The Economist is an international weekly newspaper printed in magazine-format and published digitally that focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, and technology. It was founded in the UK back in the year 1843. On Thursday, July 15th, The Economist stated that Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is setting up a show trial of his predecessors.
It is a question that might have been devised by Cantinflas, a comic actor who turned the Mexican taste for circumlocution into an absurdist art form. “Are you in agreement or not that appropriate actions in accordance with the constitutional and legal framework be carried out in order to undertake actions of clarification of political decisions taken in the past by political actors, aimed at guaranteeing justice and the rights of the possible victims?”
This is what President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wants Mexicans to decide in a national referendum on August 1st. Decoded, what it means is, should he be authorized to orchestrate a kind of unofficial show trial of his five most recent predecessors and their subordinates?
Mr López Obrador (or amlo, for short), has always insisted that he became president in order to draw a line under 30 years of what he calls “neoliberal”, corrupt government. He holds those five presidents responsible, variously, for corruption, the concentration of wealth, electoral fraud, and a failed drug war that begot yet more violence.
Shortly after his landslide victory in 2018 he began to talk about holding a referendum over whether to put the ex-presidents on trial.