The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Order is

sustained once again two guests today. We'll hear from Edward Ackerman on the

Mexican election which saw landslide victory for Claudio Schainbaum,

who will succeed the immensely popular Amlow, and then from Joel Whitney, about the security

state's harassment of some prominent radicals of the Western Hemisphere.

On June 2nd, Mexico held elections for the presidency in both houses of the legislature.

The results were a landslide victory for the party of the current president,

Andres Manuel Lopez-oblador, known universally as Amlo.

The victor, Claudia Schainbaum, got just shy of 60% of the vote,

and her and Amlo's party, Morena, the National Region. of the The reason for this landslide was Amlo's stunning popularity, the result of some serious successes while in office,

notably a major reduction in poverty and increase in the welfare of the working class.

Here with Morris Edwin Ackerman, assistant professor of sociology. of the year old is still very much worth reading. And he should be out with a follow-up soon.

Edwin Ackman.

I was just looking at the economic stats the other day, and on paper they look quite orthodox.

Pretty high interest rates, budget surplus, and I guess this is all part of that whole

program of Republican austerity, but evidently it worked pretty well and people are pleased.

So how do we reconcile something that on paper looks pretty conservative with results that look quite populist?

There's on the one hand at the macroeconomic level, certain orthodoxy.

I would add that if you compare that to let's say Lula at least you know in the first two

terms you could see a similarity there where there's a certain orthodoxy at the

macroeconomic level and then the interesting stuff as it were is happening at different levels of the economy and I think what's happening in Mexico is that there is the significant push in and now we can also show actual outcomes in that

sense in favor of the working classes. There's a significant decrease in poverty and more importantly that decrease in poverty

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