Mexico’s opposition is trapped in a fake news vortex

And it has the international media’s ear.

Mexican politics for the international business reader.

On Sunday, as the extent of Claudia Sheinbaum’s landslide in Mexico’s presidential election became apparent, parts of the opposition went into a panic. Xóchitl Gálvez, the main opposition’s candidate, spread rumours of electoral fraud. Anti-government pundits sat visibly shaken on screen, repeating how they thought the result was impossible, despite the fact that all reputable polls gave Sheinbaum a double-digit lead. “We’re going to have to leave [Mexico],” concluded a commentator on Atypical Te Ve, an online opposition talk show with close to a million subscribers on YouTube. “They’re going to take your home.”

There has been no serious indication in the current government or the recent presidential campaign that Mexico is on a path to a Cuban or Venezuelan-style dictatorship. Given the size of the victory of the governing party, Morena, and its allies, it is clear that the vast majority of Mexicans aren’t worried either.

The markets and international media, though, reacted in stride with the opposition. The stock market fell by 6% in a way unseen since Covid. The Mexican peso fell dramatically. Sheinbaum’s chosen finance minister (who also currently holds the job) had to jump on a call with international investors to soothe fears.

There are many understandable reasons for this volatility: The peso is arguably overvalued. Stock markets globally have been more turbulent than usual. The country’s and the national oil company’s financials are looking in worsening shape. Morena’s devastating landslide puts democratic checks and balances in doubt. The list goes on.

But, most of these concerns have been around for a while, and under the administration of a far scarier leader—at least on paper. Current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a populist who for years felt threatening to the business and middle classes. Sheinbaum cuts a more technocratic figure and represents continuity of a government most Mexicans approve of. 

The current turbulence can be in part explained by the mismatch between the expectations of influential global actors (investors, policy makers…) and what actually came to pass in Mexico’s election. These key people and institutions are disproportionately informed by a Mexican opposition trapped within its own disinformation bubble, that was caught completely off guard by Sheinbaum’s win, and that nevertheless continues to have access to much of the global media, which in turn quotes many of the fears that this rather small group harbours. 

To understand how the anti-government intellectual and media elite got the point is crucial, not only to rebuild any semblance of an effective opposition in Mexico, but to understand why the media outside of Mexico seems so much more afraid of what’s happening inside the country than Mexicans themselves.

The birth of Mexico’s intellectual and media opposition

The current opposition media and intellectual elite were, not too long ago, the media and intellectual elite in power. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Mexican thinkers were co-opted by the State through funding. Artists were given commissions, intellectuals got grants, and analysts subsidies for their journalistic endeavours—so long as they didn’t bite the hand that fed them.

When López Obrador rose to power, he pledged to shoo out the ancien régime and the intellectual elite that cosied up to it. The first thing his government did was cut government funds for famous and established periodicals like Letras Libres and Nexos. When these outlets complained, the president revealed just how much money they had been receiving from the government. (And, almost as if to prove his point, López Obrador went on to lavish pro-government outlets with state funds.)

The print runs, staff, and public influence of these media outlets collapsed with many powerful journalists and analysts losing their jobs. These would become the intellectual bastions of the new opposition.

Slowly but surely these public personalities found new sources of funding, new platforms, and new audiences in an evolving media environment. This in a way freed new opposition outfits like Atypical Te Ve, as well as Latinus—which was born to be an outlet for Latinos Stateside but whose talent, funding, and audience was compelled to return to Mexican politics. Both of these brands exist solely online, freeing them from the constraints of regulated media. Both also found private funding that freed them from the tacit non-belligerence that public financing entailed.

But these new ways of sharing information also doomed these outlets to become increasingly closed echo chambers.

Reliance of social media algorithms drew in predominantly anti-government audiences. And, despite its pernicious effects, public funding did allow and to an extent compelled Mexico’s media to draw from a diversity of opinion; private funding, often from very anti-government figures, had the opposite effect.

Today, Atypical Te Ve has the second most watched Mexican outlet on Facebook, while Latinus boasts 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube where it has focused on in depth investigative exposés focused almost solely on criticising the government. 

Isolated in Mexico, influential abroad

These numbers make for impressive stats but they actually make little dent in Mexican public opinion. Instead, these enclosed outlets festered in opinions that gradually departed from the mean and then from reality altogether. 

That isn’t to say serious investigative reports weren’t being made—Latinus has kept close tabs on the ongoing failings of one of the president’s pet projects, the Maya Train—it was that the opinions of their commentators were simply no longer in touch with what was going on on the ground.

This became especially apparent during the election campaign:

Even as pollsters gave Sheinbaum a healthy lead over Gálvez, her closest contender, opposition commentators rejected the numbers. They cited “hidden voters” that had yet to come out but that would surely vote for Gálvez and waved around the single poll that put their candidate ahead—by 0.2%. (Sheinbaum won by a 30% lead over Gálvez.)

Ultimately, the greatest delusion was the idea that the country was with them. The main opposition’s central position was its hatred of the government. This directly contradicted the research carried out by a smaller opposition party, Movimiento Ciudadano, which reached the conclusion that the vast majority of Mexicans didn’t want to hear criticism of López Obrador. 

This culminated in the reactions following the publication of the election results. Latinus’ presenters declared that voters clearly had no idea and had opted for dictatorship. “I am saddened to know that most of my compatriots have put on the same chains that we released them from,” said Denise Dresser, a political commentator, on a panel. Atypical Te Ve presenters refused to believe the results. 

Despite their decreasing influence in Mexico, many of these opposition intellectuals continue holding sway in the international media. Names unheard of for years in Mexican mainstream media, like historian Enrique Krauze, still carry some weight in The Financial Times, The Washington Post, and more. Mostly in op-eds, they criticise the government.

This is in large part López Obrador’s own fault. The president overshadowed his own movement’s fledgling intellectuals, reducing most to cheerleaders and leaving international correspondents without fresh analysts to reach out to.

“Who are the pro-government people worth quoting?” one Mexico-based foreign journalist told The Mexico Political Economist.

It is difficult to measure the exact effect this cohort has had on the international community’s understanding of Mexico. It is clearly a somewhat outdated interpretation of the country and one increasingly at odds with the general population’s views.  

The election has served as a wake up call for most of this isolated intelligentsia. “It was a reality check,” concluded Carlos Loret de Mola, Latinus’ headline anchor, on receiving the results of the election. He criticised the conspiracy theories trying to explain away the results: “The worst thing would be to go into denial. Whoever wants to claim that there was electoral fraud, that it was handouts in social programmes… But none of this explains the size of [Sheinbaum’s] victory, and the size of the defeat.”

Your key takeaways:

1. The worst disinformation is the one you make and believe in yourself. 

2. International media is still struggling to find the right voices to analyse Mexico from an objective position. 

3. The most influential figures in the opposition failed to enter a period of serious introspection when López Obrador won, instead turning into its own echo chamber—they paid for this with a Morena supermajority in 2024.

Correction: This report previously read that the “Mexican peso fell to four-year lows”; it actually fell to closer to late-2023 levels.