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 Editorials | April 2005 
Searching For A Silver Lining
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - The Herald México
| | Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador raises his arm as thousands of leftist sympathizers stage a protest last week to complain about his removal. (Photo: EPA) |
Once more into the breach on the desafuero of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, modern Mexico's version of the trial of Socrates.
With apologies to all who've had more than their fill of this unpleasant subject over the last few weeks, there's really no getting away from it. We're living through the most consequential political moment since at least the Colosio assassination in 1994, and more likely since the disputed 1988 presidential election. We might as well examine it to death.
Historian Lorenzo Meyer warned many months ago that the move to eliminate López Obrador as a presidential candidate by prosecuting him on a minor and doubtful contemptof-court charge would throw Mexico's democracy back to where it was in 1988 which is to say, nowhere at all. That was the year that Cuauhtémoc Cardenas' breakaway challenge to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PR) was beaten down at the last minute by what most consider to have been blatant fraud.
The PRI now shares its power in Congress with the National Action Party's (PAN's) power in Los Pinos, but the message of the desafuero formalized on Thursday is the same message as 1988: "Our democracy is like high school student government, boys and girls. You can play at it all you want but if you ever get serious, out you go."
Out went López Obrador's candidacy on Thursday, along with the hopes of millions of the poor who support him and millions of the not-so-poor who are also disillusioned with freemarket absolutism's chokehold on public policy. Yes, there's a chance that hidden in the upcoming byzantine proceedings lurks some judicial space for a conscientious judge to put an end to this nightmare in time for López Obrador to register as a presidential candidate. There are some escape hatches.
But realistically, it will take a miracle to salvage his candidacy, and the ad hoc PRI/PAN alliance has outlawed miracles.
Whether the campaign to sink López Obrador was a caballed conspiracy or a convenient convergence of interests, it couldn't have come at a worse time. Democratic culture was in its infancy. The desafuero is infanticide.
A year ago, Mexico was a fledgling democracy with growing pains, to be sure, but boasting a strong electoral body (the IFE) and a national commitment to do things right. As a nation, Mexico looked forward to an exemplary threeway race in 2006 the way baseball fans look forward to Opening Day.
That was a year ago. Today, Mexico is a country whose entrenched leaders may soon have put the leading opposition candidate in jail.
As I walked on Thursday afternoon in a blue funk through the hills of Naucalpan PAN country I looked for a silver lining in all this. The mom-andpop shops and comida corrida holes in the wall were crammed with people watching the desafuero proceedings instead of the usual Televisa/Azteca embarrassments. That right there, I suppose, is some kind of silver lining.
But I also noticed that most people were disgusted by the idea of pulling the trap door on a candidate. This observation is reflected in the polls, which show opposition to the desafuero running even higher than support for Lopez Obrador's candidacy. The media pundits, too, are overwhelmingly against the prosecution of López Obrador, whether they support his policies or not.
As silver linings go, this isn't the most satisfying one. It's hard to get too excited about the population voicing widespread opposition to a travesty when the political elite can spit in the face of it and pull off their virtual advance coup d'etat anyway.
But at least there's hope in the fact that most Mexicans aren't going for the ploy that this thing is all about the rule of law. Nor are most so cynical and antidemocratic that they would stoop so low as to accept the true (though rarely spoken) rationale for the desafuero, which is that "this dangerous man must be stopped by any means possible."
The people aren't buying the Big Lie. Unfortunately, they're going to have to live with it anyway. |
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