Mexico’s Next Crisis Will Arrive From the South
Lopez Obrador may hurt poor Mexicans by helping Central American migrants.
What happens if the trains start running again?
Photographer: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images
In the wake of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s historic victory, the markets are focused on Mexico’s economic prospects, keenly sniffing for any whiff of either pragmatic promise or populist calamity. Yet while a financial crisis is possible, Central American migration may prove the new administration’s biggest first challenge.
Since 2014, hundreds of thousands of Central American men, women and children, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, have fled their homes. Driven by violence, extortion, poverty, and a drought that has decimated subsistence farming, and pulled by family connections and the hope of safe haven, they mostly head north.