President Andrés Manuel López Obrador swept into office nearly six years ago with a simple motto laying out his administration’s priorities: “For the good of all, first the poor.” His administration scrapped a host of existing social programs and installed their own, quickly increasing overall social spending to unprecedented heights for senior citizens, unemployed youth, students, farmers and people with disabilities. But less noticed was that the new roster of social programs dramatically shifted who was getting that money. Suddenly Mexico’s poorest citizens were receiving a smaller portion of the spending and less money than under previous administrations. And some of Mexico’s wealthiest started getting money they didn’t really need.
