Letter from AMLO

El Peje signed a letter for President Obama, "Andrés Manuel López Obrador, The Legitimate President of Mexico". The missive begins, "You arrive to our country in tragic times, when the majority of our people live burdened by poverty, unemployment, and insecurity." He later writes, "Our extraordinary people have been condemned to survival or exile." He also manages to slip in that Mexico is ruled by an oligarchy. 

This is nothing unexpected from AMLO, but it's a pretty good distillation of the flaws of his outlook on Mexico. In fact, if you measure Mexico today against its history and against the rest of the international community, it's doing OK. (Yesterday's Slate articles include a pretty good example of this line of thinking.) You don't want to go overboard making this point, because it becomes all too easy to trivialize the very real ailments from which Mexico suffers, and which are indeed tragic. But at the same time, Mexico today is better than it was 10 years ago. It's better than it was 80 years ago, 100 years ago, and 150 years ago. Many (if not most) Mexicans have myriad options between mere survival and immigration, and to say that they don't is to belittle the millions of Mexicans contributing to the nation as lawyers, doctors, psychologists, nutritionists, football players, engineers, et cetera. Mexico is making progress, stubbornly slow thought it may be, while AMLO and his ilk like to pretend that the sooner a class war is fought, the better.