La Revolucion

While the ME is in flames and the media's attention is diverted with barely enough left to report on the heat wave gripping the nation, I am getting worried about the powder keg smoldering to the south.

Things are at a standstill in Mexico while the country resolves its electoral crisis that many wonder might explode into civil war.

From Rueters:

"You want civil war!" a full-page advertisement in one newspaper this week screamed at Lopez Obrador. The ad, placed by what appeared to be a private citizen, accused the leftist of treason and seeking "to divide and bleed a people that is united and at peace."

A cartoon in the Reforma newspaper pictured Lopez Obrador as the horror movie doll Chucky wearing a Nazi swastika armband and wielding an ax.

On the other side, posters portraying conservative Felipe Calderon as a Nazi are showing up in Mexico City's subway and a group of people harassed him as he left a meeting with trade union leaders earlier this week.

The election split Mexico between left and right, giving Calderon a victory of some 240,000 votes, or 0.6 percentage point, over Lopez Obrador.

The leftist, 52, challenged Calderon on Friday to accept a vote-for-vote recount of ballots and promised to keep up massive street protests if the court did not call a recount.


One might be experiencing deja vu over this squeaker of a vote so close to the US's series of tight races. Why are vote margins so thin while conservatives dominate institutions and at the same time have such deplorable poll numbers? I know that's a question pondered deeply these days in the red state/blue state debate. But many are beginning to accept the possibility that right wing governments just cheat like hell and laugh at the public for its sheepishness. Although a UN election monitoring team called the Mexican elction clean, some of the same controversies over provisional ballots, ballot dumping and voter intimidation are issuing from Mexican media. From LA times:

Election authorities said that as many as 900,000 votes remained to be added to the official tally because polling station results had not yet arrived at regional election headquarters. An undetermined number are from the remotest rural areas of southern Mexico, which lean toward Lopez Obrador.

The new figures were released after Lopez Obrador charged Monday that more than 3 million votes had been "lost" from the preliminary tallies released by the Federal Electoral Tribunal.

The Calderon campaign insisted that the final outcome was not in doubt.

"The general tendencies and the result will not change," Calderon advisor Arturo Sarukhan said. "Felipe Calderon is today the president-elect of Mexico…. With or without these 3 million votes, the result will not change."

But leaders of Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, said election officials had committed a serious error by leading Mexicans to believe that nearly all the votes had been counted.

"It seems to me very grave, and unforgivable, that a fact of this nature was not released to the public," said Jesus Ortega, Lopez Obrador's campaign coordinator.

Obrador's followers are raising hell like voters in the US should have made in 2000 and 2004. It might be unnatural for people in America to think of protests and civil disobedience as means to a legitimate end, but a sense of true patriotism dictates that we must be vigilant in challenging those who would hijack our institutions. Although I have little hope of this trend changing anytime soon, let's keep a closer look south of the border as to the people's next move.