A brief update on what I wrote in March about Mexico's elections.
As expected, the attacks against Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the PRD
candidate, have become extremely nasty -- and apparently effective.
Recent telephone polls show a drastic narrowing of AMLO lead and in
some cases a reversal in favor of the PAN candidate Felipe Calderón,
aka as Fecal. It's not clear to what extent these polls are
manipulated, but there are other red flags as well.
I haven't been able to follow things very closely, but I know that
recently AMLO incorporated into his advisory team a bunch of people
from the former Carlos Salinas' PRI. The head of that group is Manuel
Camacho Solís. (I won't say much about him, because you can easily
Wiki-search him.) Also, the PRD candidate to Mexico City's major is
Marcelo Ebrard, from the Camacho Solís' team. It seems clear that
there's a serious displacement (or withdrawal, or both) of the old
Cárdenas clan. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas left the PRD a little while ago
and he's been critical -- although not overtly -- of AMLO.
Adolfo Gilly, an intellectual with some influence on the radical left,
published two recent articles in La Jornada, where he also distances
himself from AMLO. He doesn't call people to abstain, but he says he
personally won't vote. These are the links to the articles (Spanish):
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/03/03/020a1pol.php
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/03/22/021a1pol.php
He claims that, deep down, AMLO's project is indistinguishable from
the "neoliberal" project of Fecal (PAN) and Roberto Madrazo (PRI) --
the latter lagging behind in the polls. Gilly claims that in AMLO's
version of "neoliberalism" the self-organization of the people is
excluded. (I'm not sure about that.) In any case, I don't know
what's the chicken and what's the egg -- whether AMLO felt compelled
to compromise with some of those vultures from the old PRI as Marcos,
Cárdenas and the left of the PRD broke up with him and weakened him,
or whether he always wanted to jettison the left wing of the PRD and
revive the old PRI-ism. All I can say is that the disunity of the
left might have a very dear cost.
Obviously, in terms of funding, AMLO is absolutely behind the other
guys. AMLO campaign strategy has been more "ground" (rallies and
direct contact with people) than "air" (costly TV ads). Meanwhile,
the PAN is saturating the airwaves, and that's not counting the "free"
endorsement he's receiving from the Televisa's and TV Azteca's
pundits. One of the propagandistic tricks of the PAN has been to tie
AMLO to Chávez and to try to scare the middle class with the ghost of
a capital flight motivated by an AMLO victory. Some TV ads (that have
proved to be very effective) show Hugo Chávez responding to Fox after
the summit in Argentina: "do not mess with me, gentleman" (referring
to Fox). Chávez's image is immediately followed by a Howard-Dean
moment in AMLO's campaign, his telling Fox to "shut up, chachalaca" (a
chachalaca is a bird from Mexico's tropical jungles and "tierras
calientes," something between a crow and a parrot).
I hope my concerns are unwarranted.
Julio
