What AMLO's Legacy Means For Mexico's Upcoming Election

Andrea Navarro (0:03)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Tracy Alloway (0:05)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Tracy, I think we, as a podcast, I think we have to do more on Latin America. Let them, economics, the business situation. It's just like a sort of part of the world that I don't think we've covered enough.

Tracy Alloway (0:36)

No, I have to admit, this is a total, or almost total geographic and economic blind spot for me, with the exception of Guatemala.

I just haven't spent that much time in Latin America. I haven't read that much about it. I think the story there is becoming increasingly interesting. And I think if you look at something like Mexico, for instance, there's all this enthusiasm about the theme of nearshoring, the idea that American companies are gonna build all these big factories over there. It's gonna be a big beneficiary of trade tensions with China, but at the same time, there's this ongoing political backdrop, which is, as far as I understand it, about to heat up in the shape of the Mexican presidential elections on June 2nd.

Joe Weisenthal (1:26)

Yes, that's right. There is a Mexican presidential election coming up on June 2nd, which is like a perfect news hook for us to sort of set the stakes, understand what this is all about, and sort of use that as an entry way to expand our coverage. It is sort of crazy just in general in the media. And so like, I'm not trying to excuse us by implicating the entire media. It does feel like here in the US, there's much attention paid to Europe and the Middle East, obviously, and various things going on in East Asia. And yet the sort of dearth of coverage, I would say, about countries which probably are much more economically and politically intertwined with us than the countries that get most of the sort of foreign coverage.

Tracy Alloway (2:09)

Yeah, it is actually kind of weird, isn't it? Now that I think about it, what's that expression, familiarity breeds contempt?

Joe Weisenthal (2:15)

Contempt, yeah.

Tracy Alloway (2:16)

Maybe not contempt, I guess.

Joe Weisenthal (2:18)

Ignorance.

Tracy Alloway (2:19)

Ignorance, you're right. We spend so much time talking about things happening in the Middle East, oil production in the rest of the world, but actually not a lot of that attention trained on Latin America. So, okay, here is our first offering to course correct and actually learn something about specifically Mexico, but we'll broaden our horizons later and expand.

Joe Weisenthal (2:44)

We are going to be the change that we want to see in the world, but to this point, a really interesting fact that probably people don't really realize, Brad Sensor had some great observations about this. Mexico said to displace China as the biggest source of imports into the US market. We know there is a lot of investment happening. Tesla is building a factory in Mexico. We know that some of the Chinese automakers that are already impaired by tariffs and trade barriers, they're investing in Mexico maybe as a way of getting a conduit to the US market.

So there's more and more investment happening at the same time as we know there are very significant issues with national security, violence, the power of the cartels across the country, all of this setting up in terms of like, what are the stakes of this upcoming election?

Tracy Alloway (3:32)

Yeah, I'm just gonna reemphasize that I am not entirely up to speed on the situation. I meant to come in this morning and sort of speed read my way through what's happening in Mexican politics. But then I got really distracted because I read that one of the things that's happening is this huge expansion of the amount of money that the government is spending on the military and the defense programs are basically growing very, very quickly. And one of those is something called the National Security Infrastructure Project.

And in addition to building military bases and hospitals and things like that, part of the project is to build an equine reproduction center. So I saw that and I went, I spent an hour going down a rabbit hole of why the Mexican army seems to love horses.

And there's actually like a lot written about this. So anyway, instead of reading about politics, I was reading about the Mexican army's love of show jumping and things like that. So, okay, let's do it. Let's actually talk about important things.

Joe Weisenthal (4:35)

Listeners getting a glimpse into the Odd Lots episode, preparation process right there. We do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Andrea Navarro, senior reporter covering business for us here at Bloomberg, based in Mexico City. She has a big story out now on the AMLO administration, the legacy of it, the upcoming election, and what it all means and the balancing of these different countervailing forces. So Andrea, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots, and we really appreciate you taking on the task of getting me and Tracy up to speed on what really is an important trading partner, neighbor, and big economic story for us.