Archivado en: opinión | escrito por goleech | 04/16/2005 | 21:55

Leaders: How not to defeat an awkward candidate; Mexico's presidential election
The Economist
Abril 16, 2005

A big step backward for a still-uncertain democracy

IT IS a basic principle of a presidential democracy that voters should be free to choose whomsoever they wish to exercise government authority. It is a similar axiom of democracy that politicians should be subject to the rule of law. But what happens when these two principles appear to collide?

That is the dilemma with which, ostensibly, Mexico has been grappling. On April 7th, the country's Congress resolved it by voting to lift the immunity from prosecution granted by virtue of his office to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the mayor of Mexico City. As a result, any day now Mr Lopez will be arrested to face charges of contempt of court arising from a planning dispute. According to both President Vicente Fox and his main opposition, the formerly ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), this is a victory for the rule of law.

Yet that is not the way that it looks to most Mexicans. For much of the past two years, Mr Lopez, a populist from the left-of-centre Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), has topped opinion polls for a presidential election due in July 2006. But should he be convicted--or should charges still be pending in January--he would be barred from standing. To the mayor's supporters his treatment is a crude stitch-up, all too reminiscent of the rigged political system that Mexico claimed to have left behind in 2000 when Mr Fox won the presidency, ending seven decades of rule by the PRI.

Who is right? To reach a judgment on this requires a journey down the byways of the planning dispute. This began in 1993 when the city government sold 16 acres of land to a private health-care company for a hospital to serve a poor area in the west of Mexico City. The city council agreed to build an access road to the hospital on an adjoining plot. Having failed to agree a price with the plot's owner, Mr Lopez's predecessor issued a compulsory-purchase order and began to build the road. In 2001, a judge ordered construction to stop, pending an appeal by the owner. Construction was halted, but only after 11 months. That prompted Mexico's attorney-general to open the contempt of court proceedings that led to last week's vote.

Certainly Mr Lopez has a history of acting in a high-handed manner. Even so, Congress's decision has questionable aspects. First and foremost, the punishment is out of all proportion to the alleged crime. The land dispute itself is a matter of civil law, and many of the decisions may have been taken by junior officials. Yet the mayor now faces criminal proceedings--presumably because that is the only way to block his candidacy. Second, those proceedings have been initiated by a partisan politician, the attorney-general.

Third, when it comes to enforcing the rule of law at the expense of political considerations, Mexico has been less than zealous. In 1970, Luis Echeverria was elected president two years after hundreds of unarmed students were massacred by government agents when he was interior minister. Recent attempts to prosecute Mr Echeverria have got nowhere. After the 2000 election, both Mr Fox and his opponent from the PRI were accused of violating campaign-finance laws; the only punishment has been fines against their parties.

To be sure, when it comes to subjecting politicians to the letter of the law, Mexico must start somewhere. Yet starting with Mr Lopez has serious implications for the country's still-uncertain democracy. Once before, the left was excluded from power in Mexico by questionable means. In 1988, the electoral authority's computer mysteriously broke down when the PRD's candidate was leading Carlos Salinas of the PRI, who was then declared president. During Mr Salinas's presidency, several hundred members of the PRD were murdered.

Latin America's turn to democracy in the past two decades has at last allowed the left to take power by peaceful means. That has helped to break the cycle of political violence which dogged the region, produced a healthy alternation of power, and directed attention to deep-rooted social problems. In some cases, it has also brought bad government. In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chavez has undermined his country's democratic institutions and its economy. But left-wingers have no monopoly on elected autocracy, as Alberto Fujimori showed in Peru in the 1990s. And even if Mr Lopez were "another Chavez", as some fear, Mexico is not Venezuela: like Mr Fox, he would almost certainly lack a congressional majority.

Mr Lopez's record is ambiguous (see page 45). His defenders point to his driving energy and can-do pragmatism. His detractors see an unscrupulous opportunist of overweening ambition who is disrespectful of independent institutions. Even if the critics are right, the place to defeat the mayor is at the ballot box. So far, Congress's action has merely increased sympathy for its victim. By depriving the voters of a free choice, Mexico's politicians have cast a cloud of uncertainty over democracy and a question over their country's hard-won economic stability. For the sake of both, Mr Lopez at least deserves a swift and fair trial.


The Americas: A would-be president heads for political martyrdom; Politics in Mexico
The Economist
Abril 16, 2005

The opponents of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador hope that protests over his impending criminal trial will fizzle out. But what if they are wrong?

