Help me, AMLO
The petitioners meet every day outside the offices of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico City, in search of work and justice. José Fidel had driven all night in search of his worldly miracle. "We wanted to be the first," said the 64-year-old coffeemaker, one of half a dozen petitioners huddled in front of the incoming president's offices in Mexico on Thursday in the dark before dawn. "What we are asking for is support."
Since the overwhelming electoral victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador on July 1, its headquarters in Mexico City has become a point of urban pilgrimage for disenchanted and disenfranchised supplicants awaiting liberation. Every morning, the crowd congregates outside its red and white walls, embracing pleadings processed with words to a man whom detractors slander as a populist "tropical messiah" but whose supporters hope to fulfill a promise to govern by the forgotten and poor from Mexico.
What were Amlo's campaign promises?
Amlo has repeatedly pledged to make the eradication of corruption the main focus of his presidency, once he is sworn in on December 1. "We will get rid of ... this cancer, which is destroying this country," he promised in his final campaign demonstration Poverty "We will give priority to the most humble and forgotten," Amlo said on election night, and it is believed that It will turn the fight against poverty into an emblematic policy, as former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did after his historic electoral victory of 2002.
Drug analysts expect Amlo to pursue a less aggressive and less militarized approach to Mexico's "war on drugs," which has claimed approximately 200,000 lives and is widely viewed as a calamity. He has proposed an amnesty designed to help low-level outlaws to get away from a criminal life and has raised the possibility of legalizing the use of marijuana. Amlo government austerity has announced plans to cut taxpayer-funded benefits for high-level government officials. The official presidential residence will become a cultural center, the presidential plane will be sold and the former presidents will no longer receive pensions, he said. He has reduced his own future presidential salary to less than half of what his immediate predecessor did.
US relations In the campaign, Amlo harshly criticized what he called the policy of family separation, arrogant, racist and inhuman Donald Trump. But he has since adopted a more diplomatic tone and said he emphasized the need for mutual respect and cooperation during a phone call with Trump the morning after his election victory.