The Guardian 11 May, 2005
Tough face-off in Mexico
Emile Schepers
The Bush administration and its right-wing allies in Latin America are not doing so well.
People's forces in Mexico and continent-wide have scored important victories. In Mexico,
the right-wing administration of President Vicente Fox blinked first in a showdown with
Mexico City's tough leftist mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Most polls show López Obrador to be the frontrunner in the 2006 presidential elections. The
popular mayor from the left-centre Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) has staked out a
position against US-backed neo-liberal policies of free trade, privatisation and austerity, and has
praised Cuba's socialist government.
Fox's right-wing National Action Party (PAN) teamed up with the former ruling group, the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), to block López Obrador from running.
Fox's attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, cooked up criminal charges against the
mayor, based on the flimsy issue of his supposedly having ignored a court order to stop a road
construction project in 2001. Under Mexican law, López Obrador could not have run for public
office until the matter was cleared up, too late for the election.
López Obrador turned the issue to his advantage, and the PAN, PRI and Fox now bitterly regret
getting into a spitting match with him. A majority of Mexicans saw through the manoeuvre and
turned out for increasingly larger demonstrations in support of the mayor, culminating in a
march by well over a million people through Mexico City on April 24.
On another front it was the US that blinked first: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to
save face for the Bush administration by bowing to the inevitable and acceding to the election of
Chilean Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Insulza, a Socialist, as secretary-general of the
Organisation of American States (OAS).
This was a double defeat for the United States. Originally, the Bush administration was pushing
ex-President Francisco Flores of El Salvador, a close US ally, for the post. However, it soon
became apparent in Latin America that this was as a reward for El Salvador's participation in
the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, which seems to have killed his candidacy.
The US then switched support to Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Derbez. But Brazilian President
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez went to work also and lined up support
for Insulza.
The Derbez candidacy crumbled last week, a process that was helped along by the ouster of
Ecuadorian President Lucio Gutierrez by angry workers and farmers. The popular uprising was
a reaction to policies closely resembling those advocated by Derbez and his boss, President
Fox, and Gutierrez's ouster further eroded Derbez's vote count.
In the Latin American media, the story goes that Lula subsequently persuaded Condaleeza Rice
that the election of Insulza was inevitable, and she — not wishing to come out so publicly on the
losing side — talked Mexico into withdrawing Derbez's candidacy. Insulza has now praised the
statesmanlike attitude of the United States, but it is clear who won and who lost.
The OAS is widely perceived in Latin America to be an instrument of US imperialism. (The US
pays 60 percent of its budget.) No radical changes should be expected, but the defeat of two
US-backed candidates in a row shows which way the winds are blowing in the
region.
People's Weekly World