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 Editorials | May 2005 
Hopes, Fears Ride On Mayor
 Ginger Thompson - NYTimes
| | An estimated 1.2 million marchers poured into the capital's center as part of a rally supporting Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. |
He is mayor of the largest city in the hemisphere, and this country's latest political phenomenon.
He can summon tens of thousands into the streets at will. In a whirlwind three weeks he staged the biggest protest in Mexico's recent history and turned back a legal challenge from the president and Congress that threatened to end his political career.
Now Andrés Manuel López Obrador seems all but destined to be elected president next year.
"What we saw last Sunday was proof that this is a new society," the mayor said during an interview last week, referring to the protest march, "that the traditional structures of power are not in control, not even with all their money and media." Indeed, while López Obrador, a 51-year-old widower and father of three sons, has proven that he can motivate this country's vast underclass, what remains unclear is whether he will be able to keep pro-U.S. businesspeople and the fragile middle class on his side.
He is better known for picking political fights than building bridges. And his left-leaning, hard-charging political style has many in the ruling elite and analysts abroad worried that Mexico could go the way of Venezuela, embroiled in a class war as President Hugo Chávez rides a wave of anti-U.S. sentiment.
It is a wave that has swept leftist politicians into power across Latin America. And like Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Tabaré Vásquez of Uruguay, López Obrador personifies the angry disappointment with Washington-backed pro-market economic policies that have stabilized the economy for the rich but failed to lift the poor. His rise to power would move that frustration to the United States' back door.
In the interview, López Obrador rejected comparisons to leftist movements across the region. He said he considered himself a purely Mexican phenomenon, shaped by a devout Catholic mother, a devastating family tragedy and a poet who wrote about Mexico's beautiful landscapes and introduced him to this country's grimmest struggles.
At his core, the mayor said, he remains an underdog activist from the tropics, where politics can be a rough-and-tumble affair. But, he said, he has been a player in national politics for nearly a decade, having served as president of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) before becoming mayor in 2000.
He pointed to his record as mayor of this monster of a city, pulling out financial statements that showed the lowest debt increases in the last 20 years as proof that he is qualified to run the national economy. He pointed to the nearly one million people who marched on this city last month as proof that most Mexicans think so too. "The mentality of the people has changed," he said. "They are willing to stand up for democracy. That's what we were betting on. And we bet right." Indeed, the mayor, known in Mexico JFK-like as AMLO, defies easy labels. He holds daily press conferences at 6 a.m., but brushes off most substantive questions and has blocked the enforcement of freedom-of-information laws.
He has been criticized by conservatives for spending lavishly on welfare for the elderly, a shelter for prostitutes too old to work and double-decker freeways to ease traffic. He rattled the left when he blocked laws that would have legalized gay unions, forged agreements with business tycoons to restore Mexico City's Historic Center and brought former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York to help design zero-tolerance crime policies.
And in what even his closest aides considered a major blunder that alienated the middle class, he said the organizers of a citizens' march against crime were pawns in a right-wing conspiracy against him.
Like almost every other political leader in this country, López Obrador started out in the old authoritarian regime that dominated the government for more than seven consecutive decades. His supporters point out that the mayor agitated against corruption within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), then abandoned it to help lead a leftist opposition movement that put Mexico on the road to greater democracy.
"It has been said that López Obrador writes his speeches with his left hand and governs with his right," said Héctor Zagal, who coauthored a biography on the mayor. "He's a product of the old PRI, with all its flaws and virtues." Manuel Camacho Solís , a federal legislator and chief political strategist to the mayor, said, "He is comfortable as a social leader, and he does it well, but he has had to work on learning to govern. "To be president, he needs to win people's respect through dialogue, not in conflict with them." López Obrador did not disagree. "There is the impression that I am authoritarian," he said. "But social movements require strong leadership.
"This fight is very hard," he said. "And at times it hardens the heart, but not forever." Clues about the mayor, named for his father, Andrés, and his mother, Manuela, are scattered across the southern state of Tabasco. He was born in a tiny town, Tepetitan, that feels nothing like the city he governs today.
Children play ball in the middle of cornfields, and scruffy fishermen like Felipe López González quote scripture from the New Testament as they explain how the average family lives close to this country's richest oil fields on less than US4 a day.
Poverty, at that time, seemed a passing matter to the young López Obrador, something he heard about from the men and women who could not pay their tabs at his family's general store.
Then, in 1969, that idyllic life was shattered when one of his younger brothers, José Ramón, was killed; he was playing with a pistol when it fired.
Andrés Manuel, 15 at the time, watched it happen. Relatives said he had tried to get his brother to put the gun away.
In the interview, the mayor declined to talk about the event or the speculation by some here that the trauma of that shooting gives his politics a messianic zeal.
"It affected me and still affects me," the mayor said.
Perhaps the experience that changed him most came years later in the Indian town of Tucta, which López Obrador helped raise from a swamp. He first laid eyes on the village in 1976 in the company of Carlos Pellicer Cámara, one of Mexico's most beloved poets.
It was a place that seemed lost in time. The Chontal Indians, descendents of the Maya, had no electricity or clean water. There were no schools or clinics. And people lived in huts made from branches and leaves.
"Not only did they have the Chontales stuck out in the margins of society," López Obrador recalled, referring to government authorities, "they denied that the Chontales existed, even though they are the most intimate reality of Tabasco." The Indians quickly became an intimate reality for López Obrador. He moved his wife and baby son into a shack in Tucta with dirt floors and a thatched roof, and much as he has done in Mexico City began a combination of welfare and infrastructure programs to help meet people's basic needs and put them to work.
"He could have had a comfortable life with his family, but he brought them here to be with us," recalled Pedro Bernardo, 58, one of the beneficiaries of López Obrador's work in Tucta. "There are few people who could endure the blows of this life." There were even tougher blows to come.
"My dream was to become the governor of Tabasco," López Obrador said, "because I wanted to change it." It was a dream that would elude him.
López Obrador abandoned the PRI, then set out to topple it in 1988 when the party refused to run him for mayor of the municipality of Macuspana.
Backed by a peasant political base that he commanded like a general, the firebrand politician ran twice for governor on leftist tickets and lost both times. The elections in 1994 were marred by allegations of corruption. And for several months, López Obrador and his civilian troops protested every way they could, to make the state ungovernable.
Two years later, the anti-establishment activist was at it again, leading thousands of supporters against more than 50 oil wells across the state to protest spills by the state-owned oil company that had contaminated rivers and farmland.
The protests caused the company to lose some US8.5 million in revenues in the first 12 days. Dozens of people were hurt and arrested as police tried to clear a way to the wells.
In the interview last week, López Obrador said the principles of those battles still guide him, but his radical days are over.
"I'm a centrist now," he said, with a wry smile.
"When we started, the PRI dominated completely," he said. "Not even the leaves of the trees moved unless the PRI said so."
"A lot of time had to pass before people began to live their freedom," he said. "It was up to us to teach them not to be afraid."
"They are not afraid anymore." |
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