Condi the Lip fans Mexican flames

You may recall an earlier post about the trouble brewing south of the border. Bush buddy Vicente Fox is attempting to strip popular leftist politico, Andrés Manuel López of his right to run in the 2006 Mexican presidential election. Al Giordano comments:

A few months ago, the Bush Administration seemed ready to accept an electoral victory by the Mexican left and a President López Obrador.

During a November 9, 2004 visit to Mexico City, then-U.S. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge told the press that Washington would welcome any victor in the 2006 Mexican presidential contest, saying: “...independently of the philosophy of the victorious candidate, if it is a democratically elected government we will continue with this process and we will honor it, because it is a process we have already begun in this administration without it mattering with whom we are working.”

During the same November visit by U.S. officials to Mexico City, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said, according to this news report: “President Bush would receive [a left-wing] Mexican leader as warmly as he would receive any other leader of Mexico.”

But all that changed in January 2005 when Condoleeza Rice replaced Powell. The first State Department “travel advisory” issued under her command was against Mexico. The “travel advisory” and the Commercial Media campaign to buttress it – rebutted by Narco News on January 27 – painted a shrieking portrait of a country ravaged by what U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza called “a rising wave of crime.” U.S. officials and their house journalists further insisted that the so-called Mexican disorder was caused by narco-traffickers.

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An honest public official has much less to fear from such U.S. saber rattling than those who indeed are messed up in narco-corruption. But the members of the historically corrupt PRI, and the PAN of Fox (who, it was recently revealed, counted with an alleged narco-trafficker as the presidential trip director), got the message loud and clear. Within days those two rival partys joined together in a Congressional committee to speed forward the desafuero against López Obrador that had, until then, languished lazily in cobwebs. Condoleeza, with a mere “travel advisory,” got them jumping to her whip, and the coup d’etat began to emerge for real.

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Various national youth organizations, labor unions, and other networks recently met in Mexico City and launched a non-hierarchical, horizontal network of autonomous local groups. Much in the style of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign last year (and of the civil resistance in Venezuela that overturned, in 2002, a coup d’etat), it utilizes the Internet and cell phones as its weapons of communication. Add to that mix that this movement will be independent of the López Obrador’s PRD party, thus uncontrollable by any political force, and a potent political recipe is brewing from South of the Border.

Included in a long list of activities (which looks very well-organized, including a plan for the aftermath) aimed at blocking the coup on López Obrador, the groups have designated one point in particular coming to a city near you....

3. Form similar solidarity committees among Mexicans residing in the United States and the rest of the world to protest outside of the Mexican Embassies and Consulates that dot the planet.

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Mexico now finds itself at an historic crossroads: Between a Washington-imposed two-party dictatorship wrought by a coup d’etat called a desafuero… Or a definitive break with that kind of imposition from above, one that would restore Mexico’s birthright as a member of the community of Latin American nations that are increasingly moving together toward authentic democracy.

The latest I have read indicates that the decision about stripping López Obrador's rights will come later this month - possibly during holy week, with the idea that people will be away from the capitol city and therefore unavailable to block the congressional vote.

There is talk of possible nation-wide road blocks, particularly border commerce stoppage. The Zapatistas in Chiapas are equally opposed to the desafuero. And John Ross quotes Mexican political columnist Luis Hernandez Navarro in consideration of what may come:

[T]he crystallization of "a movement of historic proportions" [...] will far outstrip the reinstatement of [López Obrador]'s candidacy. "Fox and the right do not yet understand what the desafuero has unleashed."