, is it? Keep in mind, Democrats were (rightfully) furious over Russia`s media involvement in the 2016 election, and to some degree, connections with the Trump campaign. Yet AMLO is supposed to just graciously roll over for this same thing! Better yet, this could entirely be a misframing about his relations with Biden and Trump (he may have just hated both, but had to deal w Trump in particular ways). They go on to portray AMLO warming up to Biden as a cynical move. And maybe it is? Although it`s worth noting that Biden sent a shocking signal to the Brazilian military that the US would not tolerate a coup against Lula - an actual good use of America`s economic-military-security gravity. Could this concrete effort, in support of one of Latin America`s most effective leftist politicians (Lula) no less, be one reason AMLO has found a firm patch of ground for trust? But how could NYT cover this (that is, how huge a reversal Biden`s maneuver`s were with respect to American foreign policy in Latin America (Imagine if Russia used its muscle to back a former-Soviet nation Pro-Western candidate in an election against a coup - it would be crazy! It might garner Moscow some trust from people that don`t trust it! To many Americans, it might not seem like that for us and Latin America, because our deep dark history in Latin America conveniently gets the ol` Orwellian treatment in mass media, except for occasional cracks))? It is a symptom of American imperialism that must go unmentioned.

3: Further back, we find this gem, saying AMLO will be the next Maduro! This completely ignores the history that made the Maduro situation possible (one very basic thing, Venezuela is an oil state who`s social reforms were cripped by diving oil prices; Maduro took the bloody way forward from there, but go on, make lazy comparisons). But on top of this, they ascribe to AMLO all of the issues that should be ascribed to his opposition (in fact, they DO ascribe it to his opposition, but say AMLO is even MORE of a creature of PRI than the PRI!!). Further, they write about his "concern for the poor" as if it is bad thing! They call him "worse than Trump" because he is "a more effective demagogue"; they also compare him with Erdogan, and in a moment of regional illiteracy, Kirchner in Argentina (comparing Kirchner and Erdogan is utterly ludicrous - why not compare Modi and Nasser?). Here is the kicker! The author`s parents were bonafide capitalists in Mexico - no wonder he hates AMLO and despises helping poor people. Plus, his foreign policy is described as congruent with the Bush doctrine! And he is just writing wild accusations against AMLO in NYT`s Op-Eds. And I thought the NYT apologized for supporting the invasion of Iraq, the pièce de résistance of the so-called "Bush Doctrine". Ahh whatever, this guy married two people at NYT, so why get rid of him? (He probably gets a pass because he "opposes Trump"). It`s not just Mexico he is an idiot on though, here is him cynically discussing the Ohio derailment as a factor in Buttigieg`s odds for a 2024 run, while practically saying no one is to blame (who even wants him?? This Republican? And what about the deregulation? The strike breaking? Oh yeah, he likes deregulation and all that sh*t... so for him nothing is to blame! It was just an oops! 1000 trains derail a year, we can`t do anything about it!), here he is saying mask mandates did nothing, here he is warhawking over China by evoking ancient anti-Leninism, here he is supporting Third-Partyism via everyone`s favorite: Kyrsten Sinema. This guy sucks! No wonder the "moderate wing of the GOP collapsed", they all f****g suck.

4: We do get some respite from the vitriol here... and some clear eyes. Also, for what it`s worth, this is a guy who currently lives in Mexico, and is an economist. Not that this is essential to making valid arguments, but its just a little chef`s kiss on top of it all.

Note: Kemal was a secularizing nationalist, considered as the "founding father" of Turkey, after a remarkable victory against Italy, France, Greece, and ~the British in the 1920s (who wanted to divide Turkey amongst themselves, in the same arbitrary manner they divided the Arab world). Thus the founding crucible of Turkey was one of [ethnic Turk] nationalism - still a potent legacy, with direct ramifications for its relations with other peoples (among other things). He was aggressively secularist (abolished the caliphate, opposed veiling, forced the Latinization of Turkish, very Western-inspired, etc), and thus the current Islamist tide in Turkey (the AKP government of Erdoğan post-2003 rule) is very much antagonistic to this foundational "Kemalist" trend (largely under the aegis of the CHP opposition party). In fact, Islamism was given virtually no room in the government until the 1980s (a generally reactionary period (which we still live in) heralded by the simultaneous neoliberalizing Volcker Shock (which killed most any vestigial secular republican aspirations in the Third World under crushing debt) and the Shi'ia Islamist surge amidst the anti-Western 1979 Iranian Revolution). Turkey has a very rocky history, to say the least.

Its worth noting as part of the USA's post-WWII anti-Communist Truman doctrine, we set up various ultra-secret anti-Communist black-ops-like organizations in various nations, such as Italy (as Gladio) and Turkey (as Kontrgerilla) (the actual existence of the thing in Turkey wasn't known until 1971!). Much instability (ie Turkey's many coups, Italy's "Years of Lead") in both of these countries is believed to be linked with these organizations, and they have been used to massacre leftists and trade union demonstrators, and in the war on the Kurds. They are also believed to have links to the neo-fascist, Islamonationalist Grey Wolves, the paramilitary of the correspondingly far-right MHP (itself a party of organized crime), which has been called the "AKP's lifeline". The Islamist and reactionary tide in the Middle East is not necessarily "natural" or "inevitable" (as an Orientalist conception might suggest to us), but, at least in part, a consequence of Western policy of supporting reactionary anti-communists of any creed. Today, Turkey's government has a very brutal record in Turkey, Armenia, and Libya; they run occupied Syria like a mafia, and use people (inclding children) from Syria as mercenaries in their conflicts in Armenia and Libya. In addition, they have occupied "north" Cyprus since the 1970s, with tacit approval from their NATO ally, the USA. As Cyprus is a EU member (and traditionally considered part of Greece), it`s safe to say that this is the first post-WWII attempt to change European borders (a record ignored here in the states). On top of this, the "ethnic conflict" which "justified" this invasion was one stoked by the British in the... 1950s. Before this point, ethnic Greek-Turk tensions was basically irrelevant, but this tensions was great for British "divide and rule" methods (although it still ultimately failed, with a risk of Cyprus falling to "communism" under Makarios (the "Castro of the Mediterranean"... also a Greek Orthodox priest, btw)... hence the blind eye to the invasion).

In Turkey, two other contemporary figures to note: Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish Islamic figure, who's school targets the education of the rich to effect Islamist change in a country; reading from Khalid`s book Islam After Communism (about Islam in Central Asia), it seems these guys are sort of analogous to the Christian private-school boosters in the USA, but with much more power. Early on he worked with Erdoğan, but things soured between them, and he is now in the US. From what I`m aware, he is to Erdoğan kind of what Trotsky was to Stalin (ie allegations that the 2016 coup plotters were linked with him). The second figure is Abdulah Öcalan, a Kurd, founding member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), leader of resistance throughout the late 20th century, seeker of a political resolution, abducted by the Turkish and US intelligence services in 1999, and is now a political prisoner on an island in Turkey (his philosophy is democratic confederalism, which has been applied in North/East Syria since 2012 (amidst the Syrian Civil War)). At least 80,000 have been killed in the conflict since violence opened in 1978. On this note of ethnic oppression, it is worth mentioning that Turkey has recently grown particularly close with Azerbaijan, their "ethnic brothers", vis-a-vis the latter's conflict with Armenia... you might recall the Ottoman Empire committed a genocide against Armenia, which the Turkish govt still explicitly denies (along with Azerbaijan (obviously!)... and Pakistan).