2006: the inconvenient truth of an inconvenient woman

When I wrote Gods, Gachupines and Gringos, I was unconvinced that Felipe Calderón’s election to the Presidency was as legitimate as some critics (and even my editor) insisted.  Although I can, with some justice, be called (as one Amazon.com reviewer put it), a “total lefty”, if I were in the future to write a second edition (don’t hold your breath) that included this present administration, there are some positive things that could be said about it:  taking serious steps towards dealing with climate change,  changes in the tax code and court system, and perhaps NOT being sucked into the U.S. financial disaster at the end of the Bush Administration (though that was more a result of having made financial regulatory changes after the Mexican financial melt-down of the early 1990s).

Calderón himself seems aware, though, that any discussion of his administration is not going to focus on those small steps (which — who knows? — may be seen as seminal ones in future histories) but on the “drug war”, which touched off a spiral of lawlessness, militarization and an erosion of civil rights.  And — while it’s maybe us “total lefties” that have tied the administration’s prosecution of the “drug war” to an attempt to create legitimacy, questioning the legitimacy of Calderón’s election may not be out of the mainstream after all.  The only question I would have in writing a hypothetical second edition would be whether or not I overlooked who may be the key figure in all this:  Elba Esther Gordillo Morales.

Here I have been blithely assuming that the key figures in the 2006 election were the candidates, or at least the two main candidates, Calderón and López Obrador.

At the time, Gordillo — who in addition to her presidency of the teachers’ union, was a PRI Senator and a member of the Party’s Central Committee — had been purged in large part because of her close ties to Marta Fox and to Gordillo’s willingness to go against her own party’s platform in support of Fox Administration initiatives.  After being tossed out of PRI, she set up PANAL, but was not that party’s candidate in 2006.  PANAL received less than one percent of the national vote, but when López Obrador and his supporters contested the results, U.S. observers made the comparison to the Bush-Gore Presidential election of 2000.  PANAL was not exactly analogous to the U.S. Green Party, which the Gore supporters suspected (rightly) was receiving help from Bush supporters to drain some support from Gore (it was assumed PANAL was designed to draw support away from PRI, which did extremely poorly in that election),  but Gordillo was even more devious than we suspected.

Even if Calderón is seen in the future to have actually won (by less that half a percentage point), Gordillo is still the one who deserves the credit (or blame) for the result.  It appears that PANAL was merely a devise for giving Gordillo (who by now was party chair) a legitimate “place at the table” in the electoral process, or to keep  political operatives employed … paid through PANAL, but working for PAN.

Amazingly, this information comes not from some total lefty source, but from the editorially conservative (as in the regular columnists on Latin American affairs are Andres Openheimer, Jorge Castañeda and Mario Vargas Llosa) Madrid daily, El País.  Demographer María de las Heras not only found that only 43 percent of Mexicans believe that fraud was not involved in the 2006 Presidental election (with 49 percent believing it was, and the rest unsure): the results coming from a poll about Gordillo’s political influence that followed her “cheerful” confession of having pedaled influence in the election to ensure her own continued political relevance.

To the surprise of friends and strangers alike, Professor Elba Esther Gordillo, leader of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), admitted openly and without embarrasment that in 2006 she negotiated electoral support with then candidate Felipe Calderon in return for a guaranteed number of government positions.

…

Five years after Calderón emerged victorious in the elections with only a 0.5% advantage, a high percentage (49%) of voters believe, rightly or not, that it was a Pyrrhic victory achieved by electoral fraud.  Gordillo certainly does no favor by emerging as a key Calderón ally when she serenely confirms what was only suspected before:  that she persuaded some PRI governors to tilt the election  in favor of Calderon to the detriment of Andres Manuel López Obrador, who came up short a mere 250,000 votes.

(My translation, original article here)

Ms. de la Herda, notes that 59 percent of those surveyed feel Gordillo has had a baleful influence on the present government and that 63 percent believe that presidents should never trade government positions for electoral support.  The pollster doesn’t see any immediate consequences for the 2012 election[*], but then… historically speaking (lefty or otherwise)… it’ll be around 2018 before there’s any way to know what it all means.