Archivado en: política | escrito por goleech | 04/24/2005 | 21:20

A Self-Styled Class Warrior Has Major Battle at Hand in Mexico
Nation Divided Over Front-Runner in Presidential Race
Por Mary Jordan
Publicado en The Washington Post
24 de abril de 2005

TUCTA, Mexico -- Until 1977, this village in sweltering Tabasco state was a patch of misery surrounded by a swamp. Families lived in thatched huts, with no roads, electricity or relief from swarms of mosquitoes carrying malaria.

Then a 24-year-old government worker arrived, brimming with outrage against poverty. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a shopkeeper's son from a nearby village, set out to change the world, starting here. For the next two years, he helped dig canals to drain the swamp and create islands where bananas, papayas and cedar trees now bloom.

"We were completely abandoned until he came," said villager Juan Montero Hernandez, now 45. "Without him, what would have become of us?"

Over time, the young crusader rose to become mayor of Mexico City and a leader with a loyal following among the country's impoverished majority. He is now considered the front-runner in next year's presidential elections, and thousands of people from Tabasco and other states are traveling to Mexico City Sunday to join a huge rally for him.

But Lopez Obrador, 51, has also inspired fierce critics who view him as a sanctimonious grandstander and worse. In his zeal, they charge, he ignores the law and mismanages public money. If anyone dares to question his methods, they say, he accuses them of being part of a dark conspiracy to bring him down.

Now, Lopez Obrador is the focus of a political drama that has divided the nation, and the object of a major legal crusade over a minor criminal complaint stemming from a municipal land dispute. While supporters are trying to get him elected president, critics are trying to get him arrested -- or at least declared ineligible to run.

So divisive is the firestorm over Lopez Obrador that observers from Mexico's Catholic bishops to Wall Street analysts have warned that it could lead to dangerous instability in the country of 106 million.

Lopez Obrador's popular image is that of a relentless champion of the downtrodden, a class warrior railing against the corrupt elite. He has carefully crafted that image, living in a modest apartment and driving a beat-up sedan. Upon being elected mayor in 2000, he promptly cut his own salary.

Two years later, in a typical gesture, he evicted several millionaires from sprawling properties that had illegally encroached on Chapultepec Park, the beloved green space and popular picnic spot at the heart of Mexico City.

"We don't owe anything to any special interest group -- not businessmen, not journalists, not bankers, not politicians. . . . We don't have to lick anyone's boots," he told reporters at the time. "We just have to deliver to the people."

In nearly every speech, Lopez Obrador mentions the gap between Mexico's rich and poor. He has said the country needs an "alternative" to the current economic model pursued by President Vicente Fox, but economic analysts said he has not made it clear what policies he would follow if elected. He has started one urban welfare program after another, raising the city's debt in the process.

The mayor's message has alarmed many business leaders, sending chills through the country's political and economic establishment. Some critics call him Mexico's version of Hugo Chavez, the populist Venezuelan president whose giveaways to the poor have slowed economic progress.

"He's a man who likes to call attention to himself, but he doesn't have the background to be president," said Efrain Garcia Mora, head of a business association in Tabasco state.

Aides to Lopez Obrador, however, assert that he has proved to be a solid partner with private business and has attracted sizable foreign investment to the capital. They say he does not oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement championed by Washington, and they reject any comparison with Chavez, suggesting that Lopez Obrador has more in common with moderate, center-left leaders in Brazil and Chile.

"Anything that the current regime doesn't agree with is written off as populist," Lopez Obrador complained at a recent news conference. "I'm neither a populist nor a neo-liberal. I want there to be justice in this country."

Although officials insist their motives are not political, the Fox administration and its allies have zealously pursued the legal case against Lopez Obrador, just as his presidential campaign gets underway.

During a dispute over a piece of Mexico City land in 2001, a judge ordered construction halted on an access road to a hospital. As mayor, prosecutors said, Lopez Obrador ignored the court order so the road could be built; he has denied the charges.

This month, the lower house of Congress took the extraordinary measure of voting to strip the mayor's immunity from prosecution, allowing the case against him to go forward. Then, this week, the attorney general's office asked a judge to begin legal proceedings against him.

With public opinion strongly in his favor, Lopez Obrador announced that he wanted to go to jail to showcase the injustice being done to him. His political rivals promptly prepaid his $180 bail to keep him from parlaying incarceration into political martyrdom. A judge late Friday sent the case back to prosecutors saying they had not followed proper procedure with the unusual bail arrangement. Prosecutors pledged to refile the charges.

Lopez Obrador contends -- and polls show many Mexicans agree -- that the real motive behind the prosecution is to keep him off the presidential ballot.

"President Vicente Fox is a disgrace," Lopez Obrador said this week. "He is a traitor to the cause of democracy."

Fox, in turn, has insisted that the case is not about politics but about applying the rule of law to everyone, even popular politicians.

Even in his home state of Tabasco, opinion on Lopez Obrador is divided. During his career as an activist and two-time gubernatorial candidate, he led disruptive protests to focus attention on election fraud, workers' rights and the poor environmental record of Pemex, the national oil monopoly and the state's largest employer.

"In our region, there is misery all around the wells producing Mexico's black gold," Lopez Obrador shouted to crowds at the time. He also organized weeks-long marches to Mexico City to demand an end to corruption and a better deal for the poor. On the road, he slept with his supporters in open fields.

While fans compare him to Gandhi leading civil disobedience events, critics see him as more of a thug who mobilized menacing mobs. In 1996, protesters shut down scores of state-owned oil wells, at a cost of millions of dollars in revenue. Many, including Lopez Obrador, were injured in a skirmish with police and soldiers at the Pemex installations.

Lopez Obrador grew up in the era of the iron-fisted Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico from 1929 until Fox's election in 2000. He himself was a rising PRI star until he broke away and helped form the rival Democratic Revolutionary Party in 1989.

"People don't like his methods," said Erwin Macario Rodriquez, a spokesman for the PRI in Tabasco. "They can lead to violence. And people don't like violence."

But back in the villages of the Gulf Coast where he grew up, Lopez Obrador is still a hero. During his two years in Tucta, residents said, he did more for the people than has any politician since. By living among them and even holding his wedding party there (his wife Rocio died in 2003 after a long illness), they said, he earned their lifelong support.

Montero recalled how Lopez Obrador got the state to send materials to build houses and a school, procured machines to help drain the swamp, and organized a workshop that taught villagers how to turn sheepskin and cedar into folk drums.

"The drums have allowed my oldest daughter to go to university," said Montero, who was helping to organize a caravan of villagers for the 12-hour ride to Mexico City for the Sunday march. "He was like a man who came to free us."