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The Invisible Guillotine These stumbles may be symptomatic of deeper issues at the heart of the cuarta transformación — the fourth transformation which AMLO promises will revolutionize Mexican politics and society. AMLO’s lofty rhetoric and frenetic activism — he repeatedly declares that he works “sixteen hours a day for the people,” a claim few would doubt — allows it to seem, as columnist Julio Hernández López suggests, like big changes are in store even if, in the end, market forces will limit what his government can achieve. What Hernández López calls the “invisible guillotine” has already made itself felt in the new government’s first one-hundred days: on January 29, the Wall Street ratings agency Fitch downgraded the debt on Mexico’s national oil company, Pemex, to just above junk status. On March 2, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) announced that AMLO’s first ninety days had “affected the confidence of investors” and therefore justified the downgrading of Mexico’s public debt from stable to negative. This, despite the fact the government’s first budget largely remained within neoliberal strictures, moving money around without levying new taxes on the wealthy or corporations. The cravenness of the ratings agencies — they were willing to award positive evaluations to the Peña Nieto government while collecting approximately $1.3 million dollars in government contracts — should surprise no one. What may surprise some is how quickly the coercive power of “market forces” has been unleashed on a government which, so far, has done little to disrupt their basic logic. But, as the cases of other left governments in Latin America have shown, making concessions to neoliberal capitalism is no guarantee that the invisible guillotine will not decapitate best-laid plans. The challenge for the Mexican left in the coming months will be to find a way of working both with and against AMLO’s government. It must defend the government from the Right while simultaneously pushing it further when its reforms either do not go far enough or go too far in damaging indigenous rights and the environment. Although AMLO’s party, Morena, is politically uneven, it remains a diverse and national movement that has become a repository for decades of pent-up grievances, aspirations, and demands, often exceeding what its leadership is willing to offer. After a hundred days, some sections of the Left have already written off AMLO’s government as hopelessly compromised. But maintaining the balance between solidarity and critique is crucial to standing with and alongside the millions who, in the face of fraud, violence, disappearances, and years of crushing inequality, have succeeded in bringing a new government to power.