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 Editorials | Issues | December 2006 
Mexico Election Loser Still Fighting
 Myrtle Beach Online
| | "He has taken on a messianic attitude." |
For most of the world, Mexico will inaugurate a president named Felipe Calderon this morning. Congratulations will flow from around the globe. Cabinet members will be sworn in. Mariachi music will play.
It won't change a thing, however, in the bright yellow building at 64 San Luis Potosi St. Inside sits the man who insists that he's the real president of Mexico: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has his own Cabinet, his own budget and even his own tricolor presidential sash, which he strapped on more than two weeks ago.
'Office of the legitimate president,' his aides say when answering the phone. Never mind that he lost at the ballot box and in the courts.
Welcome to the alternate reality that Lopez Obrador has carved out months after the country's highest electoral court declared that he'd lost the July presidential election by some 230,000 votes, the most closely contested presidential race in Mexico's history.
His most ardent supporters, convinced that the election was stolen from them, seem ready to follow the fiery leftist anywhere. But others say they hardly recognize Lopez Obrador anymore, describing a haunted and lonely man consumed by the passion that he once called the 'Achilles' heel' of ambitious politicians from his native state of Tabasco, in Mexico's deep south.
'He has taken on a messianic attitude,' said Alejandro Almazan, the author of a recent book on Lopez Obrador's unsuccessful campaign. 'I don't know what happened, but he is not the man I used to know.'
Lopez Obrador told the newspaper El Noroeste this week that he's not play-acting.
'I already am the legitimate president of Mexico, proudly so,' he said when he was asked whether he'd run again in 2012. 'We are going to govern with the participation of the people.'
The headquarters of the 'parallel' government, formerly known as the Lopez Obrador campaign office, don't buzz with the excitement and optimism found there last spring, when the former Mexico City mayor seemed unbeatable.
But inside aides are busy answering phones and letters, holding meetings and putting the final touches on a logo for the 'legitimate president' that they plan to stamp on T-shirts and buttons that can be sold to help finance their operations.
Muffled chatter at the reception desk signaled the arrival of a box of handbills Thursday morning, less than 24 hours before Calderon was to be sworn in. They advertised a street protest timed to coincide with the inaugural ceremonies.
'The Imposition Will Not Happen,' the leaflet declared, referring to plans by militant party members and legislators to make trouble and perhaps even halt the power-transfer ceremony in Mexico's Congress today.
The fireworks began Tuesday, when loyalists in Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution - the PRD in its Spanish initials - came to blows with members of Calderon's National Action Party, the PAN, in the House of Deputies, where the transfer of power is to take place.
The PRD lawmakers struggled to take over the main dais. But unlike in September, when the leftists stopped outgoing President Vicente Fox from reaching the podium to deliver his final state of the nation address, the PAN lawmakers and security guards stopped the seizure.
Lopez Obrador's advisers acknowledge that the post-election mess has cost him popularity, and polls show that most Mexicans oppose efforts to stop Calderon's inauguration. That so many lawmakers remain loyal to Lopez Obrador in spite of the political risks comes as little surprise to those who've followed his career.
'He was always a leader,' said Ernesto Benitez, a lifelong friend from tiny Tepetitan, Tabasco. 'People say he's messianic, but he never asked for it.' |
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