Nine-Point Lead for López Obrador in Mexico (Presidential race)

[Judi Lynn]

January 28, 2006
Nine-Point Lead for López Obrador in Mexico

(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) continues to lead all contenders in Mexico’s presidential race, according to a poll by Parametría. 39.3 per cent of respondents would support the former Mexico City mayor in this year’s election.

Former energy secretary Felipe Calderón of the governing National Action Party (PAN) is second with 30.2 per cent, followed by former Tabasco governor Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with 28.8 per cent, Patricia Mercado of the Social-Democratic and Peasant Alternative Party (PASC) with 1.4 per cent, and Roberto Campa of the New Alliance Party (PNA) with 0.3 per cent.
(snip)

The PAN’s Vicente Fox ended 71 years of uninterrupted rule by the PRI in the 2000 election, winning a six-year term with 42.5 per cent of the vote.

Yesterday, López Obrador criticized the U.S. federal administration’s plan to build a high-security fence in the U.S.-Mexico border, declaring, "All these measures will only provoke more human rights violations and more conflicts in bilateral relations between the two governments. The failure of (Fox’s) economic policy is behind the failure of immigration policy."
(snip/...)

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/10709



Andrés Manuel López Obrador

[rucky]

1. Prepare for some REAL change in Mexico

this Leftist revolution in Latin America is the most exciting stuff going on in the world right now.

[ronnie624]

9. My sentiments also.

We are in a race against time as well as a race against those who will destroy us all before they will relinquish any of their wealth and power. A universal change in our world view will be required in order for human civilization to survive the coming decades. The movement in Latin America offers hope to some of us.

[TroubleMan]

2. This is great news. I hope he wins

nt.

[bluestateguy]

3. Is he a lefty or a righty?

nt

[Judi Lynn]

4. He's a great left-wing leader. Here's some information for a starter.

Mexico City Mayor tells his supporters that
political power must benefit all the people
By Baldemar Méndez Antonio, Mexico Correspondent



An estimated 1.2 million people took part in the ‘March of Silence’ to protest against the prosecution of Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). The march, which took place on Sunday, 24 April 2005, was described as the largest rally for democracy in Mexican history. Leading the march, together with the Mayor, were many of the country’s most prominent intellectuals and politicians, who wanted to protest publicly against the use of the institutions of justice to eliminate AMLO, the country’s most popular politician, from the 2006 presidential election. (On 31 July 2005 Andrés Manuel López Obrador resigned from office to run for president.)

Mayor López Obrador told the rally that it was essential for Mexico to become a country of prosperity and equality. “Every citizen, but specially the poor, the weak and the forgotten, must be given protection from economic uncertainty and social equality,” the Mayor said. He added that politics in Mexico had become morally devalued by neglecting the least privileged in society. “Political power only becomes virtuous when it is exercised for the benefit of all the people and not just for some favoured few.”

The Mayor won the applause of his listeners when he told them that the state must meet its social responsibilities by creating a society where all the people live in social harmony with dignity and justice. “A state that adopts equality and fraternity as its principles, must implement them by guaranteeing its people the right to sufficient food, work, fair pay, health, housing and education.” AMLO also stressed culture as fundamental to the national identity of all Mexicans.

Mr López Obrador gave a foretaste of his presidential agenda when he said that Mexico could not be transformed by taxing food and medication nor by privatising utilities and the oil industry. “Our highest priority must be combating poverty.”

AMLO rejected accusations by his opponents that he wanted a return to a state-controlled society. But he warned that he would not submissively follow neo-liberal policies, which had proved unworkable, ineffective and dehumanising. “We must benefit from globalisation and not suffer from it,” he told the crowd. He further amplified that he would adopt economic policies - within the current framework of global economics - which were in the national interest of Mexico.


http://www.citymayors.com/politics/mexico_march.html



Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador only a day earlier facing possibly criminal charges, emerged from Mexico's three-week-long political crisis as the man who bested President Vicente Fox, forced the resignation of the attorney general, and now seems all but unstoppable to win the presidency next year. (KRT Photo/Susana Gonzalez)

Published on Friday, April 29, 2005 by Knight Ridder
Mexico City Mayor Weathers Charges, Emerges as '06 Front-Runner
by Susana Hayward

MEXICO CITY -- When he became mayor of one of the world's largest cities, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was coy about his ambitions. He drove an old car, dressed humbly and annoyed reporters who had to attend his daily, punctual 6 a.m. news conferences.

That was more than four years ago. On Thursday, he was the man to beat in the 2006 presidential election, and his left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, no longer seemed likely to be a distant third in Mexico's political races.

Lopez Obrador's transformation was completed Wednesday night, when President Vicente Fox announced the resignation of Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, the brigadier general who had doggedly pursued Lopez Obrador on criminal charges stemming from a land dispute. The charges themselves were minor, but under Mexican law they would have prevented Lopez Obrador from running for the presidency.

