A Judicial Joust: Unveiling AMLO's National Security Narrative

The decree highlights pivotal for the nation-state's security the so-called Tren Maya, the Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor, and the Palenque, Chetumal, and Tulum airports.

by taller ahuehuete
✎ 2 minutes

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, widely known as AMLO, is facing a significant legal hurdle in his pursuit of advancing his flagship infrastructure projects across the Mexican nation-state. In response to the judicial system's overruling of a previous attempt to declare his schemes vital to federal safety, AMLO recently publicized a decree designating their construction, maintenance, operation, and assets matters of national security.

While the president believes this move will protect the plans from judicial injunctions, spheres in opposition criticized the attempt as a means to block transparency and accountability. The decree highlights as pivotal for the nation-state's security the so-called Tren Maya, the Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor, and the Palenque, Chetumal, and Tulum airports. These projects, AMLO asserts, play a vital role in national protection, territorial integrity, and the surveillance of the country's southern border.

Regardless, the construction and operation result in the displacement of originary populations, disrupting their livelihoods and social fabric. The transportation of hazardous substances along the Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor, future rival to the Panama Canal, raises concerns regarding the safety and well-being of indigenous and peasant communities in proximity to the corridor. Nevertheless, the legislation bases its legitimacy on constitutional provisions recognizing the state's economic planning and regulatory powers outlined in the National Security Law for "maintaining peace and territorial surveillance".

AMLO perceives the actions of judges who have ordered injunctions against the projects as being "deliberately in bad faith, premeditated, colluded." Under national security law the works, now confidential, will limit public access to information and hinder supervision. This opacity in decision-making allows the executive power to proceed with little scrutiny, alarming global capital, domestic investors, and the general public.

The administrative functions of the bourgeois state, geared towards maintaining capitalist reproduction, once partially autonomous, have increasingly aligned with capitalist logic and market imperatives despite declared antagonism or allegiance to the ideological trend specialists in the Global North have determined as the Pink Tide. While stressing concerns for "national security," state bureaus in Mexico continue to be ill-equipped to address the comprehensive needs of housing, education, and healthcare without reliance on capital, exploitation, dispossession, the money-form, and the wage relation. Only by severing the bond between labor and access to social goods can value's compulsion and the instrument of control be undermined.

The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities.

Karl Marx, Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’ (1844)