For much of the past decade, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was an opponent of military involvement in the country’s so-called war on drugs.
When then president Felipe Calderón deployed the army in full force in 2006, López Obrador – best known as Amlo – called for the troops to return to their barracks. When Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, tried to codify the presence of the military into law, Amlo decried the move and said, if he became president, that would change.
