Mexico has a new president— but who is he?

BY STAN GOTLIEB

On July 2, Mexicans went to the polls to elect the people who will represent them for the next six years. Deputies (representatives), senators, governors, mayors, and one—and only one—President. When the smoke cleared, there was one too many presidents.

Felipe Calderon Hinojosa of the conservative, pro-NAFTA party known as the PAN (National Action Party), hand-selected by current president Vicente Fox, “won” by about one-half of one percent of the votes according to the national election commission (IFE), and immediately began acting “presidential,” assembling a “transition team” and giving speeches in which he outlined his “platform” as if he were the official winner—but until the TRIFE (the electoral court) makes its declaration on Sept. 6, there is no “official” president-elect.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the candidate of the moderate, mildly left-of-center PRD (party of the democratic revolution), began immediately to declare the vote count flawed at best and fraudulent at worst. By the middle of the month he had assembled over a million citizens in the Zocalo in Mexico City, calling for a vote-by-vote recount. On July 26, while being goaded by a series of hostile questions in an interview on the giant Univision network, he blurted out, “I am the president-elect. I won a majority of votes.” He promised—and delivered—a much larger turnout for July 30 (by some estimates over 2 million), and at that rally called for his supporters to take over the streets of Mexico City until the TRIFE gives in. Tents and tarps immediately began to spring up all over the center of the city.

So now we have two gunslingers, facing off at high noon. Felipe (the scion of a wealthy and politically connected family with ties to the old PRI—institutional revolutionary party—which ruled Mexico for over 70 years), with his U.S. political advisors Dick Morris and Rob Allyn calling the tune, is stonewalling the tide of discontent and distrust sweeping Mexico in the wake of the disputed election. The voting is over, he says, and the count is tallied, and he won. AMLO should get over it, get out of the way, stop making trouble.

AMLO, a union organizer, street fighter, ex-mayor of Mexico City, is taking his cause to the streets, where he is most comfortable. A failure to hold a vote-by-vote recount will destabilize the country, he says. If Felipe is so sure he won fair and square, why is Felipe opposing a recount, he asks.
It’s a question being asked by a lot of folks, including many public figures that worked to get Calderon elected. This election has inherited the ghost of the Salinas–Cardenas contest in 1988, when, it is generally agreed, a losing Carlos Salinas benefited from a shutdown in the election computers that went off-line with Cardenas ahead and came back online with a Salinas victory. One of the people thought to have been most responsible for that particular switcheroo was a guy named Camacho Solis, then a PRI apparatchik, now a defector working for AMLO. If anyone knows how it’s done, he does.

ALMO is no Al Gore, let alone a John Kerry, and the PRD (along with its allies, the Convergence and Workers parties) is no DFL. AMLO shows every indication of being ready and willing to take this fight to the ultimate consequences—and it appears that the Mexican people are behind him. This sort of hocus-pocus that results in the “election” of the same old power elite time after time has got to stop, they say. Nothing short of the future of Mexico as a democracy is at stake. They vow to demonstrate, disrupt and destabilize until the election court calls for a vote-by-vote recount, something it has never done.

Meanwhile, below the surface, other changes are taking place. The PRI, defeated for the presidency in 2000, lost almost everything on July 2. The future of the party is in serious doubt. While the PRI candidate, Roberto Madrazo, did come in second in a few states, he did not win a single state. Even in the state of Oaxaca, which has a PRI governor, and which had always been thought to be a rock-solid PRI state, the losses were stunning, with the PRI losing nine out of eleven districts to the PRD.

All this is happening in a country that is suffering a major insurrection in Oaxaca, led by the teachers, who are demanding the ouster of the governor as the price of terminating a debilitating strike that has been going on for two months, with as many as 70,000 people occupying the city center, and closing down major roads and government buildings for hours at a time. Six thousand of them were on their way to Mexico City as I write this, to pursue their impeachment petition in the congress. No doubt they joined AMLO’s supporters on July 30.

With miners and steel workers being shot and beaten in Zacatecas state and Michoacan state, and hundreds injured and humiliated by shock troops while demonstrating in the state of Mexico, there is an atmosphere of seething rebellion in the air. The people need some sort of tender of the government’s good intentions. A complete recount would go a long way toward moderating what could be an extremely dangerous situation.