Thread: Will Mexico go left or stay conservative?

Will Mexico go left or stay conservative?
By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 19 minutes ago



MEXICO CITY - Mexicans buffeted by a mudslinging, polarized presidential campaign are choosing Sunday between plunging into Latin America's left-wing tide or electing a conservative who favors free trade and globalization.

With leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and conservative Felipe Calderon running neck-and-neck, the election — which will also pick both houses of congress and five governors — hinges on class divisions that have seldom been talked about so openly in Mexican politics.

For 71 years, until President Vicente Fox's victory in 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ruled Mexico by claiming to represent all economic classes. Fox's victory ushered in full democracy and bettered life for the middle class but failed to create millions of jobs, tame Mexico's drug barons or settle its migrant-labor problems with the U.S.

Today, half of Mexico's 103 million people live on $4.50 a day and the poorest 20 million earn half that — a social and cultural gulf that has been the cornerstone of Lopez Obrador's campaign to succeed Fox, who is constitutionally barred from seeking-re-election.

The divide was on vivid display recently as his supporters cut through a swanky Mexico City shopping mall on their way to a campaign rally. Farming families who had never encountered escalators were hesitant to get on them, drawing disdainful looks from well-dressed onlookers.

This election boils down to a race between those strangers in the shopping mall and Mexicans who fear losing the low-interest loans and economic stability that emerged under Fox's disciplined budgets and high international reserves.

Santino Sanchez Juarez, 87, is one of the former. He barely survived doing odd jobs until Lopez Obrador, as Mexico City mayor, gave the elderly $65 monthly pensions.

"He is the only one with a heart, who cares for the people," said Sanchez Juarez.

He expressed a certain nostalgia for Adolfo Lopez Mateos who, as president from 1958 to 1964, used charisma, nationalism and populist handouts to the poor, but also crushed dissent and antagonized the United States.

Lopez Obrador shares that nostalgia, and his conservative opponent's campaign has been largely based on stoking fears that the left-winger is a clone of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's Cuba-friendly president, and will foment class divisions while returning Mexico to the last debt-ridden years of PRI rule.

The PRI now looks like a spent force, with its candidate, Roberto Madrazo, trailing third in the polls, and Calderon's line of attack seems to have won some supporters.

Listening to Lopez Obrador, "It's almost as though, if you're not poor, he doesn't want to know about you," said Marisol Castro, 55, a middle-class nutritionist from the western city of Zamora.

Victory for Lopez Obrador would be a crowning moment for Latin America's left-wing renaissance, which has captured or held onto the presidency in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

Lopez Obrador has sought to distance himself from the leftist surge, painting himself as a moderate with such benign slogans as "Happiness is on the way." But he also rails against "those on top," pledges to make the rich pay more taxes and wants to restore a sense of national pride, in part by standing up to the United States on issue such as farm trade.

His supporters sometimes heckle opponents' campaign events, cry conspiracy if polls show him faltering and pass out leaflets saying "only Lopez Obrador can win" — fraught language in a country that fears violence if he is defeated.

The last polls all showed a statistically insignificant gap between the front-runners. First results will come in by about 9 p.m. EDT Sunday.

For all the divisions exposed in the campaign, there is much that all three candidates agree on. They advocate close U.S. ties and U.S. immigration reform that would allow more Mexicans to work legally north of the border. They all promise to crack down on crime, and Lopez Obrador has called for the army to play a greater role in fighting drug trafficking — a departure from the left's anti-military tradition.

"There are areas of the country that the government doesn't even control. The drug cartels control them, so we should give thanks if the Mexican government can recover its sovereignty," said Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a Lopez Obrador adviser. "If we can't do that, we won't have good relations with anybody abroad."

Some ghosts of the PRI years have been laid to rest. A stable economy has ended a history of boom-and-bust cycles, and a strong, respected election authority has made vote fraud and dirty tricks much harder to pull off.

But even if a candidate wins handsomely, he is unlikely to command a majority in the new Congress, and may face the same frustrations as Fox did in trying to get his more ambitious programs approved.

Calderon has offered almost as many giveaways as his allegedly free-spending opponent, but has also endorsed some of Fox's most exclusionary policies, such as a law that all but guarantees the stranglehold of a few large companies over the media sector.

Lopez Obrador's campaign has already absorbed some of the old-guard elements of the PRI by building a base of Mexico City government employees as well as beneficiaries of government programs, the kind of patronage machine that kept the PRI in power for decades.

"This is a choice between two clearly distinct proposals that differ over the central theme, which is inequality," said writer Carlos Monsivais. "That's the structural problem of this country."

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Friday, June 30, 2006



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Mexico: On the brink of Marxism

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Posted: June 30, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern



By David T. Pyne



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© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
It is perhaps the most significant potential threat to U.S. national security with regards to our southern neighbor since Poncho Villa raided a U.S. border town in 1916. Mexico will be holding its presidential election on July 2, which will determine whether Mexico, with its nearly 2,000 mile border with the U.S., joins an emerging anti-American Marxist alliance in Latin America. It will decide whether Mexico follows Venezuela's example in becoming a state sponsor of terrorism with a potential pool of 12-20 million illegal immigrant recruits already inside our borders, a couple of million of whom recently conducted mass demonstrations against our country, or continues to be ruled by the much more mainstream PAN party.

