The Fourth Transformation

On January 12, tens of thousands of Mexican citizens packed into the Zócalo to hear President Claudia Sheinbaum deliver her report on the first 100 days of government. Her announcements reflected an agenda both ambitious in scale and comprehensive in scope: sixteen new laws and twelve constitutional reforms ranging from the recognition of Indigenous peoples and the real increase in the minimum wage, to the recovery of Mexico’s national ownership of natural resources and a crackdown on tax evasion. “Let it be heard loud and clear,” Sheinbaum said. “We will not return to the neoliberal model … We will continue with Mexican Humanism and with the maxim of ‘For the good of all, first the poor.’”

That maxim sits at the heart of the “Fourth Transformation,” the political-economic project inaugurated by Sheinbaum’s predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO. Founded during his own campaign for the presidency, AMLO’s National Regeneration Movement (Morena, in its Spanish abbreviation) drew inspiration from the country’s three prior great transformations—the War of Independence (1810–1821), the War of Reform (1857–1861), and the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). A century on from the Revolution, AMLO claimed to recover its tradition of popular self-determination, proposing “a system of democratic planning of national development” to shape economic growth toward the goals of “independence” and the “political, social, and cultural democratization of the nation.” Sheinbaum now promises to construct a “second storey” atop this political edifice.

The return of “democratic planning” to Mexican governance would mark a sea change in the country’s prevailing political economy. For decades, Mexico has been characterized by the micro-politics of clientelism, with election periods marked by the distribution of goods, favors, and bribes. If the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which held power continuously from 1934 until 2000, was once admired for the developmental vision of its Planes Sexenales (six-year plans), by the 1980s it had embraced radical structural adjustment and reduced its planning process to the backroom selection of presidential candidates by dedazo. The successor administrations of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), from 2000 to 2012, neoliberalized the country further still. The Fourth Transformation, by contrast, has set its horizon to the macro-politics of programmatic developmentalism, calling on citizens to hold Morena accountable to the ambitious “100 commitments” set out at the start of its presidencies.

Six years into its implementation, the project of the Fourth Transformation earned Morena a massive second mandate in the general election of June 2024, securing Sheinbaum the largest share of the popular vote in Mexican history and majorities for her party in both the House and Senate of the Mexican Congress. The interpretation of that mandate, however, has provoked debate from both the left and right, which variously criticize the government as shallowly populist or beholden to perceived special interests. Is Morena, as critics allege, simply a replica of the PRI’s corporate-clientelist machine? Or does Sheinbaum’s electoral margin signal a shift among Mexicans’ perception of their national government—from a “failed state” to an enviable model of post-neoliberal governance? How did Sheinbaum assemble a winning coalition for her vision of popular self-determination, where neighboring incumbents suffered stinging rebukes at the ballot box? And how will the Fourth Transformation fare amid the escalating threats of economic warfare emanating from the Trump administration?

Inheritance

Accounts of the Fourth Transformation often start in 2018, making brief mention of AMLO’s prior attempts at the presidency before turning to his period in office and his planning for succession. But these narratives fail to register the crucial political-economic context from which the National Regeneration Movement emerged—both the parasitic mode of capitalism that hollowed out the Mexican economy, and the political despair that it engendered across the population.

At the time of AMLO’s inauguration in 2018, the presidency, political parties, and local governments recorded the lowest levels of citizen trust in the country’s modern history. Eighty-five percent of the population expressed no trust at all in the president, 84 percent had no trust in political parties, 81 percent distrusted their state government, and 77 percent their municipal government. Federal legislators fared little better: 62 percent of citizens disapproved of their deputies, and 60 percent of their senators. Faith in the judicial system, meanwhile, had eroded through both the quotidian experience of its dysfunction and a series of high-profile scandals; the previous government of Enrique Peña Nieto, for example, spied on its citizens with Pegasus technology, and fired the prosecutor tasked with investigating sources of illicit financing for his presidential campaign.

Such discontent was the fruit of a failed development model, and the shrinking political space for “democratic planning” that it afforded. The roots of these constraints can be traced back to a single date. On August 12, 1982, the Mexican government announced that it would default on its debt, inaugurating a crisis that would soon spread across the global South. To weather the storm, President Miguel de la Madrid turned to the IMF for a multi-billion dollar loan conditioned on a familiar recipe of aggressive structural adjustment. In the five years that followed the 1983 bailout, Mexico saw a dramatic redistribution of income between capital (48 percent to 64 percent) and labor (42 percent to 29 percent). Real wages for industrial workers fell 29 percent, while the purchasing power of the minimum wage fell 42 percent.

