Mexican Government May Jail Leading Left-Wing Presidential Candidate

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
March 2, 2005

CIA Warns of Ingovernability of Mexico
Fox Schemes to Jail Front-Running Leftist
By JOHN ROSS

Mexico City.

The table is being laid here for a political battle of biblical proportions as the Mexican Congress, under the hammer of the rightist National Action or PAN (the party of President Vicente Fox) and the once-upon-a-time long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), prepare to strip left-wing Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) of both his office and the immunity from prosecution ("el fuero") it affords him, for the heinous crime of seeking to build an access road to a hospital despite a court order barring him from expropriating a private right-of-way.

If convicted of contempt of court charges in this momentously forgettable imbroglio, Lopez Obrador could be sentenced to prison for up to eight years and would be automatically stripped of his political rights and excluded from next year's presidential election--AMLO has been a ten-point front-runner in the race for the job ever since 2003 mid-term elections.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's powers of convocation are formidable--he has repeatedly filled the Zocalo, the great central plaza spreading beneath his City Hall offices, to the brim with his supporters when his authority has been challenged in the past. Giving the rising tide of fury in the city at the PAN-PRI frame-up, political calculators figure AMLO could put a half million marchers in the streets of Mexico City on the day of reckoning, a number that would rival what his one-time mentor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was able to turn out after the PRFI stole the 1988 presidential election from him in a veritable Tsunami of fraud.


As in 1988, the "coraje" (both courage and anger) of the protestors is bound to escape PRD control during prolonged confrontations, considers left political columnist Luis Hernandez Navarro. With civil society in the driver's seat, occupying public buildings and tying up Mexico City traffic day after day, Navarro contemplates the crystallization of "a movement of historic proportions" that will far outstrip the reinstatement of AMLO's candidacy. "Fox and the right do not yet understand what the desafuero has unleashed."

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross03032005.html

[Walt Starr]

1. So Fox is going to "Clinton" Obrador

How typical.

[gratuitous]

2. Stupidhead can only watch in frustration

"Now why didn't I think of that?! Jail the other guy before the election. Doggone, Vicente, I take my hat off to you."