Mexico leader holds massive rally in de-facto first salvo to 2024 elections

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has held a massive rally in Mexico City's main plaza attended by tens of thousands of people.

Though it was called to commemorate Mexico's 1938 expropriation of the oil industry, many of those attending the rally on Saturday agreed that it was the de-facto opening salvo to the 2024 elections that will choose the president's successor.

Perhaps conscious of recent tensions with the United States over US overdose deaths from fentanyl smuggled in from Mexico, Lopez Obrador spent part of his speech praising former US Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who didn't actively oppose the 1938 oil expropriation despite the fact many of the firms were American.

"The best example of the authenticity of his 'Good Neighbour' policy was his respect for our nation's sovereignty," Lopez Obrador said of Roosevelt.

The process to nominate a presidential candidate for his Morena party will begin later this year. After that, the party's candidate is likely to take centre stage.

But most agree that few of the presidential hopefuls can match the popularity of a president whose approval ratings are routinely above 60 percent.

That is especially true for the Morena party, which was largely built around Lopez Obrador.

Alberto Martinez, 59, said he hoped Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum would be the party's nominee. “We like her education, her prudence,” Martinez said. But he would settle for anyone Morena choose.

Most polls show Sheinbaum as the front-runner in the race, followed by Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard.

"The important thing is for the ideology of Lopez Obrador to continue," Martinez said. "This train is already in motion, somebody just to get aboard and drive it."

Former president Lazaro Cardenas, one of Lopez Obrador's heroes, delighted Mexicans when he expropriated the largely foreign-owned, privately operated oil industry on March 18, 1938.

READ MORE: 'Lack of hugs and embraces' behind US fentanyl deaths

Pushing out 'Gringos'

One of Lopez Obrador's main policy initiatives has been to save the state-owned oil company that Cardenas founded from crushing debt and low oil production.

Those attending the rally in the Zocalo wholeheartedly approved of Lopez Obrador, who has struck a nationalist stance, drastically reducing the ability of US anti-drug agents to operate in Mexico.

Blas Ramos, 69, an electrical engineer, held up a sign reading “Get out of Mexico, FBI, CIA, Gringos!”

He said the president was right to oppose US calls to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organisations or to use the US military to crack down on the gangs.

“They are hypocrites,” he said of US politicians calling for such measures, “because they don't do anything to reduce drug consumption” in the United States.

The synthetic opioid fentanyl, which kills about 70,000 Americans per year, is mainly manufactured in Mexico with precursor chemicals smuggled in from China.

READ MORE: Fentanyl is US problem; broken family values behind addiction rise: Mexico

'Mexico is free'

Lopez Obrador has claimed that Mexico doesn't produce fentanyl — something most experts disagree with — and that the US has a fentanyl problem because American families don't hug their kids enough.

Lopez Obrador thundered against the US proposals. 

"Mexico is a free and independent country, not a colony or protectorate of the United States," he said, shouting: "Cooperation, yes, submission, no!"

Ramos was confident that the president's movement, which he calls "the fourth transformation of Mexico," would not end when he leaves office in September 2024.

"This is a movement that began a long time ago," he said.

"We have spent our whole lives waiting for this movement."

"This movement isn't over in six years," Ramos said, referring to the length of presidential terms in Mexico.

"This is a process, that will take 30, 40 years."

READ MORE: Obrador calls for mass mobilisation to celebrate 'transformation of Mexico'