The 1990s saw Mexico’s immiseration intensify. Kicked off by the so-called Tequila Crisis—in which a peso bid up in anticipation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) rapidly collapsed—the IMF conditioned its new bailout package on further privatizations and the country’s opening up to foreign ownership. On January 1, 1994, as the Zapatistas of the EZLN rose up to defend Indigenous territories in the southern state of Chiapas, incoming President Carlos Salinas de Gortari brought NAFTA into effect, flooding Mexico’s agricultural market with subsidized US American goods and rapidly driving the extreme poverty rate from 16 to 28 percent.

Even before signing onto NAFTA, the PRI had promoted domestic labor repression through a corporatist system of “employer protection contracts” that saw charro union bosses cut deals with exploitative employers—all with the blessing of the government, which formed the third party in the tripartite model. To compete with China’s manufacturing productivity, Mexican officials kept minimum wage increases just on par with inflation, and sometimes below, hampering productivity and increasing poverty. After the signing of NAFTA, that exploitation only intensified, with a maquiladora industry exploding across the US-Mexico border; between 1984 and 2002, these cheap-labor-intensive factories multiplied from 180,000 to over 1.1 million workers: a quarter of the country’s manufacturing workforce. Against Clinton’s promise of “prosperity and growth,” Mexico’s poverty and unemployment rates had both risen, twenty years on.

This barrage of structural adjustments acted like a political economic centrifuge. The influx of cheap US agricultural products displaced nearly five million Mexican farmers, while the number of annual migrations across the US-Mexico border rose by 79 percent between 1994 and 2000, as Mexicans sought economic opportunities closed off in their home country. These centrifugal dynamics then played out in Mexico’s political system. The year 2000 brought the end of the PRI’s reign in Mexico—a moment hailed by pundits as the fall of the “perfect dictatorship,” as coined by writer Mario Vargas Llosa. But these political changes not only failed to redress the dynamics of under-development; they intensified them. Far from democratizing the economy, the incoming governments of the National Action Party (PAN) oversaw its plunder, accelerating primitive extraction through foreign mining companies and financial groups alike. The free-for-all set off by the country’s freewheeling neoliberal model, meanwhile, proved fertile ground for the expansion of criminal syndicates that had shifted narcotic trafficking routes out of Colombia and through the Mexican border to the United States. The “War on Drugs” declared by PAN President Felipe Calderón in 2006 only drove the country deeper into despair. In 2007, Mexico’s homicides per capita numbered 9.7 per 100,000 inhabitants. Just three years later, that number reached 22.7.

The downward spiral of violence, corruption, and displacement ultimately unwound the country’s developmental coalition. The rights of land, labor, and natural resources that the 1917 constitution once secured for the Mexican people were stripped to the bone. And as the PRI’s old corporatist networks deteriorated into multi-party clientelistic machines, electoral competition became a narrowly local division over what remained: a system of caciques and acarreos unwedded to the historical orientation of developmental planning, and hostile to challenger candidates who threatened the entrenched system of political privileges. The result was Mexico’s isolation on the regional stage. While its neighbors across Latin America underwent a pink tide—bringing social democratic governments into power with ambitious plans ranging from redistribution and social protection to nationalization and industrialization—Mexico’s transformation was forestalled.

Confidence

Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigned for the presidency against the “power mafia” responsible for this national decline. His victory in 2018—the third attempt, following scandals of electoral fraud that bedeviled his campaigns in 2006 and 2012—rested on the discredit that the existing parties had brought upon themselves during the decades of PRI-PAN electoral competition. In their place, AMLO and his movement crafted an electoral coalition that spanned geographies, classes, and ideological currents—inviting even the tránsfugas from right-leaning parties in regions where the left was historically weak. The goal was to win a clean majority, while securing the votes for ambitious constitutional amendments. But to bring that ambition to life, the Fourth Transformation would first have to restore public confidence in Mexico’s democracy. “What we desire is to purify public life in Mexico,” AMLO said in his inaugural speech. “I will not lie, I will not steal or betray the people of Mexico.” For AMLO, building trust in Mexico’s institutions was a precondition for transforming them.

