The problem with Andy
Morena Party secretary Andrés Manuel López Beltràn, son of former president AMLO. Image credit: Cuatroscuro.
by David Agren, writer-at-large.
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Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador used to campaign on the slogan: you can’t have a rich government with poor people. Austerity became his calling card: being chauffeured in a cheap Tsuru while head of the Federal District in the early 2000s, wearing rumpled suits and eating at taco stands rather than the posh Polanco haunts favoured by politicians.
He also practiced what he called “republican austerity” – or Franciscan poverty, when he was in preacher mode at the mañanera press conference – which took an axe to the state, not unlike the way DOGE vandalized the US government.
AMLO slyly developed a narrative that his austerity, cutting perks and privileges and stopping theft was funding the social programs that made him popular and helped pull people out of poverty. Effectively, it created a narrative that took hold: money recovered from previously thieving politicians was given to the needy – making the cash stipends even more satisfying and AMLO more saintly. He also made performative pleas of poverty by turning out his empty pockets at press conferences.
As Ilán Semo, a historian at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, told me in an interview for the Washington Post as AMLO left office, the austerity trope, “gives him an aura of honesty as the man who doesn’t need anything.”
Sheinbaum campaigned on “honesty,” using the word often as she campaigned. She played the austerity card, too. She copied AMLO’s pleas of poverty. Sheinbaum claimed at a debate that she only rented a small apartment, despite being an UNAM academic and politician for years. Opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez ridiculed the claim, saying, “If you haven’t been able to accumulate a patrimony by age 60, you’re a fool.”
Such personal austerity – no showing of luxuries – and the absence of scandal have Sheinbaum sitting with an approval rating hovering around 75 per cent. But AMLO’s example isn’t rubbing off on others in the Fourth Transformation (4T) – as the movement founded by AMLO and now headed by Sheinbaum is known. It’s not even rubbed off on his sons.
José Ramón López Beltrán, was found living in a luxury home in a well-to-do Houston suburb connected to a contractor for Pemex, the state oil company. Gonzalo López Beltrán, “ran a network overcharging contractors supplying materials for the Tren Maya,” according to The Economist. All deny wrongdoing, including AMLO.
Then there’s Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, better known as Andy.
Andy caused a commotion in Mexico after photos of him enjoying the premises of the five-star Hotel Okura in Tokyo – a luxury establishment used to receiving presidents and even James Bond, in the novel You Only Live Twice, according to the Financial Times. He reputedly stayed for 14 days. He was even spotted leaving a Prada store in Tokyo.
Then the hotel bill got leaked. Aristegui Noticias found that he paid roughly USD $400 nightly. He even had a 47,000 peso dinner – roughly $2,500 US dollars.
“The cost of that dinner exceeds the entire biweekly salary of the secretaries of the (ruling) Morena Executive Committee in 2023, which was 43,957 pesos,” Aristegui Noticias noted.
The younger López Obrador only made things worse by issuing a letter written in a tone of self-pity, justifying it by saying he paid for it himself and it came after a grueling work schedule.
“They sent me to Japan to spy on me to launch a lynching campaign,” he alleged. “My adversaries and conservative hypocrites, who tend to only see the speck in someone else's eye and not the beam in their own, sent their spies to photograph and harass me, thus launching a political lynching campaign steeped in class hatred and slander.”
Political analyst Fernando Dworak described the response as among “the worst cases of crisis management I’ve seen in Mexican politics. After Angélica Rivero's response to the Casa Blanca” when the then-first lady was found in 2014 to have bought a mansion from a prominent government contractor.
The images of luxury seemingly exposed hypocrisy in the 4T. President Claudia Sheinbaum scolded Andy at her press conference, saying, “Power is exercised with humility and simplicity.”
Andy’s scandal exposed potent power disputes in the 4T – with the perception being that Sheinbaum has been ruling with people imposed on her by López Obrador in Congress, her government and Morena, too – where Andy is a key organizer in the party. It comes also as his ability to organize is questioned: the June 2 judicial election vote attracted just 13 percent turnout and Morena underperformed in local elections in Durango and Veracruz.
In a column titled “Andy and the juniorcracia,” journalist Peniley Ramírez spoke with deeply disillusioned Morena staffers on Andy’s expenses. She wrote, “Talking about Andy matters because he’s the junior, the heir, because he has his father's last name. It matters because Morena was built on symbols, on critiques of the same-old power, the same-old practices, which we now see in them, one after another.”
Andy isn’t the only high roller from the ruling 4T. Ricardo Monreal, the Morena leader in the lower house, was photographed in a restaurant at the Rosewood Villa Magna hotel in Madrid this month. He said he was not a guest at the more than $900-a-night hotel and that he was paying for the trip with personal funds. Education Secretary Mario Delgado also was seen vacationing in Portugal. Like Monreal, he said he was paying with his own money.
Analysts noted that the knives came out for Andy and also Monreal – and Adán Augusto López, Morena’s senate leader, who is caught in scandal back in Tabasco – because they’re not aligned with Sheinbaum and seen to be impeding her. Pro-Sheinbaum columnists have been leading the charge against him – likely using talking points from the National Palace, according to a person familiar with the government communications format, speaking anonymously.
“This line against Andy is approved and rewarded,” the person said. “This synchronized swimming by (friendly columnists) to point fingers at certain Morena characters, the bad apples. is paving the way for Claudia to have more of a say in reconfiguring Morena as a party-government in the 2027 elections,” they added. “This time it will be her (people) rather than AMLO's (people) getting the plum candidacies and plum government positions.”
Piling on Andy will serve Sheinbaum’s interests. But it’s unlikely to achieve austerity in Mexican political life.