In besting the president, Lopez Obrador also defeated the two other major Mexican political parties, Fox's National Action Party, or PAN, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, whose members in Congress had teamed up to strip Lopez Obrador of his immunity from prosecution three weeks ago.

"If Lopez Obrador was the man to beat before this, he's even more powerful now," said Cesar Hernandez, a political scientist with the think tank Investigative Center for Development. "He showed his political muscle, played hardball, bluffed, threatened and controlled his followers from getting violent, something the government was banking on to add more charges."

The mayor, who took a leave of absence from office after he lost his immunity and had taken to holding court in a public park not far from his home, was back in form Thursday at his early morning news conference.
(snip/...)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0429-05.htm

[saigon68]

6. The CIA will KILL him

[Judi Lynn]

7. I'm sure they will! It's a sad thought, but it's going to be a grim task

waiting to see which new Latin American non-Bush-serving leader is going to get slaughtered first. My greatest hope is that they have had enough time to become completely aware of how previous Republican Presidents have treated Latin American lefists, and will have super-human security measures in place this time.

[saigon68]

8. amerika has a long legacy of murder

After Pinochet assumed power, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told U.S. President Richard Nixon that the U.S. "didn't do it" (referring to the coup itself) but had "created the conditions as great as possible" <12> , including leading economic sanctions. Recently declassified documents show that the United States government and the CIA had sought the overthrow of Allende in 1970, immediately before he took office ("Project FUBELT"), through the incident that claimed the life of then Commander-in-Chief, General René Schneider, but claims of their direct involvement in the 1973 coup are not proven by publicly available documentary evidence. Many potentially relevant documents still remain classified.

[Judi Lynn]

10. Sure hope someone can move them to cough up those documents

in our lifetimes... It would be more than interesting.

Speaking of assassinations, how many Americans have ever really heard of Operation Condor, the actual large-scale right-wing murder organization?

Pulling Back the Veil on Condor
by John Dinges
The Nation magazine, July 24/31, 2000

For three years, from 1975 through 1977, the countries in what is known as the Southern Cone of South America underwent a human rights crime wave unprecedented before or since in the region. Military regimes in place for more than a decade in Brazil and Paraguay were joined by like-minded military rulers who had overthrown civilian regimes in Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Perhaps the most closely guarded secret was a system of international cooperation known as Operation Condor, an intelligence organization in which multinational teams tracked down and assassinated dissidents outside their home countries. At least 13,000 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned in concentration camps in the six countries participating in Condor.

Now, the discovery of secret-police documents in Paraguay and other recently declassified documents in the United States is pulling back the veil from Operation Condor. The new information paints a picture of up-to-the-minute knowledge of Condor operations by US officials, including detailed intelligence just before Chile sent a team to Washington, DC, where they killed a prominent opposition leader with a car bomb on Embassy Row. Other documents provide a feasible scenario for the origins of Operation Condor and point to the intriguing early involvement of an FBI agent. This is my reconstruction of what happened:

In May 1975, Paraguayan police arrested two men, Jorge Fuentes Alarcon and Amilcar Santucho, who represented what they considered a major new guerrilla threat, a united underground organization of armed groups from several countries, called the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta, or JCR.

The arrests were seen as an intelligence bonanza, according to Paraguayan and US documents. Last year the Justice Department declassified a letter, dated June 6,1975, from an FBI agent, Robert Scherrer, to a Chilean police official. Scherrer, who had taken great interest in the arrest of the two revolutionaries, describes the results of "interrogations" of the two men.
(snip)

.......Fuentes was seen, tortured but alive, by a dozen witnesses inside a secret prison known as Villa Grimaldi, on the outskirts of Santiago. He was taken away in January 1976 and is presumed dead.
(snip/...)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Veil_Condor.html

[Little Star]

18. Was there a movie about this starring

Robert Redford?

[Judi Lynn]

23. .That was "Three Days of the Condor." I just looked it up. Not the same

people, it would seem, although Redford does play the part of a CIA researcher.

You can be sure there were no Robert Redford adventures connected anywhere near this industrial-strength assassination squad preying on the leftists and alleged leftists of this hemisphere, even to the point of hiring Cuban "exile" bombers to murder a Chilean diplomat, Orlando Letellier, and his American assistant, Ronnie Moffit, and her husband in the streets of Washington D.C. in broad daylight.

[Judi Lynn]

12. It just occurred to me that the new Latin American leaders most likely

will open their country's sealed records from the dirty wars times, during Nixon-Kissinger, Ford, Reagan, etc., which will put pressure on the U.S. to make our own records available, too. This will expose American Republican Presidential treachery, so they will undoubtedly fight it but hard.

Already, Kirschner in Argentina, and Lula da Silva in Brazil have opened records, and Argentina has even started prosecuting torturers, etc. from that time, Chile, too.

Just a thought.