A key channel for sustaining his popularity was the mañenera, a daily press conference hosted at the National Palace. Inviting regular presentations from his cabinet—or simply fielding questions from an audience of journalists—the mañanera sought to communicate AMLO’s ambitions directly into the ears of Mexico’s citizens, cutting out the media middle man that Morena credited, in large part, with the destruction of democratic culture. From the point of view of AMLO’s critics, the mañanera was an attack on the country’s press, given the president’s frequent denigration of their coverage of his administration. From the point of view of the administration, though, the mañanera was not just a soapbox; it was a corrective device to Mexico’s hypertrophied, right-aligned media. Even The Economist, which regularly lambasted AMLO’s government as authoritarian, ignorant, and reckless, admitted to the “marvel” of the mañanera, which has since been adopted by his successor Sheinbaum.

Along with the mañanera came a slew of political reforms aimed at reviving Mexico’s democratic culture. Popular consultations invited citizens to vote on polarizing government priorities, such as the cancellation of the planned international Mexico City Texcoco Airport, accused of excessive environmental damage; following the vote, the airport was relocated to a disused military base, and the build site was replaced by the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park. A new federal law instituted presidential recall elections to allow citizens to decide whether the leader should continue in office halfway through their term (while only a fifth of registered voters turned out for AMLO’s mid-term mandate referendum, he won with 91.9 percent of the vote). Meanwhile, the government popularized the idea of “republican austerity” as an orientation to government spending—including the largely symbolic reduction of high-ranking public officials’ salaries alongside the elevation of those of low-earning bureaucrats, and the $92 million sale of the luxury presidential plane—with the goal of projecting a sense of responsibility from discredited state authorities. The communication around the project was accordingly sharp: “It’s important that everyone knows how people thought before, how the authorities acted, like little pharaohs,” AMLO said. “Not any more.”

If AMLO sought to reduce the social privileges afforded to the government’s “little pharaohs,” he also sought to redistribute them to its citizens. AMLO’s sexenio saw a major renovation of the country’s welfare system, and the broader organization of the labor market that underpinned it. The 2019 Labor Reform Law, for example, introduced a package of reforms that limited outsourcing, obligated employers to pay annual profit-sharing bonuses, and broke with the exploitative system of “employer protection contracts” backed by the country’s powerful charro unions. Leadership must now be elected through secret ballots, contracts ratified by membership, and disputes reviewed by an independent arbitration mechanism to replace the tripartite Conciliation and Arbitration Boards traditionally biased against the rank-and-file. For the unorganized majority, the AMLO government not only increased the real minimum wage by 90 percent, but also indexed the new floor to inflation. For the elderly, for students, and for rural farmers, AMLO introduced broad new forms of social insurance: the Pensión para el Bienestar de Adultos Mayores, the Becas Benito Juárez, and Sembrando Vida, respectively.

The most far-reaching of AMLO’s interventions was his last: the judicial reform, approved by the Senate in the waning days of his presidency. Overhauling the entire system of judicial appointments, the law established popular elections for all federal judges—including the Supreme Court, the terms of which will now be limited to twelve years. The representatives of Mexico’s judicial power would not go gently; in August, 1,400 judges declared an indefinite strike to oppose the reform. Their reaction paled in comparison to that of the international investment community, which warned that the measure would “set Mexico back 50 years.” But the objections of the corporate press were overruled by Congress and Senate—and the general public. By June 2024, between 68 and 75 percent of Mexican citizens agreed with the government that their judges and magistrates should be elected by popular vote. One year later, on June 1, the country will hold its first judicial elections.

Against apocalyptic predictions for AMLO’s “wild ambitions,” these reforms only served to strengthen the prospects for the democratic planning of national development. The capacities of the state grew through infrastructure projects built around new state-owned enterprises in rail (Maya) and airlines (Mexicana) as well as existing public companies in oil (Pemex) and electricity (CFE), generating a boom in the neglected states of the south, in particular. And the government’s industrial policies took advantage of the nearshoring trend to attract new investment; even in the automotive sector, which critics expected to be hampered by the labor reforms, $13.4 billion was invested during AMLO’s tenure, and the lowering of tariffs on EVs reshaped the Mexican auto fleet. “It is very important that the public sector, the private sector, and the social sector are joining together to promote the growth of our country and achieve well-being,” AMLO said. By 2023, Mexico’s gross fixed capital investment hit its highest level on record.

