Election won't solve Mexico's problems

WASHINGTON -- When Vicente Fox became the "great reformist president" of Mexico six years ago, everyone expected that he would build upon his extraordinary defeat of decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, by reforming Mexico. They got the defeat; they didn't get the reform.
On Sunday, Mexicans go to the polls again. The PRI today is a sniveling third in the race; but the question remains: Will either of the two leading candidates really reform Mexico's stratified social class system and monopolies on power? The answer, unfortunately for both Mexico and the United States, is not one to cheer about.
Consider the most dramatic candidate, the charismatic, super-populista mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and his Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD. He is popularly known by his initials, AMLO, and there is no question that he has spruced up the overcrowded Mexico City into a gorgeous capital. But he has done it through massive borrowing, backed up by a strange messianic personality that some see as incipient Mexican fascism.
"I would not say he is fascist," Professor George Grayson, Mexico specialist at the College of William and Mary and author of the Spanish-language "The Mexican Messiah," told me just before the elections. "But he has a definite messianic tendency. He really feels he has been called to uplift the downtrodden. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, for instance, feels that he represents the poor; but AMLO views himself as the redeemer of the poor and as an incarnation of strength against evil -- against the technocrats, against globalization, against the rich."
But others are worried. The respected writer Enrique Krauze recently published a devastating, well-documented piece, "Tropical Messiah," on AMLO in The New Republic. In it, he delves deeply into the candidate's family and political roots in the Mexican province of Tabasco, where in the '30s, "Red Shirts," far-leftist student contingents, marched through the streets against "God and religion" -- and all with fascist discipline.
"What is worrisome about Lopez Obrador is Lopez Obrador himself," Krauze wrote. "He does not represent a modern left; he represents an anti-modern left -- the kind that is now stirring in many places in Latin America: radical and populist, and with a disturbing element of political messianism."
Attractive businessman
Then there is the only other real candidate, an attractive businessman, the candidate of free enterprise -- not a man of wealth but a regular guy who likes barbecues at his modest house in Mexico City. Felipe Calderon is the center-right candidate of the National Action Party, or PAN, which was also Vicente Fox's party.
"We are going to win," Fredo Arias-King, a leading analyst and Calderon supporter who has done brilliant writing on transitions in Eastern Europe and has sought to have some of their lessons applied in Mexico, told me by phone from Mexico City. If AMLO wins, says Grayson, and if he continues his anti-free market, anti-globalization, subsidizing and pump-priming ways, you could have inflation, capital flight and even class warfare, which would augur more illegal immigration to the United States. And, as is already occurring, what industries are left will flee to Asia. In fact, most analysts agree that neither candidate will take any active role in cutting back immigration, although Calderon would not be as malicious about it as AMLO.
Vicente Fox did accomplish a couple of things in his initially hopeful years as president. He built a solid economy, without devaluation or monetary crises, and an electoral process that now seems to be truly honest and democratic; he consolidated a free press and freed access to public information; and he established a professional public service in place of the old PRI hangers-on. But he left a country where there is virtually no way for the poor to rise -- except to leave, which allows the rich elites to retain their privilege at no cost.
Now what Mexico badly needs is a genuine attack on the oligopolies and monopolies whose enormous wealth is controlled by probably 40 families, a genuinely egalitarian education system (today seven out of 10 students drop out of high school), and the kind of class and economic transformation that countries from Chile to Singapore to Taiwan to Tunisia have gone through -- but which Mexico never seems to think of studying.
Universal Press Syndicate