Ultra-left Marxist candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, continues to outpoll his more mainstream socialist PRI and center right PAN party opponents in the in the final run-up to the Mexican presidential election scheduled for Sunday. Obrador is a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who is himself a close ally of Communist Cuban President Fidel Castro. Together, Chavez and Castro have been the two principal supporters of Communist and Marxist revolution throughout Latin America.


The PRI's presidential candidate, Roberto Madrazo, has warned that "there are clear similarities between (Venezuelan President Hugo) Chavez and Lopez Obrador. … They have very similar attitudes. I see authoritarianism in them both." Madrazo further said that Obrador, like Chavez, does not respect the rule of law and that foreign investors would shun Mexico if Obrador were to come to power. Madrazo also accused Obrador of being in close contact with Chavez aides and suggested that Chavez was trying to sway the Mexican elections towards Obrador, accusations Obrador did not deny. Obrador's populist leftist appeal and his socialist-style handout programs as mayor of Mexico City have fueled the comparison with Chavez. These allegations were strengthened when Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., told several Mexican legislators that he had intelligence reports revealing major financial support from Chavez to Obrador and his political party. These attacks against Obrador by his presidential rivals have succeeded in reducing his lead in the polls to just a few points.

Madrazo's comparison of Obrador to Chavez is chilling given the fact that Chavez is a self-proclaimed Communist who has declared Communist Cuba as his primary model for Venezuela. The People's Weekly World, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, has staunchly supported Obrador and has noted that his party "was formed in 1989 by left-wing elements of the PRI, the Communist Party of Mexico, and other left and progressive groups." Having a Hugo Chavez-clone elected president of Mexico, a country with a nearly 2,000 mile long border with the United States at a time when President Bush has been trying to open the borders with Mexico and grant amnesty to 12-20 million illegal immigrants and allow tens of millions more to enter the country at will would presumably change the administration's preoccupation with the war in Iraq and focus its attention on America's "backyard" where it belongs.

Dick Morris recently reported in a column this past April entitled "Mexico's Hugo Chavez" that "Chavez is a firm ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro. Lopez Obrador could be the final piece in their grand plan to bring the United States to its knees before the newly resurgent Latin left. Between them, Venezuela and Mexico export about 4 million barrels of oil each day to the United States, more than one-third of our oil imports. With both countries in the hands of leftist leaders, the opportunity to hold the U.S. hostage will be extraordinary. Think we have security problems now, with Vicente Fox leading Mexico? Just wait until we have a 2,000-mile border with a chum of Chavez and Castro. … Lopez Obrador would be part of the Latin America's new, anti-U.S. left. … Mexico, with its vast oil resources and its long border and free-trade agreement with the United States, would be the crown jewel for America's enemies."

A recently published article entitled, "Who Lost Latin America" similarly noted, "Washington confronts the distinct possibility of having an explicitly hostile government in Mexico. The implications of such an outcome could be far-reaching for the integrity of our southern frontier, illegal immigration, drug trafficking, terrorism, trade and the radical 'reconquista' movement (which is intent on 'taking back' at least parts of the United States for Mexico)."

Even under the relatively friendly government of Vicente Fox, as Heather Mac Donald pointed out last November, "Mexican officials here and abroad are involved in a massive and almost daily interference in American sovereignty." Imagine what representatives of an unfriendly Mexican apparat might do. The consequence of all these elections may well be the complete undoing of Ronald Reagan's legacy of successfully countering and, with the notable exception of Castro's Cuba, defeating totalitarianism in our hemisphere.

If Obrador wins this presidential election, it would herald, along with the election of Communist front leader Lula da Silva in Brazil in 2002, the most important victory for Marxist revolutionaries and the biggest defeat for the cause of freedom worldwide since the fall of China to Communism in 1949. The Bush administration should pursue all peaceful avenues available, including covert means, to ensure that Obrador does not succeed in his bid to become the next president of Mexico, or else the national security woes of this administration and this country may increase substantially.

If Obrador wins, President Bush's already badly damaged presidential legacy will likely end up being a much greater terrorist threat to this country than before he became president, and the loss of over 100 million citizens of our southern neighbor to Marxist control nearly two decades after Reagan "won" the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

This is article is the first installment of a special two-part series on threatening developments to the US in Latin America. Part Two "The Emerging New Marxist Latin American Axis of Evil" will premier on WorldNetDaily tomorrow.


David T. Pyne, Esq. is a national security expert who currently serves as president of the Center for the National Security Interest and as a vice president of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies. He served as an international programs manager in the Headquarters, Department of the Army from 2000-2003 with responsibility for the countries of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

Will Mexico go left or stay conservative?

If Fox is a conservative, then let them go the full commie route.

It couldn't be worse for us, and might actually help convince a few more of the Washington morons to secure the border.