Coalition

In the span of just six years, AMLO’s policies succeeded in restoring the public’s faith in a once-failed state. By 2023, 54 percent of Mexicans had high or moderately high trust in the federal government, a figure significantly higher than that of its OECD partners, which averaged just 39 percent. This has often been dismissed, particularly in the pages of the US’s business press, as the result of mere populism—a superficial appeal to mass anti-elitism in service of the consolidation of power. But for its militants, the Fourth Transformation is a “national popular” project. Though aided at times by symbolic gestures and public theatrics, its foundational strategy is the forging of a durable coalition to carry out a truly transformative program. This has meant not only firing up the masses, but also drawing in other poderes fácticos, from the country’s industrial elites to its armed forces, toward a mutually beneficial vision of national development.

Critics of the Fourth Transformation have tended to focus here: on the proximity of the project to the same established powers it once accused of corruption, or worse. Despite his frequent critiques of the Mexican ruling class, for example, AMLO maintained a council of business leaders as close advisors, and in his six years in office refused to raise their tax rates. (Accusations of fiscal laxity are, however, overstated. A crackdown on tax evasion led to significantly increased tax intakes: the government took in 4.7 percent more in tax revenue in 2024 than 2023, which was itself already a record-breaking year; the latest numbers indicate even more dramatic tax revenue increases.) Yet it was this working relationship with the country’s industrial elites that allowed AMLO to negotiate an agreement with the private sector to cap prices on a basic basket of essential goods, protecting the country’s poorest citizens from the gales of inflationary pressure that rocked the global economy in recent years—and, according to the predominant account of recent elections in countries like the United States, forced incumbents out of office. Where many critics depict AMLO’s relationship to the national bourgeoisie as a concession, others see it as a pragmatic effort to corral them into the tent of the Fourth Transformation—while not hesitating to confront billionaires who dared to remain outside of it.

AMLO’s relationship to the armed forces can be considered in the same light. Under his administration, the Army’s budget increased by 22 percent, and the Navy’s by 17, the military was given significant new responsibilities, and the National Guard, which AMLO created, was transferred from civilian to Army control. Yet this “militarization” can also be understood through the logic of the Fourth Transformation’s national popular model. A cursory tour through the recent coups, arrests, and exile of Latin America’s left-wing leaders—Honduras in 2007, Brazil in 2015, Bolivia in 2019—reveals the acute power of the armed forces to shape the political realities of the region. While moving to dismantle the country’s most despised security forces of the Federal Police, AMLO sought to channel the military’s activities directly into the developmental project, putting them to work constructing airports, railways, and hospitals. By 2024, the majority of the military’s budget was earmarked for such infrastructure projects.

“Republican austerity” also flows from the strategic thinking of the Fourth Transformation. When Mexico declared default in August of 1982, AMLO was a 28-year-old political aspirant in the state of Tabasco, rallying his supporters to reject the structural adjustment program imposed by the International Monetary Fund. The experience of Mexico’s subjugation through its successive sovereign debt crises has thus informed the Fourth Transformation’s approach to fiscal management. Unlike in the global North—where a “balanced budget” more often serves merely as an excuse for the abdication of state provision of public goods—unsustainable levels of sovereign debt present acute threats to Southern development, as to the prospects of “democratic planning” under the diktats of foreign creditors. Where critics have highlighted the costs of frugality—and the government’s stubborn commitment to an appreciating peso as a symbol of the country’s macroeconomic strength—AMLO’s approach to republican austerity was evidently not for austerity’s sake. Such fiscal restraint set as its goal the recovery of the country’s economic sovereignty, and the demonstration of government responsibility to its citizens.

With these flanks enlisted in “regeneration,” AMLO fought to reverse the erosion of public, sovereign control of the energy sector that had begun under his predecessor. During the last oil boom of the early 2000s, oil revenues were used to fund general expenditures and Pemex was forced into high indebtedness; since 2018, the government has cut taxes and reinstituted subsidies to stabilize the state-owned firm. The reforms were of a piece with the general policy aimed at the re-nationalization of strategic energy resources, including the nationalization of the lithium mining industry—and a reflection of both the 1917 constitution’s claim on natural resources as the common property of the nation, and the 1938 nationalization of oil. In that same spirit, AMLO went toe-to-toe with Spanish energy company Iberdrola, resulting in the state purchasing 55 percent of Iberdrola’s operations in the country. In this context, AMLO’s row with the Spanish monarchy can be understood as more than a cheap nationalist stunt, but as a tactic in the struggle for control over Mexican natural resources.

