José Fidel had driven through the night in search of his worldly miracle. “We wanted to be the first,” said the 64-year-old coffee farmer, one of half a dozen petitioners huddled outside the offices of Mexico’s incoming president on Thursday in the predawn gloom. “What we are asking for is support.”

Since Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s landslide election victory on 1 July, his Mexico City HQ has become a point of urban pilgrimage for disenchanted and disenfranchised supplicants hoping for deliverance.

Each morning crowds gather outside its red and white walls clutching word-processed entreaties to a man whom detractors malign as a populist “tropical messiah” but who supporters hope will make good on a pledge to rule for Mexico’s forgotten and poor.

Q&A What were Amlo's campaign promises? Show Corruption Amlo has repeatedly pledged to make eradicating corruption the main focus of his presidency, once he is sworn in on 1 December. “We will get rid of ... this cancer, that is destroying this country,” he vowed at his final campaign rally. Poverty “We will give priority to the most humble and to the forgotten,” Amlo said on election night, and it is thought that he will make fighting poverty a flagship policy, as the former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did after his historic 2002 election win. Drugs Analysts expect Amlo to pursue a less aggressive and less militarised approach to Mexico’s "war on drugs", which has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and is widely viewed as having been a calamity. He has proposed an amnesty designed to help low-level outlaws turn away from a life of crime and raised the possibility of legalising the use of marijuana. Government austerity Amlo has unveiled plans to slash taxpayer-funded perks for high-level government officials. The official presidential residence will become a cultural centre, the presidential plane will be sold and former presidents will no longer receive pensions, he has said. He has cut his own future presidential salary to less than half of what his immediate predecessor made. US relations On the campaign trail Amlo railed against what he called Donald Trump’s arrogant, racist and inhumane family separation policy. But he has since struck a more diplomatic tone and said he emphasised the need for mutual respect and cooperation during a phone call with Trump the morning after his election win. Photograph: Gustavo Graf/X06622

“I just want to explain my situation,” said Plasido Angeles López, an unemployed installation contractor who was also queuing outside the Chihuahua Street compound in the hope of landing a job.

The causes and complaints lined up outside the offices of López Obrador – or Amlo, as he is widely known – offer a snapshot of the challenges he will face after taking power on 1 December.



José Fidel Luna Caricia, from the municipality of Tepatlaxco, in Veracruz state, said he had come seeking a loan he would use to alleviate rural poverty by purchasing 3,481 acres of land that would enable small-scale farmers of maize, chilli pepper, tomato and papaya to support their families.

Years of government neglect has left many young rural workers with little option but to flee north to the United States. “We’ve been abandoned, like orphaned children,” Caricia complained. “We’re not asking for a gift – we’ll pay it back in 10 years, in annual instalments.”

Maria de los Ángeles Estrada Espinosa, 43, a cleaner from the dilapidated, violence-stricken sprawl around Mexico’s capital, was third in line and brought a trio of pleas: for work, for a scholarship for her 19-year-old daughter and, finally, for a new home.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as Amlo, Mexico’s president-elect. Photograph: Daniel Becerril/Reuters

“I’m a single mum and I’ve come to ask for help,” she said, proffering an A4 letter produced with the dregs of a fading printer cartridge.

In her sparsely punctuated appeal, Espinosa wished Amlo well and requested assistance “if it isn’t too much bother”. “My petition is that I am asking you to do me the favour of giving me the chance to work in any government institution and to see if you could offer me a home for which I could gradually pay with my work and that way I would have my own home and wouldn’t have to carry on paying rent, for now that’s all I’d like to petition for, thanks very much for your attention,” she wrote, concluding: “I’m an honest woman, I have no criminal record and I enjoy working.”

Plasido Angeles López, 71, had also brought a missive for Amlo and a seven-page CV that listed his personal interests as music and reading. “Allow me to make a humble petition,” his letter began. “I have worked my whole life, since I was five … All I want is to carry on working.

“I would be really grateful for your support … and I’m waiting for your reply,” López signed off. “A big thank you from your servant and friend.”

Unaware that Amlo was vacationing in Chiapas, the petitioner confessed he was anxious for a personal audience but suspected the veteran leftist might not have time. More than presidential face time though, López just wanted a job. “I feel strong. I feel able to carry on working.”

The morning’s knottiest exhortation came from Ma Catalina Vázquez Pérez, 51, who had woken at 5am hoping Amlo could get her son and her son-in-law out of jail.

In a two-page declaration, Pérez lamented how the pair had been jailed for a combined total of 90 years after being wrongly convicted, she said, of extortion. “There are politicians in this country who have stolen millions and millions and nothing happens to them while others go to jail because of 18,000 pesos they didn’t even take,” she protested.

Ma Catalina Vázquez Pérez, a petitioner who hopes Amlo will get her son out of jail. Photograph: Tom Phillips/The Guardian

Even within Amlo’s party, Morena, there are worries Mexico’s president-elect – who has promised to eradicate corruption, vanquish violence and engineer an epochal transformation akin to independence or the 1910 revolution – has set the bar too high in terms of voters’ expectations.

Petitioners are not a new phenomenon in Mexico but experts say Amlo’s longstanding popular image as an ally of the poor means they are flocking to his door like seldom before.

“When you create such great expectations in society, there’s an enormous risk of not fulfilling them,” said Indira Vizcaíno, a rising Morena star. “Sometimes we even expect more than someone has actually promised.”

But Vizcaíno said she believed Mexicans understood they could not “wait for others to solve all our problems … Each one of us must take actions in the world around us.”

The Chihuahua Street supplicants voiced a quasi-religious conviction that Amlo would succeed. “He’s a good person and we hope he fulfils the promises he made,” said Pérez. Was she scared he might not? “No. I believe in him,” she replied, without hesitating.

Caricia also declared himself a believer and said the early signs – such as Amlo’s decision to slash his own salary and abolish ex-presidents’ pensions – were positive. “A 5m peso monthly pension in a country as fucked as ours?” he said. “Just think how many poor rural families you can feed with 5m pesos [about £200,000].”

The farmer had a fallback though. Around his neck he wore a silver pendant of Jude the Apostle, the patron saint of lost causes and desperate situations.

“He has a real gift for making the impossible possible,” Caricia said of his protector, before submitting his petition and preparing to begin the 11-hour trip home. “I wear it day and night.”