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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | February 2005 
Condoleeza Rice vs. Democracy in Mexico
 Dan Feder - NarcoNews.com
 It has become increasingly clear that the Bush administration is intent on stopping Mexico's most popular politician, left-wing Mexico City governor Andres Manuel López Obrador, from entering his country's upcoming presidential election. Al Giordano reports from Mexico today that while Condoleeza Rice and her ilk are piling on the drug-war rhetoric to justify U.S. government interference in the expression of democracy in its neighbor to the South, Mexico's two traditional, neoliberal parties are relentlessly continuing their attempts to use legal loopholes to disqualify López Obrador.
A new kind of coup d'etat has been hatched to strip Mexico City's activist governor Andrés Manuel López Obrador – the country's most popular political leader according to all national public opinion polls – of his right to run for president in the July 2006 elections.
This attempted coup became official policy the week that Condoleeza Rice took the helm of the U.S. State Department last month, and Washington's reliable puppets in two of Mexico's national political parties immediately jumped to implement the master's orders.
López Obrador's opponents – domestic and foreign – fear that the leader of Mexico's electoral left wing will be unstoppable at the ballot box sixteen months from now. And so forces accustomed to stealing and fixing elections for 75 years in this country have come to a last resort: A dirty plot to remove his name from the ballot.
However, both of these anti-democratic forces – the Bush administration and Mexico's traditional political parties – are about to run up against something potentially much more powerful then they: the will of the Mexican public. Giordano describes a new movement, still being born, to stop this "soft coup d'etat" (as Zapatista subcomandante Marcos put it in a recent communique) before it destroys the country's chance at its first truly democratic election.
Various national youth organizations, labor unions, and other networks recently met in Mexico City and launched a non-hierarchical, horizontal network of autonomous local groups. Much in the style of Howard Dean's presidential campaign last year (and of the civil resistance in Venezuela that overturned, in 2002, a coup d'etat), it utilizes the Internet and cell phones as its weapons of communication. Add to that mix that this movement will be independent of the López Obrador's PRD party, thus uncontrollable by any political force, and a potent political recipe is brewing from South of the Border. |
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