IF ONE attribute has marked the political career of Mexico City's left-wing mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, it is persistence in the face of obstacles. He first achieved national prominence in 1994 when his supporters blocked oil wells and marched on Mexico City to try to reverse what he claimed was his defeat by fraud in an election for governor of Tabasco state. So Mexico may well be in for a turbulent year. Last week, the Congress voted, largely on party lines, to remove Mr Lopez's immunity from prosecution for contempt of court. With that, it flung a spanner into his campaign to be elected president. But the mayor is Mexico's most popular politician. He has now promised a lengthy campaign of "civil disobedience".

These events set the stage for what will be Mexico's fiercest political battle since the election victory of Vicente Fox in 2000 marked a deceptively smooth transition to democracy after seven decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In the Congress, Mr Fox's party and the PRI joined together to strip Mr Lopez of his immunity by 360 votes to 127. Although these parties claim that they are merely upholding the law, the mayor's supporters are not the only people who detect a political plot to stop him being elected.

The battle will now move to the courts. The attorney-general's office will shortly give a judge some 16,000 pages of evidence in 17 volumes against the mayor, who is accused of ignoring a previous court order in a planning dispute. The judge will have ten days in which to issue an arrest warrant against Mr Lopez, and a further ten to order a trial. From that moment, the mayor is prohibited by the constitution from standing for election and is obliged to give up his current job.

Mexico's judiciary used to be under the thumb of the government of the day, but has recently shown signs of increasing independence. So there is a chance that the judge may decide that Mr Lopez has no case to answer, or accept a complaint filed by his party. Barring that, the mayor's political martyrdom will proceed. He has said that he will refuse bail and conduct his campaign of resistance from a jail cell. Since the course of justice in Mexico is never swift--the case against Mr Lopez refers to events in 2001--it is highly unlikely that the trial will end before the January deadline for the registration of candidates for the presidential election.

So far, Mr Lopez has the public on his side. Opinion polls in January gave him some 32% support for the presidency, ahead of Roberto Madrazo of the PRI and Santiago Creel of Mr Fox's party, who both had around 25%. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it was Mr Madrazo who defeated Mr Lopez in Tabasco in 1994). Now, Mr Lopez has risen to 45%, according to the Institute of Marketing and Opinion, a pollster. Another poll showed that 60% disagree with the Congress's decision to remove the mayor's immunity.

Mr Lopez's campaign will have two tracks. First, he has said he will apply to the Federal Electoral Tribunal for an injunction to re-establish his political rights, and may also seek redress in international human-rights tribunals. Second, he plans to use the streets. Some 150,000 people turned out to support him at a rally in the Zocalo, Mexico City's main square, on the (weekday) morning of the congressional vote. The next test of his support will be a "march of silence" planned for April 24th.

The only alternative candidate of the mayor's Party of the Democratic Revolution is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Although only fraud seemed to deny him victory in 1988, he is now a spent force, so Mexico's left will not easily abandon Mr Lopez. A bigger risk for him may be that the protests will tip into violence and thereby alienate other voters. But the mayor has urged his followers not to break the law.

His opponents see in Mr Lopez a messianic populist in the mould of Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez. He frequently overrode the city council until he secured a majority on it in 2004. He is alleged to have been slow to act against corrupt collaborators. Some Mexicans question his handling of the city's finances: they claim that he robbed the sewerage system of investment in order to pay for popular handouts to over-70s. They worry whether Mexico's democratic institutions would be strong enough to impose restraints on his power should he become president.

His supporters paint a different picture. They admire his energetic, can-do approach to governing, his austere personal habits, his left-wing rhetoric and his cheeky sense of humour. And they see in the campaign against him the hand of top businessmen who fear that as president Mr Lopez would re-open investigations into a generous government bailout of banks a decade ago.

Mr Lopez's opponents are banking on the protests petering out well before the election. This may happen. But if they are wrong, the damage to Mexican democracy could be great. Before 2000, the previous four presidential contests were marked by economic or political instability, or both. Mr Fox promised ambitious reforms to liberalise the country's economy and political system. He has disappointed on both counts, in part because he lacks a majority in Congress. The last thing Mexico needs is for the legitimacy of its next president to be questionable.

-----------------



Americas: A Mexican Mayor's Legal Problem Energizes His Base
Mary Anastasia O'Grady
Abril 16, 2005

For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law.

-- Oscar R. Benavides,

president of Peru, 1933-1940

A collective cry against the "unjust" use of power in Mexico rose in the U.S. this week as sundry editorial writers attacked the Mexican Congress's decision to strip Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (aka "Amlo") of his immunity from prosecution. The desafuero, as it is called in Spanish, means that the populist mayor could be charged soon with contempt of court in a land takeover. He might land in jail.

