Security & Strategic Review - October 2023

In his annual state-of-the-nation address (Informe) on 1 September, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador highlighted the development of new free textbooks for schools. The school textbooks were distributed to over 20m students in almost all of Mexico’s 32 states at the start of the new school year on 28 August. However, the books have proven controversial for multiple reasons, serving as a reflection of the polarisation within society more generally under López Obrador’s government.