Together with thousands of his supporters in the Mexico City Zócalo, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador July 1 celebrated five years since his landslide electoral triumph.
Addressing mostly his own Morena Party faithful, many of whom were bussed in from all around the country, AMLO gave a run-down of his administration’s “miraculous transformation” of Mexico, even announcing some future policy measures, including a 25-percent increase next year in the federal government’s pension program for over-65s.
In an event dubbed by the media as the “AMLOFest,” López Obrador lauded his social programs that, in addition to universal pensions, have seen paid apprenticeships for young people (12 million by his reckoning), and increased support for the disabled, the children of single mothers and indigenous communities. The president pointed out that the minimum wage was 88 pesos a day when he assumed office; it is now 207 pesos, an increase of 89 percent. The Bolsa de Valores (stock exchange) is up by 17 percent, he said, boasting that Mexico is the “country with the third lowest rate of unemployment in the world,” although the methodology is highly questionable given that so many people work in the “informal” economy and that data fails to take into account the very high rate of “under-employment.”
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