AMLO waged a similar battle for sovereignty on the legal front. NAFTA’s introduction in 1994 brought with it a then-novel form of corporate profit protection known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). The ISDS system allows corporations to sue foreign states in an opaque, parallel legal system for any actions that interfere with their projected profits, even if these actions are well within the state’s authority and demonstrably taken in the public interest. Mexico is among the most sued states in the world under ISDS, and has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in such cases as Metalclad v. Mexico, in which a US-based waste management company took Mexico to court, and won, after a Mexican municipality refused to grant it a permit to construct a toxic waste facility due to concerns over water contamination and other health hazards. During the NAFTA renegotiations, AMLO fought successfully to water down—if not entirely eliminate—ISDS, restricting the scenarios that are grounds for a suit and incorporating new requirements that the case first be heard in domestic courts.

Storeys

If the June 2024 federal elections were a referendum on AMLO’s project, the results were resounding: the highest vote share in Mexico’s democratic history—a 30+ point margin of victory—for AMLO’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum; a supermajority coalition in the Chamber of Deputies and nearly the same in the Senate; victories in seven out of nine gubernatorial races; and Mexico City’s mayorship. With such an unprecedented popular mandate came lofty expectations: in her inaugural address, Sheinbaum laid out her 100-point plan for her sexenio, ranging from education programs for a “Reading Republic” to agricultural programs for a “Just & Rural Republic” to digitalization programs for a “Prosperous & Connected Republic.” In her first six months in office Sheinbaum has been able to maneuver her majorities to make significant progress toward those commitments, not merely retaining the policies of her predecessor but building upward from the foundation that he laid. This is the second storey of the Fourth Transformation—its edifice most readily visible across three essential domains: food, fuel, and medicine.

AMLO came to power vowing to stem the rapid erosion of Mexican food sovereignty that had begun with NAFTA. In a nation that had seen its import dependence on corn quintuple from pre-NAFTA levels, the Morena government ramped up domestic production of fertilizer, promoted agroecology, shifted agricultural subsidies from large to small and medium-scale farmers, and instituted a program of price guarantees for the same, the purchases from which are used to provide lunches for hospitals and public schools. Most controversially to foreign agribusiness, AMLO also attempted to ban the use of genetically modified corn to protect Mexican farmers from US agricultural dumping. Sheinbaum has picked up where AMLO left off, with a plan to promote domestic production of staples like beans, corn for tortillas, and lower-end coffee and chocolate products, while providing consumers access to basic goods at affordable prices via government-run Tiendas del Bienestar. While the US successfully obstructed AMLO’s GMO import restrictions under USMCA, Sheinbaum is now leading the charge to amend the Mexican constitution to ban the planting of genetically modified corn. And in a nation wracked by droughts, Sheinbaum’s five-year water plan will invest in major new infrastructure projects, review concessions to industries, and promote more water-efficient irrigation systems for agriculture.

So too with energy sovereignty, where Sheinbaum is carrying forward AMLO’s plans for public power generation, down a path soon-to-be cleared of judicial obstruction. Within weeks of the start of Sheinbaum’s administration, the Senate approved reforms to reclassify PEMEX and CFE as fully public entities rather than “productive state companies,” placing them under greater public control unrestricted by profit generation requirements. The reforms also ensure majority public stake in domestic power supply, while maintaining a minority place for private actors. Sheinbaum has further pledged over $23 billion in investment in energy infrastructure, with a stronger emphasis than her predecessor on renewables, and a program to install solar panels in homes across the desert north. Expanding on AMLO’s lithium nationalization, Sheinbaum plans not only to promote new technologies to accelerate lithium extraction, but to move Mexico up the supply chain with, among other things, the development of a domestically produced electric microvehicle.

