Why is AMLO worried about an outsider? She’s funny, profane — and inspiring.

 Why is AMLO worried about an outsider? She’s funny, profane — and inspiring./ By David Ignatius

The Washington Post, August 20, 2023 at 8:15 a.m. EDT

Sen. Xóchitl Gálvez, an opposition presidential hopeful, speaks to reporters after registering her name as a candidate in Mexico City on July 4. (Fernando Llano/AP)

MEXICO CITY — Xóchitl Gálvez is a Mexican original. She’s a radiant, broad-faced Indigenous woman who grew up in extreme poverty, studied math over the protests of her abusive, alcoholic father, and battled her way to building a prosperous tech company and becoming a senator. Now she is rocking Mexican politics.

Gálvez is the leading opposition candidate running to succeed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Clothed in a simple embroidered dress during an interview here, she is by turns funny, profane and inspiring. As she explains how she battled off an attacker as a girl in the barrios, you can see why the populist autocrat López Obrador seems worried about her.

Gálvez describes how she had come to the capital after winning a math contest. She was living in Iztapalapa, one of the city’s most violent neighborhoods, preparing to study engineering. When a man tried to rape her at 17, she attacked him with a metal soldering iron. “When I beat that guy, I realized I was a brave woman. From then on, I have never been afraid of anyone.”

She certainly doesn’t seem afraid of López Obrador — or of the generals, corrupt politicians and drug lords who silently back his government. López Obrador has denounced her, his government has leaked her private business records, and he has claimed she is a tool of the rich elite. He has also attacked the national election commission that struggles to keep Mexican democracy alive and well.

“I have the ovaries to confront him. I hope you have the balls to follow me,” she recently told an audience in Chihuahua, according to one of her advisers. That’s the kind of comment that is disrupting Mexican politics.

Xóchitl (pronounced “so-cheel”), as her fans call her, keeps coming. Partly because of the president’s attacks, her name recognition and popularity have soared. And polls show she is likely to win a Sept. 3 primary that will select the opposition coalition’s candidate for the June 2024 presidential election. She has gained popularity because of her eccentricity — riding around town on an electric bicycle or dressing up as a Tyrannosaurus rex to dramatize López Obrador’s proposed election-law changes that she claimed bring back the “Jurassic era.” But she knows that her mission is deadly serious.

“She’s running against the government, the forces of the state,” says Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican secretary of foreign affairs. López Obrador can’t run for another term himself, and the potential successors in his Morena party lack his charisma. But in interviews here, Castañeda and other political analysts stress that López Obrador is likely to remain the dominant power.

A chilling example of what frightens many Mexicans about López Obrador happened last Wednesday morning at the president’s office, a few miles from where I was talking to Gálvez.

At his regular morning news conference that day, reporters asked López Obrador about five young men from Jalisco who had disappeared a few days before. A horrific video had just surfaced that showed the five, friends since childhood, their bodies battered and bloody, with their mouths taped shut and their hands tied behind their backs. One victim was forced to bludgeon another with a brick and then decapitate him, before he was killed himself. Investigators later recovered their badly burned bodies. The governor of Jalisco said the murders were “clearly linked to organized crime.”

And what did the president say when reporters asked him to comment on this appalling crime? “Can’t hear,” said López Obrador, cupping his hand to his ear. He then told a crude joke about a poor Mexican man who pretended he couldn’t hear a question. And then he smiled and walked offstage.

Mexicans with whom I dined that night were shocked to the point of tears by the brutality of the boys’ death and López Obrador’s toleration of this reign of terror. They described the incident as one of the most horrifying portraits ever of Mexican cartels that, over the years, have burned victims alive and forced them to kill each other with sledgehammers.

And the president? He said the next day it was “all a lie and an infamy” to claim that he had deliberately ignored the question. “I am a man of feelings, I cannot mock pain.”

The Jalisco nightmare is a measure of the challenge facing Gálvez or any other successor to López Obrador. She decided to run, she tells me, because “we need to defend democracy at all costs.” A Gálvez adviser likened this election to a lottery for a tiger. “You can be the winner, but then you have to deal with the tiger,” he said.

When I ask Gálvez what she would do about the cartels, she answers: “I will base my government on the rule of law.” Pressed for specifics, she responds, “A big problem is corruption and ineptitude [of the police]. It has generated impunity, and that has generated more violence.” She tells me she is drafting an “innovative” plan with specialists but won’t say more.

Gálvez is franker about the Mexican military, which has grown more powerful under López Obrador and is accused of using hacking tools to invade privacy. “The army spies on its citizens, and they spy on me,” she says. The generals have been used by López Obrador, she claims. “I know the army. They are not happy. They are exhausted — by immigration, by building airports, building railways [on government projects]. We need to get back to an army that does its business.”

Mexico has a proud revolutionary history and an abiding suspicion of the United States. López Obrador has succeeded by invoking that spirit with a left-wing populism that, since his election in 2018, has veered toward one-man rule.

Gálvez is an experiment in something we don’t often see these days — a populism of the center. Previous center-right reformers in Mexico became ensnared in corruption. She appears less vulnerable. “I’m rebellious,” she tells me. “No one can control me.”

And then there is the unusual fact of her roots in the native Indigenous community, which has suffered centuries of discrimination and poverty. She outlines for me a very ambitious program for social reform to make Mexico’s free-market economy fairer. López Obrador must know that he can’t really match her as a representative of the dispossessed.

“In our Indigenous culture, it’s believed that the only sin that leads to hell is to keep more money than you need,” she tells me.

At a time when democracy is under threat in so many places, in the United States as much as in Mexico, it’s good to hear a full-throated defense. As a columnist, I meet lots of people around the world who talk about change, but rarely with the conviction and internal motivation of this dynamic Indigenous woman in her plain embroidered dress.