Previous post.It’s April in Mexico. An uncompleted revolution has slept for 86 years. The ghosts of Emiliano Zapata and his white horse still ride through these hills. And the cynical men in power have no idea what they are about to awaken on this Black Thursday of 2005.[...]
Eighty-six years ago this week Mexican revolutionary General Emiliano Zapata was assassinated in a State-plotted ambush, on April 10, 1919. Eleven years ago, also at this springtime of year, leading presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated on the campaign trail, in Tijuana: on March 23, 1994. What President Vicente Fox, together with his former adversaries of the once-monolithic PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for seven decades prior to Fox’s 2000 electoral victory), are attempting today is nothing less than a pre-emptive coup d’etat: a political assassination, dressed up in legal technicalities no more serious than a parking ticket, to remove Mexico’s leading presidential candidate from the 2006 contest.
At 9:30 a.m. (Central Time Zone) Mexico City Governor Andrés Manuel López Obrador will address a multitude in the Zocalo, the village square of this country of 100 million Mexicans, a crowd that as of 7:30 this morning included at least a million of them...[...]
Unable to play and win by the rules of democracy – a word that supposedly means that the people decide their destiny – Fox and the PRI (urged on from Washington from the very day that Condoleeza Rice, in January, took the helm of the State Department) are likely to win a battle today – a vote in Congress – to declare López Obrador guilty until proven innocent and rob from the Mexican people the right to vote for him – he now towers 20 points, at 44-percent in the polls, over his nearest rivals – to be their president next year.
And that – as a 12-percent crash in recent days of the Mexican stock market presages – will set in motion a political war dance with steps already planned by Mexico City’s activist (and strategist) governor. López Obrador is ready to go to jail and lead the fight from there. And much of Mexico is declaring its will to, if need be, join him behind bars by launching what would be the country’s first-ever campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience.[...]
There is little question in this correspondent’s analysis that the pressure on Fox and the PRI to cement their little coup d’etat today comes from above, from the Bush administration in Washington, which has decided it cannot abide another democratic decision by another large Latin American country that would place Mexico with Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela (among others such as Uruguay) in a Bolivarian bloc of resistance to the imposed policies from the North.
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But while the government of Washington appears hell-bent on ripping democracy from Mexican hands once again, the reaction from Civil Society in the United States is, for the second time in the five-year history of this newspaper (the first being the rejection of the US-backed coup d’etat in Venezuela in 2002), emerging in opposition to the dirty tricks from inside the beltway.
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