Disafuero-mania around the world…

09-April (Europe)

The Parisians weigh in on the desafeuro… from today’s Jornada…

The Paris protest was mounted by Mexican students, but this stupid desafuero is going to put Mexico in the news world-wide. Forget Fox as a democratic leader… maybe they’ll stop referring to him as “Vincente Fox, whose election ended 71 years of one-party rule”… and refer to him as “Vincente Fox, who conned millions with his talk of democracy…”

10-April (Mexico)

While Mexico was basically a one-party state for 71 years, it wasn’t the same party for all those years, and governments shifted from left to right over the years. From the mid-1960s until 1988, THE Party (PRI) became more and more authoritarian, less and less open to change from within. Leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, putting together a coalition of old leftists and anti-PRI forces won the 1988 presidental election… but neither the U.S. nor the PRI would put up with a socialist Mexican president… so… as everyone knows… the electorial computers broke down, caught fire and Carlos Salinas de Goutari was seated. Cardenas and the old leftists (mostly military officers) could have provoked a civil war, but settled for democratic change. Vincente Fox, in 2000, benefitted from the democratic semi-revolution. He never caused it.

And Mexico looked like a democratic country until last Thursday. I still haven’t made up my mind what to make of the desafeuro… but Kelly Ann Garrett of the English-language Mexico City News tried to find a silver lining in all this (http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/web_columnas_sup.detalle?var=20498).

ON THE OTHER HAND…

The streets are quiet (except for Orthodontist Street… where AMLOs apartment is surrounded by federal coppers waiting to deliver an arrest warrent… should one be issued… and well-wishers are surrounding the cops — THAT COULD GET UGLY), no one is taking to the hills… just yet and life goes on. On the surface, I expect it will. IF AMLO doesn’t run for President, expect a couple of non-entities to duke it out, and inherit a discredited office. At worst, we’ll have Santiago Creel blathering for the next six years. OR… PRI will turn on their PAN partners and — if they’re true to form — they’ll shoot themselves in the foot and “punish” Mexico City for voting PRD by starving the city of funds. They’ve done it before, they’ll do it again. OR…

at any rate, the tourists can continue to come, and the city will still be safe for foreigners. This is a Mexican problem, and one the Mexicans will have to sort out. Heartbreaking to watch from the sidelines, but impossible to predict what’s going to happen next. Maybe nothing? Maybe everything?

12-April (north of the border)

Thanks to “lostsoul” of Alaska, a regular ingredient in “Political Stew” for passing along Justin Raimundo ‘s global perspective on the desafuero… and it’s serious reprecussions for the United States, the economy and democracy in general.

When a supposedly fixed election in distant Kyrgyzstan did not meet the “democratic” standards of either the U.S. government or the European Union, it was time for yet another color-coded Western-financed “revolution.” When Eduard Shevardnadze ceased to be useful to the U.S., a “Rose Revolution” bloomed in Georgia. In Ukraine, where electoral politics is subject to more manipulation than even Chicago or Brooklyn, the necessity of U.S. intervention – in the form of millions in grants to opposition groupings – was self-evident to U.S. government officials.

Mexico, however, is a different matter altogether. The “global democratic revolution” announced by President Bush in a 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy – and since reinforced by word and deed – apparently stops south of the U.S.-Mexican border. In a blatant move to disqualify Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador from the presidential sweepstakes – he’s ahead in the polls by a wide margin – the Mexican Congress has voted to strip Lopez of his immunity from prosecution and arrest him on a minor procedural issue: an act that effectively kicks him off the ballot. Mexican law forbids anyone under indictment from seeking the presidency.

…

This brazen attempt to steal Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, from the man who, by all accounts, would win a free and fair election, proves that Fox is just another Third World autocrat, no less gangsterish than the losing faction in Ukraine, former Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev, or other alleged tyrants, such as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, all of whom have earned brickbats from the West. While none of these targets of our official ire is exactly an angel, at least they allow opposition candidates to run in elections: the deal concocted by Fox, the PAN, and the PRI to eliminate (and jail) the most popular candidate saves them the trouble of rigging the election.

From: Trouble South of the Border at antiwar.com