How Mexico reacted to Obama’s re-election

The Mexican press was awash with editorials reflecting on Barack Obama’s re-election this week. United in their fear of what a Mitt Romney-led Republican administration would have done, virtually every publication viewed Obama’s victory as the most favorable outcome.

Writing in Reforma, renowned former politician and academic Jorge Castañeda drew three main conclusions: that “Obama won by a larger margin than expected, both in the popular vote (a difference of almost 3 million votes) and in the electoral college (almost 100 votes difference);” that “Obama owes his reelection to the Hispanic vote;” and that “certain segments of the population are much more liberal than you think. This was manifested in several states in favor of same-sex marriage and especially the legalization of marijuana.”

In La Economista, Raul Feliz noted that Obama made history by becoming “the first president to be reelected with the unemployment rate at 7.9 percent since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, and only the second Democratic president since then to govern for two terms (Bill Clinton is the other).”

“Barack Obama deserves another four years in the White House, and the truth is that the world does too,” Jorge Fernandez Menendez wrote in Excelsior. “Tuesday’s election showed that the toughest, most backward positions of the conservative right have no place in a society that, although polarized, is demonstrating that these are policies of the past.”

Similarly, in Milenio, Diodoro Carrasco Altamirano described Obama’s re-election as “a rejection of the policies of fear, bigotry and misinformation.” The Republicans were defeated because of “the contempt with which they treated minorities,” he added, while “Democrats know that without the black and especially the Latino vote, and the young, and women, Obama would have lost the election.”

In Proceso, Jose Gil Olmos expressed his “surprise that there were millions of votes of Latinos supporting (Obama), despite the fact that  his administration expelled more than a million undocumented workers and the issue of immigration policy was not addressed in his campaign.”

The most critical editorial was that entitled “Obama: from hope to the lesser of two evils” in left-wing newspaper La Jornada. “Over the last four years the president lost the halo of hope that accompanied him as a candidate in the 2008 election and has become part of the political establishment,” the editorial said. Abandoning his promises of change, Obama “failed to reform immigration or the financial system, expand the public health system or moderate U.S. militarism and colonialism.”

Moving away from Obama himself, El Universal ran an editorial focusing on the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington. Noting the support for legalization from various current and former Latin American heads of state, the editoral argued that “opening a debate to discuss the pros and cons of each stance seems imperative today, in order to save lives.”

Finally, in a more Mexico-centric opinion piece in Vanguardia, Emilio Rabasa Gamboa wrote that “Enrique Peña Nieto will have an excellent opportunity to change the bilateral relationship with Washington.” Imploring Peña Nieto not to focus only on security issues, he described “immigration reform and economic growth as the two mega-issues on the bilateral agenda with the U.S. that will have a huge impact in Mexico.”