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 Editorials | At Issue | June 2006 
Fear of Leftist has Mexican Middle Class on Edge
 Greg Brosnan - Reuters
| | Presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the leftist Democtratic Revolution Party, PRD, is kissed by a supporter during a rally in the city of Izamal, on the Yucatan peninnsula on Sunday June 10, 2006. Next July 2, Mexico will hold presidential elections. (AP/Israel Leal) |
Magda Leguizamo's secluded middle-class street, with its brightly painted two-story homes, neatly pruned gardens, yapping toy dogs and children riding electric-powered tricycles, was gone.
Hordes of uncouth street vendors had turned the road in a vast trash-strewn open-air market, tying plastic awnings to every corner of the 59-year-old retiree's house, blocking her drive and making her a prisoner in her own home.
The nightmare in which she dreamed her street was overrun by the masses was inspired by fears shared by much of Mexico's middle class about what might happen if leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wins a July 2 election.
Recounting the nightmare to a journalist, Leguizamo said she awoke relieved that the election was still to come and that conservative candidate Felipe Calderon was just as likely to win. "I looked out of my window and saw my pretty street," she said. "That's the way I want it to stay."
Once seen easily scoring the latest in a line of Latin American leftist presidential wins, Lopez Obrador is now in a dead heat with conservative ruling party rival Calderon.
With much of the rural and urban poor unbudgingly loyal to the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI of struggling third-place candidate Roberto Madrazo, analysts say Lopez Obrador must appeal to at least part of the middle-class if he is to win.
To do so, he may have to overcome middle-class fears, however irrational they may be, that a victory for the left would ignite an egalitarian apocalypse which could spark economic chaos, street protests and land grabs.
Having an afternoon drink with a group of gym friends in a house in the tidy Bulevares neighborhood in northern Mexico City, 57-year-old housewife Marisela Suarez said she would vote "so that gentleman does not get in."
POOR MAN'S CANDIDATE
Mexico City's urban poor -- Lopez Obrador's main support base -- live cheek-by-jowl in crowded tenements or in sprawling conurbations like Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, pegged onto the scruffy edges of a vast metropolis that takes hours to cross.
The former Mexico City mayor is popular among them for promising to increase incomes for the country's worst-off, many of whom feel little gain from the economic stability President Vicente Fox cites as his main achievement.
While the gated hillside hide-outs of Mexico City's very rich were never going to vote for a former Indian welfare officer, Lopez Obrador-phobia is also rife in lesser well-off districts like Bulevares.
"I'm not afraid, I'm terrified," said Maria del Pilar Arcos, a 30-year-old architect friend of Marisela Suarez.
Calderon campaign television ads comparing Lopez Obrador to Venezuelan firebrand President Hugo Chavez and predicting a financial meltdown akin to the mid-1990s Tequila Crisis if he wins are partly credited with costing the leftist his lead.
Despite repeated assurances from Lopez Obrador that he will respect private property, the nightmare scenarios portrayed in the ads are tame compared with those in the heads of some middle-class voters, who imagine their spare rooms being expropriated and handed over to a brutal underclass.
"We're talking about a mob without culture or education, which is prepared to kill people for a kilo of anything you give them," said Suarez.
"(We) are scared that tomorrow you will need to have a rifle here by the door because they've come to put 20 people from Nezahualcoyotl in with you."
RUMORS OF REVOLUTION
Lopez Obrador's campaign aides say the fears are totally unfounded and point to high private investment while he was Mexico City mayor as proof he will work with businessmen.
They say he wants to boost economic growth through investment and that expropriations are nowhere on the agenda.
"Andres Manuel is a moderate," said top campaign aide Jose Agustin Ortiz Pinchetti. "He is a man of the center-left, a very moderate social democrat and is not going to encourage a popular uprising. He wouldn't be able to govern."
Fear among the better-off that a violent rabble will rise up in revolt may date back as far as Mexico's 1910 revolution, its land expropriations and ensuing civil strife which gave roving bandits a free reign.
Lopez Obrador aide Ortiz said anonymous phone calls and malicious chain e-mails to voters -- one of which said Lopez Obrador would make Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin's birthday a national holiday if elected -- had heightened the hysteria.
He said that while Mexico's poor alone could win the election for Lopez Obrador, many enlightened middle-class voters would also back him. But he conceded that fear was a very real hurdle between the leftist and the presidency.
"Calderon can count on a very strong vote from all these people ... from the upper-middle class which, despite apparently being educated have deep phobias about what will happen when all these masses rise up." |
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