Throughout the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Héctor Aguilar Camín kept a detailed record of the most important events in national life, specifically the unfolding of the self-proclaimed Fourth Transformation. Published Monday through Friday in the newspaper Milenio, this log quickly became a real-time chronicle of the meticulous dismantling of Mexican democracy using the tools of democracy itself.

This book is a comprehensive selection of texts from that diary, which is both public and personal. It begins on Monday, June 25, 2018, and ends with the entry dated December 20, 2024, when the constitutional reforms that turn Mexico into a budding dictatorship have been completed. Along the way, the author lucidly and alarmingly examines the steps of this process of democratic corrosion: the fabrication of majorities in Congress, the militarization of public security, López Obrador’s subservience to Donald Trump, the infamous response to the pandemic, and the storm of crime and violence.

The Germinal Dictature is also the portrait of an unusual politician in the Mexican ecosystem, a politician in the open, who knew how to consolidate the largest project of centralization of power this country has seen since 1968.