No wimps in Mexican politics

The Mexico City Herald is a much better paper than I sometimes give it credit for being. Kelly Arthur Garrett’s take on the desafeuro threat is much better than anything I could write. Not that I think AMLO will be stripped of his immunity. Even the wildest-eyed PANista doesn’t want to see a general strike in Mexico City. The only ones “hoping” for that seem to be Agence France-Presse, which recently invested in gas masks for its reporters and photographers… the better to cover the mediagenic uprising…

BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
The Herald Mexico

March 15, 2005


Presidential politics is a vicious business . . . and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. Hunter S. Thompson, (1937-2005).

The late inventor of gonzo journalism had the 2000 White House race in mind when he wrote those words. He could just as easily have been writing about the 2004 version, a boiling cauldron of meanness if there ever was one.

What’s of interest here, however, is that Hunter Thompson was also unintentionally prescient about the way the current campaign is unfolding in Mexico. The meanest of the mean are in full attack mode. And they’re very good at it.

This first post-“Change” presidential election in a fully democratic Mexico is hardly the Jeffersonian exercise in gentlemanly debate some may have hoped for. It’s turning out to be even uglier than the time-honored tradition of character assassination though there’s plenty of that. Mudslinging, aimed at discouraging votes for your opponent, seems a positively quaint strategy in today’s brutal atmosphere, where the name of the game is to erase your opponent from the face of the political map before votes ever matter.

That’s what we’re seeing in the present effort to strip Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador of his legal immunity. It would be the first step in prosecuting him for allegedly failing to obey in a timely fashion a judicial order to halt work on a public road project.

Being prosecuted would almost surely bar López Obrador from running for president. This, despite vehement denials from President Fox, appointer of the Attorney General who set the legal process in motion, is what’s perceived as the point of the whole thing. Whatever side you come down on in the immunity debate “the law is the law” vs “legal coup d’etat” the upshot would be the elimination of the front-running candidate based on what’s essentially a minor administrative dispute.

And not just any candidate. Rightly or wrongly, the nation’s poor and disaffected regard López Obrador as their best and only hope. He’s also the sole viable alternative to the hardline neoliberalism that has dominated national politics for nearly a quarter century. Eliminating López Obrador is tantamount to telling a major segment of the population that they can’t play in this game.
Why would López Obrador’s opponents the PAN and the PRI do such a thing? See the Hunter Thompson quote above.
Keep in mind that López Obrador is not only increasing his lead in opinion polls, he’s also polling well ahead of his own PRD party, as The Herald Mexicocolumnist Fred Rosen pointed out recently. The PAN and PRI are confident they can handle the PRD, a party with an image problem, to say the least. But the fear is that López Obrador himself, who’s indicated his run will be as much outside the PRD as in it, may be unbeatable in a fair race.

There are, to be sure, non-reactionary arguments against a López Obrador presidency. Isabel Turrent and Ricardo Alemán have put forth those arguments forcefully in Reforma and El Universal, respectively. But for the PRI and the PAN, depending on the persuasive power of ideas in the heat of a campaign is a shaky proposition at best. Better to simply get rid of the problem at the outset.

The elimination option is hardly new in Mexican presidential politics. It’s just more out in the open than before. Now we can see how the sausages are made, and it’s not a pretty sight.

For most of the 20th century, the reigning PRI permitted no meaningful opposition at the polls. The breach in the stonewall finally came in 1988, when a fledgling prodemocracy movement led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas put together a left-of-center coalition that raged like a prairie fire. The movement, predecessor to today’s PRD, looked like it might actually win. At the last minute, though, helped by a convenient and suspicious computer failure, the PRI’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari eked out a victory with less than 50 percent of the vote.

Intentional fraud? Let’s put it this way: Cárdenas was running ahead in the count when the computer system crashed. When it came back up, he was behind. And there he stayed. Later, the ballots were destroyed.

We report. You decide.

But clearly, neither the PRI nor the PAN plan on letting themselves get caught by surprise again by a movement candidate. Hence the effort to remove López Obrador from the race before it begins.

The knockout strategy has its imprecise analog in U.S. presidential politics. For example, the Republicans couldn’t beat BIll Clinton at the polls, so they abused the legal process to get him impeached on grounds as dubious and petty as the planned prosecution of López Obrador.

Clinton wasn’t eliminated, but the impeachment was a spectacular success. Not only was his presidency crippled, but all the unpleasantness convinced Al Gore in 2000 to play down his involvement in the Clinton administration, thus running away from (rather than on) his role in eight years of peace and prosperity. The entire world is still living with the consequences.
Similarly, even if López Obrador survives the immunitystripping a possibility, with the PRI holding the swing votes on the Chamber of Deputies panel that will decide the matter soon the damage may have been done. López Obrador, though he’d be more popular than ever with his core supporters, would have to run as the candidate with “legal problems.” That tag won’t help him garner the middle-class, non-PRD votes he needs to win.

The threat this preemptory ploy holds out to the spirit of democracy is obvious. But tactics like this aren’t going to go away. There’s simply too much at stake for ambitious politicians to bother with the niceties of fair competition.

Like the man said, it’s a vicious business.

kellyg@prodigy.net.mx