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A Victory for Mexican Democracy

Mr. Grillo is an author based in Mexico.

Inside a polling station covered by a red tarp on July 1 in Mexico City. Mexico had turnout of 63 percent for the election.Credit...Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press

MEXICO CITY — In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, Emigdio López, a candidate for the local legislature for the leftist Morena party, was in his last hours of campaigning when he was ambushed. Firing from a distance into his truck, assassins killed Mr. López instantly along with four of his campaign officials; their bullet-ridden corpses were found slumped in the crashed vehicle. A fellow party member, Flavio Sosa, said the killings showed “a perverse interest to sow fear so that people don’t go out to vote.”

Mr. López’s slaying was part of a wave of at least 145 political killings leading up to elections last week, according to a count by the political consulting firm Etellekt. With very few arrests it is unclear who is behind the murders, whether drug cartels or shady political operators. But the effect was to create an atmosphere of fear around the election for governors, mayors and legislators as well as the presidency.

That fear, however, was overcome by the tens of millions of Mexicans who peacefully cast their votes on July 1, with long lines at many polling places. Turnout was 63 percent, according to the country’s electoral institute — eight points higher than for the 2016 presidential vote in the United States. For Mexico, it was a victory of ballots over bullets.

The election result itself also marks an important step on Mexico’s rocky road of democracy. The winner, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Morena, will become the first real leftist in the presidency since the 1930s, signaling a switch in direction after decades of governments pursuing center-right economic policies. Many of his supporters believed that fraud would stop him from taking office, in the same way Mr. López Obrador claimed he was robbed of the presidency when he first ran in 2006. But when the authorities quickly confirmed his victory by more than 30 points it proved such fears wrong. This should restore much confidence in the electoral system.

The quick and graceful concessions by his main rivals, the governing party’s José Antonio Meade and the center-right Ricardo Anaya, were also encouraging. Perhaps they have established a new tradition in Mexico, where candidates have often failed to recognize defeat.

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Mexico’s president-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.Credit...Moises Castillo/Associated Press

This boost to Mexico’s institutions comes amid a tough time for democracy elsewhere in Latin America. As Venezuela continues its economic meltdown it has become increasingly authoritarian; its May vote to re-elect the leftist President Nicolás Maduro was rejected by much of the international community. In Honduras, the right-wing President Juan Orlando Hernández was accused of rigging elections in November; dozens of people who protested his victory were killed by security forces. Nicaragua is on the verge of civil war, with more than 200 killed in political violence in recent months amid calls for the former guerrilla Daniel Ortega to leave the presidential palace.

These developments show that the struggle for democracy in the region is not one of left versus right. Strongmen come from both sides, while some of the most advanced democracies, such as Uruguay and Chile, have been governed by both the left and right in recent years. Nor is there a simple battle of populism against liberal democracies. Some nations that are said to have had populist leaders, such as Argentina, have alternated power peacefully, whereas others without them, such as Honduras, have not. The tricky reality is that it is tough to make generalizations across the continent.

In Mexico, Mr. López Obrador calls himself a leftist but rejects the populist label, which he says academics cannot define. “They don’t even know what populism is,” he said at a rally in the town of Actopan. “They fail to define it conceptually.”

Some political theorists say populism is not an ideology but a political logic, which pits an idea of the people against the idea of an elite. In this sense, both Mr. López Obrador and President Trump do criticize elites. But they also have such different backgrounds, careers and policies that it is misguided to describe Mr. López Obrador as Mexico’s version of Mr. Trump. Mr. López Obrador needs to be judged on his own record.

To be sure, Mexico’s democracy still has deep problems. It is one of the most murderous countries in the world for journalists, making parts of the country black holes for information. Governors have been accused of skimming billions of dollars from public treasuries and even of becoming active drug traffickers, while corrupt policemen working with drug cartels have been involved in brutal massacres.

It is such conditions that made so many voters turn away from established parties and to Mr. López Obrador, and he now has the herculean task of trying to resolve these problems. In his first speech after the results came in, he said he would do this while respecting democracy. “We are not looking to build a dictatorship, either open or covered up,” he said.

Mexico needs to make sure he keeps this pledge, and builds on his huge victory so that the nation becomes one of the democratic lights of Latin America and not one of its authoritarian black holes.

Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) is the author of “Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America” and a contributing opinion writer.

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