Hit the road, 'LO...

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

They voted last week in Mexico and everyone is talking about making history.

Yes, Mexicans elected their first woman as president but history continues to be made because another politician was killed.

This is the story:

A local councilwoman was gunned down Friday as she was leaving her home in the southern state of Guerrero, authorities and local media said, marking the second female politician to be killed in Mexico after Claudia Sheinbaum became the first woman to win the country's presidency last week.

Esmeralda Garzon, a councilwoman in the municipality of Tixtla, was shot dead as she was leaving her house, local media reported.

There you go. Mexicans making history by turning the elections into a killing field. What a sad statement.

The other big story south of the border is how the "presidenta electa" is going to work with the incumbent who leaves in a few months.

A few days ago, Arturo McFields Yecas, a former Nicaraguan diplomat and columnist with PanAm Post, wrote in Spanish that Mexico is headed for some tumultuous times. He believes AMLO will be an underground president or sort of like Raul Castro pulling the strings from his ranch in Cuba.

McFields-Yescas believes that AMLO will use the remainder of his term and Sheinbaum's presidency to push through his "reforms." In other words, he is not going away and will force "la presidenta" to finish what he started.

AMLO knows better than anybody that she owes her massive victory to his national political machine.

Or as a Mexican friend told me on the phone: “No AMLO, no Claudia”.

So far, Sheinbaum has vowed to continue AMLO's work. However, the stock market and peso stumbled a bit last week showing that some investors are concerned with a government with supermajorities and no control over presidential excesses.

So will "la presidenta" sing her version of that tune "hit the road LO and don't you come back no more no more."

I don't know whether she will. On the other hand, she can't run the country and keep investors happy if they think that AMLO is the master puppeteer.

My friends in Mexico say that Sheinbaum was a pragmatic mayor of Mexico City. That was then, and this is now. It’s up to “La Presidenta” to show that she’s her own woman. She can start by telling AMLO to hit the road and come back no more.

She should, but will she?

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Image: YouTube screen shot, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0