AMLO’s approach to medicine prioritized confronting government corruption and monopoly distributors, which, he argued, operated hand-in-hand to overcharge for essential medicines. Shortages, though not new to Mexico, undeniably plagued the AMLO administration — a fact that critics pin on AMLO’s policies and parsimonious health budgets, and defenders attribute to corporate retaliation and Covid-19 induced supply shocks. Toward the end of his sexenio, AMLO inaugurated a Mexico City-based government-run “super pharmacy” intended to alleviate these shortages. Sheinbaum has maintained the same general orientation, but, in recognition of the challenges of her predecessor, took early steps to streamline and transparentize the government acquisition process. At the same time, Sheinbaum has announced new plans for investment in medical research and domestic production of generics and vaccines, seeking to reduce dependency on medical imports. To get these medicines into the hands of those most in need, Sheinbaum has launched a program to send healthcare professionals to the homes of people with disabilities and the elderly across the country, who, once prescribed, will receive their medicines at government-run pharmacies that will operate alongside existing, AMLO-era government banks.

Prospects

All of these programs aim to make good on Sheinbaum’s guiding maxim: “For the good of all, first the poor.” While social democratic parties in the OECD have recently shied away from such redistributive ambitions—and suffered a class realignment away from their working class constituencies—Morena’s national popular approach seeks to bind together a broad coalition under the banner of Mexico’s sovereign development. Its success in constructing that coalition is difficult to deny. On March 3, 2025, Sheinbaum’s approval rating hit 85 percent—a record for a sitting Mexican president in at least fifty years. Only three US presidents on record have accomplished such a feat: in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, at the end of the Gulf War, and after VE Day. Even President Donald Trump has appeared to join the club, calling Sheinbaum a “wonderful woman” and thanking her for educating him about Mexico’s drug prevention policies; he cited his respect for Sheinbaum in explaining the second postponement of a 25 percent tariff on all Mexican goods.

Yet Trump’s personal admiration for President Sheinbaum has done little to stem the flow of threats issued by his administration against her country: the imposition of punishing tariffs; the prospect of drone strikes on Mexican soil; the forced externalization of border policing; crackdowns on Mexican migrants in the US, and in consequence the remittances on which Mexico’s economy depends. “Poor Mexico,” quipped the old dictator Porfirio Díaz, “so far from God, so close to the United States.” Trump’s trade war now threatens to punish its neighbor for the crime of Mexico’s enduring economic dependency. In 2024, Mexican exports to the US were the equivalent of 30 percent of the country’s GDP—the same figure in reverse is roughly 1 percent. By one estimate, a combination of US and retaliatory Mexican tariffs would shrink Mexico’s economy by up to 3.4 percent from its baseline projection, and send inflation soaring up 4 percent. By another, Trump’s 25 percent tariffs alone could reduce Mexican exports by over $40 billion—or 4 percent of GDP. Escalating economic warfare across the Northern border threatens to derail Morena’s carefully consolidated coalition. While some sectors may, in the spirit of patriotism, push for retaliation and alternative trade partners, others—those most dependent on US investments and trade—would likely press for concession. Growth has already slowed since Trump’s election, with the OECD now predicting that Mexico will slide into recession by year’s end.

In the first two months of the Trump presidency, Mexico has already been forced to make concessions in order to stave off US aggression, and may be called to make more. Sheinbaum has extradited cartel members to be tried in US courts, sent 10,000 troops to suppress migration at the Northern border, and dispatched hundreds more to combat fentanyl trafficking in Sinaloa state. But backed by her overwhelming popular mandate, Sheinbaum has largely stood her ground. When Trump blamed Mexico for “allowing” migrants, drugs, and violence to cross the border, the Morena government reversed the narrative by suing US gun manufacturers for abetting the flow of weapons into Mexico. Sheinbaum has now threatened to expand the case in response to Trump’s plans to designate Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, pointed the finger back at the US for the fentanyl trade, and vowed to retaliate against US tariffs.

On Sunday March 9, Sheinbaum once again called her supporters to the Zócalo. The mood was defiant, and Sheinbaum resolute: “We cannot give up our sovereignty, nor can our people be affected by decisions made by foreign governments or hegemonies.” Throughout Latin America, and across the global South, political movements confront conditions not unlike Mexico’s a decade ago: economies afflicted by acute dependencies, and people who have lost their faith that party politics—and even the state itself—can improve their lives. The Fourth Transformation, seen from the Southern perspective, is already an historic achievement, rejuvenating a democracy once considered to be suffering its terminal decline. “Con el pueblo todo; sin el pueblo, nada,” from this vantage point, is a strategy as much as it is a slogan: building and sustaining popular support, for Morena, is the only way to achieve a true and enduring transformation. As Mexico stares down the barrel of Trump’s bid for pan-American dominance, the strongest test for that strategy may yet lie ahead.