MEXICO CITY - Mexico’s president conceded on Sunday that economic growth has fallen short of his expectations, but said that wealth is now more fairly distributed as he celebrated a year in office riding high in opinion polls, in defiance of mounting problems.
“There still hasn’t been growth as we would like, but the distribution of wealth has improved,” Lopez Obrador told a crowd of tens of thousands of supporters in central Mexico City’s Zocalo square on the first anniversary of his inauguration. Lopez Obrador is also battling record levels of violence, which has caused more friction with the Trump administration. But he remains popular, polls show.
Chile, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador have all been roiled by civil unrest in recent weeks, while support for the government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office a month after Lopez Obrador, has fallen away sharply. “The wallets of the people will be his undoing,” said Ernesto Ruffo, an opposition congressman from the center-right National Action Party, or PAN.
He has put welfare programs at the center of his economic policy, cutting out intermediaries in the distribution process that he said were siphoning off money intended for the poor.