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 Editorials | April 2005 
In Mexico, Democracy Lingers Gravely on the Edge
 El Universal
| | López Obrador is prepared to be jailed, but pledges to keep campaigning from behind bars if necessary. |
Politicians should never be above the law. Even so, Mexican congressmen should think carefully before they vote to allow the prosecution of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, left-wing mayor of Mexico City and front-runner in next year's presidential race.
López Obrador an austere politician stands accused of contempt of court. Four years ago, the city failed to stop building an access road to a hospital when ordered to do so. The road, which ran across private property, was eventually built elsewhere.
On the surface at least, López Obrador's mistake seems a relatively minor one. It may simply have been an oversight. No long-term harm seems to have been done. Moreover, by Mexican standards it hardly compares with well-known cases of public incompetence, negligence and corruption, where there has been no legal action.
For example, judges have so far failed to punish politicians who in 2000 channeled more than US100 million from the state oil company to the presidential campaign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 years. Similarly, the appointment of a special prosecutor to examine charges that former president Luis Echeverría was responsible for a massacre of students in 1971 has failed to lead to either trial or punishment. Thus prosecution of López Obrador would look arbitrary and politically motivated, and could diminish respect for Mexico's fragile legal institutions.
It would also bar López Obrador from running in next year's presidential contest. Since his left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolutionary (PRD) does not have another candidate with the same national presence, this would benefit either the PRI or President Vicente Fox's governing National Action Party (PAN) neither of whom has yet selected their candidate.
López Obrador is running well ahead of any other candidate, with 37 percent in opinion polls buoyed by support from the poorest sections of the population. His exclusion would reinforce their suspicion that the political system is biased against them and designed to exclude their participation.
It could benefit López Obrador by allowing him to trade on his image as a political martyr, a formula already deployed to his political advantage. However, this would weaken Mexican democracy and undermine the progress made since the establishment of a fairer and more competitive political system in the 1990s and the election of President Fox five years ago.
In addition it raises the possibility of a political crisis at next year's election that could undermine hard won economic stability. The prospect of another of the "sexennial" crises that routinely accompanied Mexican sixyearly presidential elections when the country was governed by the PRI is now not so unlikely as it once seemed.
This is unnecessary and can be readily avoided if Mexican congressmen act rationally and intelligently. They should do so. |
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