El Bronco vs. AMLO: The Fight Is on for Mexico's Presidential Protest Vote David Agren - VICE News
go to original October 9, 2015

Jaime Rodríguez, better known as "El Bronco," has spent his first week as Mexico's first ever governor elected as an independent on a mission to show that he remains a political outsider.

"The party's over for the bandits," Rodriguez said in his inaugural address as the new governor of the northern state of Nuevo León before an audience filled with people he has directly accused of corruption. "If you want money, make it the old-fashion way: work."

El Bronco beat long odds and rules rigged against independent candidates to win office in the northern state famed for industrial fortunes, but also handicapped by crime and graft. Now he is regularly mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in a country consumed by corruption scandals, impunity and deep disenchantment with its entrenched political class.

But Bronco's style and popularity have inevitably put him on a collision course with another anti-system crusader: perpetual presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (pictured above), whose popularity and persistence spooks many of Mexico's political and economic elites.

"They've become the natural rivals for the anti-system vote," said Federico Estevez, political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, though the solutions they offer are very different.

Lopez Obrador, better known as AMLO, presents "a broad-brushed platform" focused on poverty and inequality, Estevez said. El Bronco hammers home a single issue: "Corruption. That's it."

Read the rest at VICE News

Related: New Governor El Bronco Says No to Luxury Home, Estate (Mexico News Daily)

Photo: Marco Ugarte/AP

Horse-Riding Nuevo Leon Governor 'El Bronco' Vows to Go Tough on Crime (Al Jazeera)

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