Monday, October 23, 2006

 

AMLO’s Campaign May Be Fizzling Out in Mexico

 

By Allan Wall

 

Just a few months back, the streets of Mexico City were filled with protesting supporters of AMLO (Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador), the losing candidate of the Coalition for the Good of Everybody.

 

To some observers, it looked like Mexico was on the verge of falling apart.  And given the Mexican media’s fixation with its capital city, it’s understandable that some would have gotten that impression.

 

The Mexican election was held July 2 and it was a squeaker. AMLO only lost to Felipe Calderon by a quarter of a million votes.

 

Even when Mexico’s Federal Electoral Tribunal officially declared Calderon the election winner in early September, AMLO continued to cry foul, and in mid-September he had himself “elected” president in a rally in Mexico City’s main plaza, the Zocalo.

 

But as of late October, AMLO’s campaign is looking more and more irrelevant.  Just a cursory look at the news media shows you that Calderon is getting a lot more attention than AMLO.

Not only that, but Calderon is looking presidential – making plans and promises and talking to people. He just recently took a grand tour of Latin America, where regional leaders accepted him as the next president of Mexico. (Calderon didn’t visit Venezuela though, where Hugo Chavez continues to reject his election.)

Next Calderon plans to visit the Anglophone regions of the Hemisphere, visiting Canada on October 26 and 27, and calling on George W. Bush at the Oval Office on November 9.

 

Mexico’s new Congress has been installed, and it includes representatives from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Workers Party (PT), and Convergence for Democracy, which comprised AMLO’s coalition.  (These politicians might have called the election illegitimate, but they didn’t consider their own elections illegitimate.)  Whatever they might say or think about Calderon, these Mexican deputies and senators are now busy negotiating and horse trading for a piece of the political pie. That indicates a de facto recognition of the legitimacy of the Mexican government.

 

The most recent nail in the coffin of the AMLO candidacy was the Tabasco election of October 15.  A race that pitted PRD gubernatorial candidate Cesar Raul Ojeda against PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) candidate Andres Granier, a former mayor of Villahermosa, Tabasco’s capital city.

AMLO himself spent weeks in Tabasco, stumping for Ojeda. For Lopez Obrador it was an extension of his post-election presidential campaign contention.  And it was a valiant effort, but to no avail as Ojeda lost and Granier won.

 

This was a heavy defeat for AMLO for several reasons.

 

For one thing, Tabasco is AMLO’s home state.  It’s where he bolted to national prominence in 1994-1995, fighting another contested election.  And it’s a state in which he won in the presidential election on July 2, garnering 56 percent of the Tabasco votes cast.

 

And yet, he couldn’t pull it off for the PRD candidate.  AMLO’s Tabasco rout is yet another nail in the coffin of the AMLO campaign.

 

Raymundo Riva Palacio, of the Mexico City daily El Universal, called the defeat a catastrophe for AMLO.  Oscar Luis Rodriguez, a PRD member from Tabasco waxed poetic as he sized it up this way: “Andres Manuel has lost credibility. He has lost respect. Here [in Tabasco] Andres Manuel was born, and here he has been buried.”

 

Even Alejandro Encinas, the mayor of Mexico City and a close AMLO collaborator, said the PRD needs to reanalyze its electoral strategy.

 

Certainly AMLO can soldier on, continuing to protest and speak out. But if his star continues to fade and his campaign keeps fizzling, his campaign could become like that of chic guerrilla chief Sub-commander Marcos, whose busy activities are politically irrelevant.

 

For the AMLO campaign the thrill is gone, and even many of his supporters have tired of the game.  In a survey in September, 55 percent of those polled said if the election were today they’d vote for Calderon over AMLO.

 

Guadalupe Loaeza, writing for La Jornada (not exactly a PAN rag) had this advice for the Mexican left: “Now it’s enough to thank him [AMLO] for his services rendered, present him with a commemorative watch, and move forward.”

Mexico is not about to fall apart – its institutions have survived this crisis.

But the country’s continuing economic and social crises are still pressing issues that Mexico’s next president must deal with.  If Calderon can’t, the left will probably win handily in 2012.

 

——————————

Allan Wall, a MexiData.info columnist, recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.  He currently resides in Mexico, where he has lived since 1991. He can be reached via e-mail at allan39@prodigy.net.mx.