When Vicente Fox became the “great reformist president” of Mexico six years ago, everyone expected that he would build upon his extraordinary defeat of decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, by reforming Mexico. They got the defeat; they didn’t get the reform.
On Sunday, Mexicans go to the polls again. The PRI today is a sniveling third in the race; but the question remains: Will either of the two leading candidates really reform Mexico’s stratified social class system and monopolies on power?
Consider the most dramatic candidate, the charismatic, superpopulista former mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and his Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD. He is popularly known by his initials, AMLO, and there is no question that he spruced up the overcrowded Mexico City into a gorgeous capital. But he did it through massive borrowing, backed up by a strange messianic personality that some see as incipient Mexican fascism.
“I would not say he is fascist,” professor George Grayson, Mexico specialist at the College of William and Mary and author of the Spanish-language “The Mexican Messiah,” told me. “But he has a definite messianic tendency. He really feels he has been called to uplift the downtrodden. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, for instance, feels that he represents the poor; but AMLO views himself as the redeemer of the poor and as an incarnation of strength against evil–against the technocrats, against globalization, against the rich.”
But others are worried. The respected Mexican historian Enrique Krauze recently published a devastating, well-documented piece, “Tropical Messiah,” on AMLO in The New Republic. In it, he delves deeply into the candidate’s family and political roots in the Mexican province of Tabasco, where in the ’30s, “Red Shirts,” far-leftist student contingents, marched through the streets against “God and religion”–and all with fascist discipline.
“What is worrisome about Lopez Obrador is Lopez Obrador himself,” Krauze wrote. “He does not represent a modern left; he represents an anti-modern left–the kind that is now stirring in many places in Latin America: radical and populist, and with a disturbing element of political messianism.”
Then there is the only other real candidate, a businessman, the candidate of free enterprise–not a man of wealth but a regular guy who likes barbecues at his modest house in Mexico City. Felipe Calderon is the center-right candidate of the National Action Party, or PAN, which was also Vicente Fox’s party, and he served as Fox’s energy secretary.
If AMLO wins, says Grayson, and if he continues his anti-free market, anti-globalization, subsidizing and pump-priming ways, you could have inflation, capital flight and even class warfare, which would augur more illegal immigration to the United States. And, as is already occurring, what industries are left will flee to Asia. In fact, most analysts agree that neither candidate will take any active role in cutting back immigration, although Calderon would not be as malicious about it as AMLO.
Fox did accomplish a couple of things in his initially hopeful years as president. He built a solid economy, without devaluation or monetary crises, and an electoral process that now seems to be truly honest and democratic. But he left a country where there is virtually no way for the poor to rise–except to leave, which allows the rich elites to retain their privilege at no cost.
Now what Mexico badly needs is a genuine attack on the oligopolies and monopolies whose enormous wealth is controlled by about 40 families, a genuinely egalitarian education system, and the kind of class and economic transformation that countries from Chile to Singapore have gone through. Will that process begin in Mexico on Sunday?
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