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 Editorials | Opinions | May 2005 
Interesting Times Without The Curse
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - The Herald Mexico
"May you live in interesting times" is supposedly an ancient Chinese curse. But I suspect the phrase has seen more use as a lead for opinion columns than it ever did in China. Still, all of us should be allowed to give the cliche a shot once in a lifetime. I'm going to use my bullet now.
We are definitely living in interesting times.
But they don't feel all that cursed. In fact, they feel positively uplifting. Maybe it's the early rains or the lighter traffic from a 10-day glut of minor May holidays, but there seems to be a whiff of optimism in the air. The clouds of Mexican fatalism just might be clearing . . . for now, at least.
In private conversation, discussion of Mexico's myriad social and political ills usually dead-ends in a resigned "Así somos." But the people in the aggregate have been voicing something quite different lately. Something like, "We don't have to live like this. We can do better."
The reason for the upbeat prognosis, of course, is the way the desafuero saga played out in its final weeks. It didn't end with a whimper and a fade to black. It ended in a full-scale retreat by the ruling National Action Party (PAN), an about-face so abrupt that it seemed to stun its beneficiaries in the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and enrage the PAN's erstwhile allies-of-convenience in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). They, after all, were left holding the bag.
You get a good idea of how whiplash-producing the Fox administration's 180 was by sizing up the job descriptions of the outgoing and incoming attorneys general. Until his resignation was accepted on April 27, Rafael Macedo de la Concha was charged with finding a proper and legal way to eliminate Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador as an opposition candidate in the 2006 elections. This Macedo dispatched with the zeal of the military man he is, using up several years and tens of thousands of sheets of paper to do it.
His replacement, Daniel Francisco Cabeza de Vaca, was given the exact opposite mission — find a proper and legal way to un-arrest López Obrador and make this whole thing go away. This, Cabeza de Vaca dutifully carried out in less than a week, in nearly paper-less fashion.
But to grasp the true magnitude of these events, take a step back and think about what actually happened over the last several months. The party in power attempted to eliminate as a presidential candidate its most formidable potential foe, the poll-leading and immensely popular left-of-center leader with a huge base and a clearly-stated political program that threatened the entrenched leaders' way of doing things.
They would use authoritarian strategies to get rid of a politician they and their allies in the press and abroad tried to brand as authoritarian. That in itself is interesting, though more cursi than a curse.
They set out to do this with support from the other opposition party (the PRI), with more than enough votes in Congress to get it done, and with the full cooperation of the Attorney General's Office (PGR) who would be doing the grunt-work. They also must have had a pretty good idea (if not direct assurance) that the Bush administration would stay out of it.
But they failed. They couldn't do it. The people wouldn't let them get away with it. Not "the people" of leftist-caricature rhetoric. But real people. Plain folks.
You don't need to be a López Obrador supporter to appreciate the impact of the mayor's victory. Indeed, many who spoke out against the desafuero made a point of the nonpartisan nature of their involvement. Not to put too sentimental a gloss on it, but the victory really was for democracy. If the PAN and PRI want to stop López Obrador now, they're going to have to convince the voters, not a judge.
And after the way they exposed themselves during the desafuero as something other than the democrats they claim to be, that might be harder to do than it otherwise would have been.
History will always look to the April 24 march to Mexico City's main plaza in support of López Obrador as the turning point. There were supposedly a million in attendance. That figure will rise over the years as more and more people, Woodstock style, will claim to have been there.
But it wasn't so much the number of people that mattered as the ingratiating way they acted. With the exception of the march against crime last year, street protests in Mexico City are seldom inspiring events. The activists usually represent a cause of little concern to anybody but themselves, and their purpose seems not to garner support but to annoy as many people as possible. What they're really good at, though, is causing maximum traffic chaos with a minimum protester-to-vehicle ratio.
The anti-desafuero masses, on the other hand, stood out not just for their peacefulness (was there even one incident reported?) but for their wit and creativity. And most of all their jokes. No matter how you feel about the left, you have to admit they got it all over the right when it comes to humor. López Obrador says more funny things before 7 each morning than the entire Fox administration has said in almost five years.
My personal favorite from the march was the huge Trojan horse made of wooden grocery crates. It was still there, lonely but unharnessed, after the crowd was gone. I also like the Peje el Toro monicker assigned to López Obrador. It's an allusion to the movie trilogy in which Pedro Infante plays, fittingly, a working class hero up against the merciless rich. He emerges in the third film as a boxer, Pepe el Toro. The "Peje" variation on Pepe comes from López Obrador's longtime nickname, a fish from his native state of Tabasco.
The most priceless nickname, though, came not from López Obrador's supporters but from his impeachers, who started referring to him as "Sr. López" after the charges against him were formally (and incorrectly) filed.
This is a little like calling Muhammad Ali "Mr. Clay." Like Gabriel García Márquez or former president José López Portillo, López Obrador uses both his paternal and maternal last names, always. He's even eligible for that rare and elite group often called by their maternal last names only, such as President Zapatero of Spain. "Obrador" has been sneaking by itself into quotes and headlines, and with a nod from the mayor could catch on more.
But the PGR and some Fox administration officials tried to demote him to "Mr. López." They did this because López is like Jones in English, a common name that can stand for a nameless nobody. The message: This man is not important any more.
Like so many of the impeachers' moves throughout the ordeal, this one backfired big time. López Obrador's major appeal is that he's seen to stand up for the nameless nobodies as no other viable politician can. A prominent sign at the march was "We're All López." And true to form, it was joined by a tongue-in-cheek version: "JLo (Jennifer Lopez) is with AMLO (the mayor's initials)."
All that was accomplished by the disparaging references to "Sr. López" was to reinforce the impression that the desafuero was all about elites trying to suppress the common people. That's not a good image for a party trying to stay in power.
None of this means AMLO's going to ride his white horse to Los Pinos and lead the country to a Golden Age. Politics isn't that romantic. Besides, we're in May 2005, not May 2006. Anything can happen in the next year, and it probably will.
But it does mean that the nation has crossed some kind of line and there's no going back. It will be a long time before the right or anybody else tries to pull a stunt like that again.
History might show that the real "change" in Mexico happened not in July of 2000 but in April of 2005. Interesting times, to be sure.
kellyg@prodigy.net.mx |
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