Mexican stand-off

6 May, 2005

Mexico is heading for a confrontation that should seriously concern the United States.

It will be affected by the broad swing to the left seen in most of Latin America recently, with Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela all adopting nationalist left-of-centre rhetoric that is more or less critical of the United States.

Only Colombia and most of the Central American states remain pro-American.

Disappointment

While Mexico's maquiladora economy along the northern border has boomed, the rest of the country has lagged behind, and this is widely blamed on the United States and, in particular, on the closeness of President Vicente Fox to President George Bush.

Fox's conservative, pro-business government - the first truly democratic administration in Mexico's history - wrested control from the perennially-in-power Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) in an election not marred by fraud.

But it has disappointed many Mexicans - not entirely through its own fault.

Problems

Fox's main problems have been:

• The extreme difficulty of prising loose the PRI grip on the government machine
• This has frustrated his reforms
• Congress has been almost as stubborn
• Squabbles in the administration and the political ambitions of the President's wife have not helped

Left-wing victory

Both Fox and Washington now face the prospect of something much more alarming than the return to power of the corrupt PRI in next year's presidential election.

The possibility looms of an outright victory by a left-wing candidate running on a populist anti-American platform.

Fox's response has been the exact reverse of everything he was believed to stand for as he sought to ban the challenger from standing in a reversion to the power politics of the PRI era.

Even worse for him, his strategy seems certain to backfire.

Mayor

The candidate is Mexico City's mayor, Manuel Lopez Obrador, a former member of the PRI who has moved to the Democratic Revolutionary Party.

Congress has just striped him of immunity from prosecution on a minor and not even particularly corrupt charge of building a public road across private land to a hospital in defiance of a court order.

Under the constitution, prosecution makes him ineligible to run for president.

Currently Lopez Obrador leads the presidential contest with more than 40 per cent support in opinion polls - triple that of any other candidate.

He offers Mexico its first chance of electing a genuine left-winger - although the labour leader, Cuauhtemoc Cardenes, once came close.

Radical

A powerful orator, Lopez Obrador is a skilful practitioner of urban politics.

He espouses grandiose schemes for double-decker highways across Mexico City's clogged and polluted urban landscape, tolerates corruption in his inner circle, and rules through patronage.

If elected he is likely to be the most radical president since Luis Echeverris in the 1970s, whom the Americans abhorred for his Third World diatribes.

Common aims

Lopez Obrador would add the voice of a powerful country to that of Luis Inacio da Silva - Lula - in Brazil, President Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, and the trailblazing President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

They would:

• seek to rewrite the terms of Latin America's debts
• demand closer regional solidarity against the 'Washington Consensus'
• opposing IMF recipes for the continent
• try to re-draw the terms of trade between the rich countries and the developing world
• aim at a common oil policy
• criticise American intervention in the world.

United States

Through its membership of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and its direct link with the United States, Mexico has traditionally frustrated greater Latin American regional solidarity.

There are of course limits to what Lopez Obrador or any Mexican president can do since so much of Mexico's prosperity depends on the maquiladora, US economic goodwill, and a relaxed attitude towards the illegal Mexican immigrant community in the United States.

Confrontation

Yet a blatant attempt to block Lopez Obrador's candidacy on what most Mexicans see as unabashed political grounds would almost certainly invite disaster - with demonstrations, a big upsurge of sympathy, even rioting and confrontation.

Citizen committees backing Lopez Obrador are springing up across the country; demonstrations have taken place in Mexico City's central square; and the press is whipping up support.

Lopez Obrador might even win on a write-in ballot or through mass casting of blank ballots, which would have to be disallowed.

This would risk an explosion of popular anger that would further radicalise him and his constituency.

The forces of order might prevail, at the cost of leaving Mexico smouldering with discontent, or there might be chaos south of the Rio Grande.

Back off

Fox would be well advised to reassert his democratic credentials by permitting Lopez Obrador to stand.

Washington would be wise to acquiesce in the hope that, if elected, he would seek partnership and accommodation.

Earlywarning believes that Fox will have little choice except to back off. The question is whether he will do so:

• Either sooner - in which case Lopez Obrador still may be defeated
• Or later under popular pressure - hugely enhancing the Mayor's prospects.