U.S. electioneers working openly (and illegally) in Mexico

BY STAN GOTLIEB

Mexican law forbids foreigners from getting involved with Mexican politics. This doesn’t seem to bother either Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox, his handpicked successor, candidate Felipe Calderon, nor U.S. “consultants” Rob Allyn and Dick Morris.

Allyn and Morris have been hired by the Calderon campaign to help derail the front-runner in the upcoming (July 2) election, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). Famous for their “dirty tricks” campaigns for Richard Nixon (Allyn) and Bill Clinton (Morris), they are actively advising Calderon and Fox on all aspects of the election PR. So far, their advice, while blatantly illegal to give, has had positive short-term and negative long-term results for their candidate.

To understand better how this works, one needs to understand the nature of the Mexican state. For more than 70 years, until the upset victory of Vicente Fox (with the “handling” of Rob Allyn), the ruling PRI party controlled all three branches of government. They still control the legislative and judicial branches. Fox, whose PAN party is controlled by conservative elements of the Catholic church and large land owners, has, for six years, been desperately trying to play the “U.S. card”: trading off increased access for U.S. and global corporate interests in hopes of a quid-pro-quo of relaxed immigration laws; a strategy which has backfired on him. Now that there are more fences being built, more troops sent to our side of the border, and new laws criminalizing illegal immigrants and those who offer them shelter or a drink of water, Fox is seen as a weak leader, incapable of leading the country in any direction other than toward more poverty, more social unrest, and more humiliation at the hands of the gringos.
The sins of the political father (Fox) have tainted the campaign of the son (Calderon). This will translate into an AMLO victory in July, unless the “consultants” can successfully smear him in the little time that they have left. They are doing their best.

AMLO is a rather mild mannered populist whose highly publicized give-backs to the poor in the form of universal pensions for the elderly and education subsidies have done little to alleviate the day-to-day desperation of the vast majority of Chilangos (residents of Mexico City). His transportation mega-projects (a second deck on the inner-city freeways and a special lane for buses on a few of the major bus routes) have proved to be boondoggles for large construction interests while doing little to alleviate the congestion that feeds the terrible smog. He supports a high-speed rail corridor across Oaxaca’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which among other things will remove a large part of Mexico’s remaining old-growth rain forest, and pollute the water tables of southern Oaxaca and northern Chiapas. He talks anti-globalist but walks a globalist path. This has not prevented the “consultants” from mounting a series of television spots accusing him of being a red-eyed, sharp-toothed populist revolutionary, bent on turning Mexico into “another Cuba,” while falsely claiming that his campaign is taking money from Fidel and from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Even though corruption is a way of life in Mexican politics (ex-president Lopez Portillo famously said the a poor elected official is a poor politician), and even though no hint of personal gain has ever emerged, AMLO is being smeared with the kickbacks and excesses of a few of the hundreds of functionaries that he supervised as governor of the Federal District.

Mexican pollsters and the main line mass media, known to be the best informers that money can buy, are claiming that AMLO, once ahead by as much as 18 percent, is now a point or two behind Calderon. (PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo is so far behind nobody is paying any attention to anything he says.)This too is part of the “consultants” strategy: convince voters that AMLO is weakening. It will create “blowback” (the unexpected result of an action) by motivating more AMLO voters to turn out on election day.

The most important strategy error of the “consultants,” however, has been to advise president Fox to exercise the “mano duro” (hard hand) of the police state, in order to quell the rising tide of public dissatisfaction at the current state of things.

When Fox first took office, he proposed (ordered) a new airport to be built about 10 miles outside MexCity. Not a bad idea, since the current airport is overcrowded and surrounded by residential and commercial zones. However, he picked the wrong location, an area known as Atenco, where the marginal farmers of the area had been eking out a living for centuries, and where there is a strong current of independence and revolutionary history. The farmers organized themselves, and, armed only with pitchforks, machetes and other agricultural implements, faced down the police and the army, forcing Fox to abandon the project. He has been out to get them ever since.

Recently, the Atenco folks came to the aid of some flower sellers in nearby Texcoco. They were refusing to be displaced from their place of business in order to make way for a giant Walmart center. There was a short but violent confrontation and the flower sellers won. On the advice of the “consultants,” Fox decided (not a hard decision for him) to send massive numbers of federal state and local troops to Atenco, to “kick butt.” The ensuing police riot, filmed by dozens of observers, resulted in death, permanent injuries, rapes, beatings, destruction of homes and theft of property. It has been a public relations disaster for Calderon, who has been standing up in front of crowds of party faithful and declaring that none of it really happened—again, at the advice of the “consultants.”

The people are angry. There have been mini-uprisings all over Mexico over various local issues and in support of Atenco. As in 2000, a “silent vote” is building which is likely to be in AMLO’s favor come July.

Little is left to Fox but to try to rig the vote count, an old standby of Mexican politics (and one not unfamiliar to the U.S.). If I were Fox, I’d have the “consultants” deported for violating article 33 of the Mexican constitution forbidding foreigners from trying to influence Mexican elections. Of course, if he did that, he might have to deport himself for receiving millions of dollars of secret contributions from U.S. interests in 2000.

Stan Gotlieb has been living in and writing about Oaxaca and Mexico for over 12 years. To read more of his writings, visit http://www.realoaxaca.com.