"Who’s Who in “The Mafia of Power”: Mexican Business Elites from the Salinas Era to AMLO, 1988-2018"

The victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in the 2018 election owed partly to his vilification of a “mafia of power,” consisting of politicians from the PAN and PRI parties and their business-sector allies. Polling showed Mexicans had special concerns about corruption, which AMLO’s rhetoric about immoral elites exploited. The term itself dates from 2009, in the wake of AMLO’s defeat in the 2006 election. This paper argues it reflects real evidence of a neoliberal power elite, traceable from the 1988 election of Carlos Salinas, whom AMLO calls the father of Mexican inequality. It focuses on industrialists who benefitted from the neoliberal polies of 1988 to 2018.
First, I identify members of this elite, using as a proxy those appearing in the Forbes billionaires lists. The list of 1994 is especially useful, as it included 24 Mexicans – all of them new entries since 1990 and many of them beneficiaries of Salinas’s privatization program. I correlate them with those AMLO has named as “mafia of power” members in his writings and speeches.
Second, I discuss how the term relates to the problems of defining crony capitalism and identifying specific crony capitalists. I link this discussion to the global literature on crony capitalism in semi-authoritarian societies: Stephen Haber (on Mexico since 1876), David Kang (on Korea since 1961), Gulnaz Sharafutdinova (on Russia since 1991), and others, plus influential essays in The Economist.
Third, I survey how AMLO’s usage of the term has changed over time, especially during 2017-18, when during his third presidential campaign he softened his rhetoric and, having won the election, invited eight billionaires or their proxies to form a presidential advisory group. I suggest that the increasingly malleable term retains some use – historical and contemporary – beyond the rhetorical, despite AMLO’s selective application of remedies.