Mexico: López Obrador wins Presidency elections

Mexico City: Andrés Manuel López Obrador(64) decisively won Mexico’s presidency with 53 percent of votes and 30 percent more votes compared to second candidate Ricardo Anaya on Sunday according to Reuters.

The 64-year-old former Mexico mayor is the first leftist to be elected as president of Mexico in decades amidst tense relations with Trump administration.

He will assume his presidency later this year but will have to prove his pledges of eradicating corruption and subdue drug business in the region which shall be closed watched over by nervous investors.

López Obrador biggest difficult task would be to help peasants, migrants drawn, dragged into Mexico’s drug business.

After the victory, Trump and López Obrador spoke for nearly 30 minutes the very next Monday morning, Washington Post reported.

“I proposed a comprehensive deal with development projects that would generate jobs in Mexico and therefore reduce migration and improve security. The tone was respectful and our representatives will talk,” López Obrador tweeted.

“I think the relationship will be a very good one,” Trump responded when to the journalists after the two leaders discussed various issues including trades between the two countries and border security.

With billions of imports and exports between the two countries, war with the US would have devastating effects on Mexico.

In the past, López Obrador has proposed protests against Trump’s immigration policy with people dressed in white forming a human chain along the length of the U.S. border.

But after the victory on Sunday night, he said any relationship with the United States would need to include a defense of “our migrant countrymen” living north of the border.

Marcelo Ebrard, one of the advisors to the President said López Obrador “doesn’t see Trump as a lunatic. He sees him as a leader making a political plan,” in fact, “ our goal now is to look for common ground, to see what we can put on the table.”

Mexico had detained and deported nearly 76,433 Central Americans who were transiting through Mexico last year.

Now how will ¬López Obrador treat the tens of thousands of Central American migrants who transit through Mexico on their way to the United States each year is the next big question.

“The priority of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policies will be that all of migrants’ rights are respected, without restrictions. We want Mexico to be a country of refuge,” Olga Sánchez Cordero, one of his top advisers had said in May.
Previously Trump had to revoke his aggressive zero tolerance for illegal immigration rules after the national and international outcry.

López Obrador on Monday said the North American Free Trade Agreement is among the top issues he plans to discuss in his first post-election meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto who is among unpopular presidents caught in corruption scandals over the past decades.

“We will support the current negotiators so that this agreement can be signed, a good negotiation will be made for the benefit of Mexico,” he said.

Many supporters of López Obrador have been adversely affected by the 24-year-old deal, as Mexico began importing billions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products such as corn, leaving thousands of small-scale grain farmers unemployed.