Mexico - one of my favorite topics

litho at kos has an excellent diary today that recaps some important mexican history in the context of what's happening there now with lopez obrador who is, to all appearances, the front-running candidate for mexico's presidency in the 2006 election... a few excerpts and my (somewhat-lengthy) response follow...

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[L]ast week, Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has pretty much won his political confrontation with rightist president (and erstwhile Bush ally) Vicente Fox. At the moment, AMLO (as the Mexican press refers to Lopez Obrador) is facing no real obstacle to an easy win in next year's presidential election, yet his victory would be much, much more than just a win for his political party, or even a win for the Mexican left. Because of the specific social movement backing Lopez Obrador, a PRD win next year has the potential to fundamentally reshape Mexican politics.

[...]

[Obrador] has developed over time a political style that relies on honesty, direct communication, and mass mobilization.

[He] won his confrontation with Fox after hundreds of thousands of average Mexicans participated in a series of massive demonstrations supporting him. Although the PRD leadership claims to lead this movement, it appears to have an element of the spontaneity that characterized 1968 and 1985. The difference today is a political system that actually holds open electoral contests, and a political party that knows how to compete effectively in them.

[Obrador] will win.

Will he control his base? Or will his base control him?

who will control whom is certainly the question... if anybody controls anybody, i don't believe it will be the "base" as litho defines it... the ultimate "base" in mexico is essentially the same as it is in the u.s. - the super-rich - and if obrador can manage to effectively take them on, he will be a national hero of the first magnitude... here's my response as posted on kos...

fox came into office in 2000 with high hopes of making a difference... mexican citizens felt hope for the first time in a long time and his election was viewed as a radical turning point in mexico... yes, fox was seen as a big-business supporter but he had one big thing going for him - he wasn't a member of the pri... but several things conspired to render much of what fox (and the mexican people) wanted to accomplish impossible...

-rooting out the embedded corruption that exists from the top to the bottom of the mexican system is well beyond the control of one man... it is particularly difficult when so many have built their very livelihoods on it... when a traffic patrolman who is paid virtually nothing has to rely on "mordida" to feed and clothe his family, he is not likely to be very interested in anti-corruption rhetoric...

-bush initially made a big deal of buddying up to fox but soon seemed to forget that mexico even existed... when fox attempted to exercise leverage for cross-border issues important to mexico, he was virtually ignored... the mexican people, always alert to the rise and fall of political fortunes, began to dismiss fox as someone with no "cojones..."

-the super-rich continue to run mexico as their personal playground... the amount of mexico's money that rests with a incredibly tiny percentage of the population is staggering... no one, and i mean NO ONE, can do anything that involves making or spending money in mexico without at least tacit clearance from and a cut going to the top - with many other stops along the way... everybody sees this, knows it, laughs about it, groans about it, and feels absolutely powerless to stop it...

the above are just some of the reasons that hundreds of thousands of people participated in the demonstrations supporting lopez obrador... they want desperately to believe that there is hope, that some sort of change is indeed possible... i sincerely hope so too but i am cynical...

obrador, if elected, is going to face very much the same constraints faced by fox only worse where the u.s. is concerned... obrador has already been branded as a "leftist-socialist" by the washington demagogues and is going to find it difficult to gain an ear... this will make it tough for someone leading a country that is so intimately tied to the u.s...

if issues around illegal immigration and the porous u.s.-mexican border heat up sufficiently in the u.s. to where the border is either partially or completely sealed, obrador (or any mexican president) will have a major crisis on his hands in very short order... one thing that's often missed in discussion of immigration and border issues in the u.s. is that immigration to the u.s. has always provided a safety valve for mexico... closing the border could rapidly result in major internal unheaval...

the super-rich in mexico have no intentions of relinquishing their strangehold on power and money... the only reason obrador has been as successful as he has is that running his feifdom, mexico city, is largely irrelevant to their concerns... that will change dramatically if obrador is elected... the super-rich no doubt already have a plan in place to neutralize obrador and to be sure that he will have minimal impact on their fortunes...

my recollection, when i was running my shop in mexico, is of hearing a parade going by outside... i asked my mexican friend what it was... he said he didn't know but he would find out... he came back a few minutes later and announced it was constitution day... "we're celebrating 80 years of bad government..." but that doesn't mean they can't hope... personally, i hope obrador gets elected...

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