Mexico has a very popular socialist president whose leftist party is heading for re-election, and there's precious little reporting on why that may be the case.

But the pieces start to pop together with a long, interesting Financial Times piece that explains what's going on in Mexico and why Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is popular.

The short answer? AMLO's turning his country over to the military. The Times begins its piece by focusing on how Mexico City's main airport has become a military operation

The airport’s administration will soon come under full military control, joining a growing number of armed forces-run assets in Mexico. To realise the president’s vision of stamping out corruption and running state-owned facilities efficiently, the army and navy will manage more than a dozen civilian airports, the national customs agency, maritime ports and two new train lines. There are plans for an army-run passenger airline to start operations in December, reviving the name of Mexicana de Aviación, which went bust in 2010. Hotels and nature reserves will follow.

The cops, too, are being taken over by the military, the FT reports. The army is getting commissioned to take over a failing train line, build a $2 billion tourist train and airport in the Yucatan, and construct two new aqueducts. AMLO himself just loves it this way and it's not hard to think that ordinary Mexicans might just agree with him.

For López Obrador, the military takeover of Mexico City’s main airport has yielded good results. “No suitcases are being stolen, as they were before; smuggling is not allowed and, most importantly, those operations when drug traffickers [temporarily] took control of the airport . . . no longer happen” he said in a June speech.

No Sam Brintons to worry about at the luggage carousel in that country.

Their customs operations are pulling in $60 billion in revenue for the government, which is 15% of its entire revenues, apparently with no chiseling, and their contracting practices, done as the army assigns them, get done on time with no messy public bidding process. You've got to wonder what Mexico's oligarchical billionaire class thinks about this new setup, but some may be coopted. In short, for now, AMLO has made the trains run on time in much of Mexico, and the voters like it, so they'll vote for his party again.

That doesn't address everything going on in that country, of course -- the north has become a cartel wasteland with many disruptions and shootouts as money rolls in there from the illegal migrant trade and Joe Biden's open borders, but it may be that the military is gaining control there, too since we haven't heard of any car burnings lately from that region.

The FT notes that Mexico's military budget has soared exponentially since AMLO took over, up from 0.5% of its budget to what appears to be (based on its chart) about 30% higher than that.

There is evidence of corruption setting in, too, with various generals buying big houses around Mexico City, taking lavish European vacations and one general getting let off from drug charges in the states after AMLO insisted on his release, claiming they'd investigate themselves, which not surprisingly, led to no charges filed. But it seems to be relatively isolated, perhaps just the early stages of what is to come. By and large in most of the country, the corruption problem seems to be shriveling good and much of the military, army and navy, the experts cited said, was honest.

This is an odd ending to what we expect of socialist regimes, calling in the military as an answer as the chaos got out of control (Mexico has had 155,000 murders and 43,000 disappearances on AMLO's watch, a record high).

There are some parallels in Latin America though -- the most obvious one is the harsh crime cleanup that has gone on in El Salvador under its eccentric president, Nayib Bukele, who seems to have leaned hard on the military to get it done, and has produced a crime-free El Salvador as a result.

Further back in time, there also are parallels to when it hasn't worked out so well -- the grandaddy of these is Castroite Cuba, a true military dictatorship these days, which runs all the trains and hotels and food stores, and which came to power after a massive string of Castro economic failures in forced collective farming and massive defaults on national debt. There also is the epoch of when the generals took over Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil during the so-called "dirty war," in response to an extended period of violence, terrorism and chaos coming from the left (Chile's case was slightly different as it was done by an act of the courts and the legislature). There's yet another an argument that Venezuela has followed this model, with the generals in that country, led by Hugo Chavez, coming to power in that country in 1998 as a reaction to the chaos of an IMF austerity program that left the country gasping for breath economically. Today, there's no doubt that country is a military dictatorship -- and the generals there now double as drug kingpins. Peru has had some parallels in bringing in a leftist military to restore order, too, having dealt with crime, terrorism and hyperinflation, but Peru doesn't look like Venezuela. As for Chile, there is no doubt the country had gone to hell in a handbasket by 1971 as a result of the totalitarian Allende regime which practiced torture, confiscation and foreign takeovers with militaries from Cuba and North Korea playing a strong coercive role. Augusto Pinochet, who was the military leader who followed, did make the trains run on time, too, and was involved in very little corruption. That Chile Model he allowed the Chicago Boys economists to create continues to stand, even today with Chile's current chaotic leftist regime determined to restore the Allende chaos.

It works, and it can work -- but just as often it can create a monster. 

And that ought to be a warning to us that this may be what is headed to America as voters grow tired of crime, chaos, illegal immigration and economic ruin brought on by Joe Biden and his fraudulent election. Voters don't like this stuff and can be quick to embrace a strongman, or military rule as a best choice alternative, given the options. While that may restore order, at least for a time, and order is the foremost of all human rights, it won't be good for the freedom that we prize and cherish in this country. Plus, it doesn't help that the military today is distrusted for its corruption, wokesterism and failure to win extended wars almost by design, which makes me wonder if such a move could be genuinely popular.

That's a distant but not absent issue for now. What's vivid now is that Mexico is turning into a military state and nobody but the Financial Times seems to be noticing.

Image: Wikipedia / public domain