Yet, in the parlor game that asks who wants to see the mayor in this pickle, don't rule out Amlo himself. The man relishes theater and the "desafuero" has opened to rave reviews, boosting his ratings as the leading presidential candidate of the hard-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). An estimated 150,000 protestors turned out last week to support him.

President Vicente Fox is nearing the end of his six-year term (sexenio) and Mexico is gearing up for presidential elections in July 2006. Amlo's legal problems would be far less notable if not for the fact that as mayor of the country's largest metropolis -- with wide support from the city's massive bureaucracy -- he has been a front- runner in opinion polls for some months. His supporters claim the desafuero is a vast right-wing conspiracy to deny him the nation's top office.

Having secured his victim status, the mayor is benefiting both from sympathy and a certain outrage among his aggrieved and often militant constituency. "Intellectuals" -- many of whom have sided with Fidel Castro over the years -- are rushing to his defense. PRD congressmen are camping out in front of the presidential palace, mobilizing marches and holding hunger strikes. Markets were a bit jittery this week. Mexico is once again bracing for a round of "sexenio" instability.

What worries a lot of Mexicans and their neighbors to the north is not the prosecution of Amlo, who by all appearances deserves to be held accountable for flouting the law. The trouble is that if this dispute isn't resolved, the victor in 2006, whoever he might be, could have his term tarnished by challenges to his legitimacy. The Fox government seems to be acknowledging this. Yesterday it said it was considering a "pardon" for Amlo if he is found guilty, so that he can still run for president.

Yet the greater worry for Mexican democracy ought to be what this case demonstrates more broadly: that since the 70-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ended in 2000, Mexico's leadership has failed to secure the rule of law so that justice is meted out uniformly, without regard to politics. The Lopez Obrador case is hardly the "witch hunt" that his defenders claim, since he apparently defied a court that ruled against his dubious use of expropriated land. But given Mexico's history of PRI high-handedness, Mr. Fox's well-known dislike for Amlo and the timing of it all, Mexicans are suspicious that the legal action is, at least in some part, political.

Arbitrary use of law by politicians is a longstanding tradition in Latin America and explains a lot of the region's inability to advance politically and economically. Socialist and Marxist doctrines focus on economic "inequality" as the source of Latin backwardness -- as did the Mexican Revolution that brought forth the dysfunctional PRI -- and claim that redistributing wealth will end poverty. But after decades of such cynical politicking, serious development economists now conclude that what the state ought to aspire to is equality under the law, not equality of economic outcomes. The former allows economic and social mobility so that individuals can progress. The latter brings forth Cuba.

If anyone ought to understand how the law can be used by the ruling class against its political enemies, it's Amlo. He came up through the ranks of the PRI in his native state of Tabasco, earning straight As in patronage politics. When the PRI began to drift away from the authoritarian corporatism of the 20th century, he broke away, along with other reactionaries, to form the PRD.

In his own city government he has played fast and loose with the law whenever it suits him. The case for which he has lost his immunity is but one example. In another expropriation case, when a judgment went against him, he declared that he would refuse to pay because the money was needed for the poor, a favorite populist dodge. His government has been plagued by corruption scandals, including the videotaping of his former campaign manager allegedly taking $45,000 in bills from an Argentine construction magnate and stuffing it in his briefcase and pockets. He has been unwilling to advance reform among the city's law enforcement bureaucracy, favoring its political support over the population's need for security. If Mr. Lopez Obrador is a victim of discretionary application of the law, he is also a practitioner.

Goldman Sachs Emerging Markets reported on Wednesday that in a recent poll, "about half of the [Mexican] population is opposed to the lifting of Amlo's immunity and about two-thirds are against a prison sentence or barring him from running for President." It's not that the man is wildly popular. Such poll numbers mostly reflect distrust of the system.

Under seven decades of PRI rule, Mexico suffered badly from discretionary law. Mexican political scientist Luis Rubio says that many had hoped that the Fox government would find a way to break with the past, as Spain did after Franco died, and form a consensus that would allow the country to go forward. "Implicit in the rule of law is the principle that everyone accepts it," says Mr. Rubio. "In the absence of the origin of such a social contract, you need to find ways for stakeholders to agree." Mexicans still wait for that development. "Everything remains discretionary," says Mr. Rubio.

Mr. Lopez Obrador is basking in the support his case has engendered. But if he does pay some penalty for his contempt for the courts, he will only have gotten caught in the web spun over decades by his own machine politics. As for Mexico, the case presents dangers but also an opportunity to finally confront the hard-to-banish demons of PRI authoritarianism and put them to rest by securing an agreement, once and for all, that no Mexican is above the law.