Tom Hayden: Mexico's Presidential Front-Runner May Roil U.S. Conservatives

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060626_tom_hayden_mexio_election/

The candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, currently leads by 3 to 4% in official polling, while his internal surveys indicate a margin as high as 10%. Obrador represents the historical party of the left, the PRD. His closest rival is Felipe Calderon of the neo-liberal PAN. The traditional governing party, the PRI, continues to trail badly while retaining significant power at state and local levels.

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An even darker projection, commonly if privately expressed by many Mexicans, is that Lopez Obrador will be assassinated if he comes close to the ring of power. Luis Donaldo Colosio, a presidential candidate in 1994, was assassinated in broad daylight. That election ushered in the NAFTA era and the simultaneous Zapatista uprising.

If the supporters of Lopez Obrador sense that the election is stolen from them, they will not go quietly like Al Gore’s Democratic Party in 2000. It is accepted across Mexico that the 1988 presidential election was crudely stolen from the then-PRD candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of Lazaro Cardenas. At that time, the lack of popular organization and fears of a massacre led the PRD candidate to accept the fraudulent outcome. “Not this time,” I was told. “The people won’t let this election be stolen.” The street demand to defend the vote could bridge the differences, at least temporarily, with the Zapatistas.

Indeed, a fusion of popular mobilization and electoral politics has saved Lopez Obrador before. In 1998, his campaigners blocked roads and oil fields after he lost a gubernatorial race in Tabasco described as “fraud-ridden” by the New York Times (March 16, 2005). Only last year, the major parties tried to force him off the ballot by indicting him on a spurious corruption charge involving the construction of a road to a private hospital. Presidential candidates are disqualified if they are indicted. So Lopez Obrador’s destiny was in doubt until hundreds of thousands of people rallied in the streets. Lopez Obrador announced he would go to jail rather than submit, leaving his enemies to ponder the prospect of 1 million Mexicans marching on his prison site. The charges went away.

and our manufacturing base...if things go to hell i`m out of work...

and wages might rise there, decreasing the incentive to outsource.