[EuroObserver]

24. Everybody in Latin-America is well aware of that n/t

[Peace Patriot]

17. The Leftist movement in South/Central America is UNSTOPPABLE. They

cannot "assassinate" it. Virtually the entire map of the South American subcontinent has gone "blue" over the last several years, with leftist governments elected, often by big majorities, in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela and now Bolivia. Peru is likely next, and there isn't must else. Look at the map! I don't have the political rundown on Central America, but I suspect it's similar. This Mexican leftist trend is part of a HUGE, from-the-bottom-up, movement, driven by, 1) TRANSPARENT elections (a lot of hard work by the OAS, EU election groups, the Carter Center and local election groups (imagine if we had transparent elections here, too!); and 2) as the article below points out, the utter failure of global free piracy (so-called "free trade," transglobal corporations and their WTOs, World Banks, IMFs, NAFTAs, etc.) to help anybody in the world except the already rich.

Amlo does not stand alone. This is not to say that the Bush junta won't TRY to decapitate this enormous groundswell for change, but when you have 10,000 Venezuelans pour into the streets of Caracas to peacefully prevent a US-backed coup against their democratically elected president Huge Chavez, you gotta figure something's up--something that has nothing to do with "personalities" and heads of state. And that something is the biggest revolution in the history of the world, happening in South/Central America right now.

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

"Latin America Shifts Left: It's the Economy," by Mark Weisbrot, Alternet

Saturday, Jan 21, 2006

 "Evo Morales' election in Bolivia, with an unprecedented (for that country) 54 percent of the vote, is seen and analyzed here mostly in political terms. He is a former head of the coca growers union and opposes the U.S.-sponsored attempts to eradicate the production of coca. He has talked about nationalizing the natural gas resources now owned by foreign corporations. "We're not just anti-neoliberal, we're anti-imperialist in our blood," he proclaimed at a recent campaign rally. These things will be more than enough to ensure that he does not get a fair hearing here in the United States.

"But we would do well to step back from the politics for a moment and look at this election in economic terms. This explains a lot what is happening in Bolivia, and indeed across most of the region. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America -- its GDP (or annual income) per person is only $2,800, as compared to $8,200 for the Latin American region and $42,000 in the United States.

"Bolivia has also been subject to IMF agreements almost continuously (except for eight months) since 1986. And it has done what the experts from Washington have wanted, including privatizing nearly everything that could be sold. Among the most notorious was the water system of Cochabamba, which led to the famous "water war" against Bechtel (the buyer) in 1999-2000 after many residents got priced out of the market. The country's Social Security system was also privatized.

"But nearly 20 years of these structural reforms -- or "neoliberalism" as Morales and most Latin Americans call it -- have brought little in the way of economic benefits to the average Bolivian. Amazingly, the country's per capita income is actually lower today than it was 25 years ago. And 63 percent of Bolivians live below the poverty line.

"So Morales' declarations cannot be dismissed as just populist campaign rhetoric. In fact, the economic failure of the last 25 years is both regional and unprecedented. For Latin America as a whole, income per person -- the most basic number that economists have to measure economic progress -- has grown by about 1 percent for the first five years of this decade. From 1980 to 2000, it grew by only 9 percent. Compare that to 82 percent for the 1960-1980 period -- before most of the neoliberal reforms began -- and it is easy to see that this is the worst long-term economic failure in modern Latin American history.

"Here in Washington, most economists and policymakers have either ignored this profound regional economic failure or maintain that is has nothing to do with the structural reforms of the last 25 years. On the contrary, they argue that the reforms did not go far enough -- and that is the position of the Bush administration as well.

"But most Latin Americans aren't buying it. This difference over economic policy -- much more than drug policy, the war in Iraq, immigration, or Cuba -- is the main thing that has set Washington on a collision course with most of Latin America. Evo Morales is now the sixth candidate in the last seven years to win a presidential race while campaigning explicitly against "neoliberalism." The others were in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador and Uruguay. And there will likely be more in the near future, as there are 10 more presidential elections scheduled in Latin America over the next year.... (MORE)

http://venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1654


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

The article is not long, and well worth reading to the end. Weisbrot doesn't mention Chile, which just elected a leftist WOMAN president, Michele Batchelet. Don't know if she's especially anti-neoliberal (she was tortured by Pinochet--so she probably is), but the total picture is basically a "blue" sweep of South America, with nearly every government gone left/socialist. The South Americans are fed up with us and our neo- libs and cons. Chavez and Morales--and Amlo in Mexico--need to be seen in this bigger context. Their elections (or, in Amlo's case, likely election) are not isolated developments.

www.venezuelanalysis.com is an excellent source on South America/Venezuela.

[ronnie624]

11. Thanks for the excellent info.

Will read tonight at work.

[Ally McLesbian]

5. A change from Vicente Fox

would definitely be a good thing.

Fox is a carbon copy of W, and I still haven't forgiven him for using homophobia to win the 2000 election.

[Bridget Burke]

19. Whoever wins the election, it will be a change from Fox.

Since the 1910-1920 Revolution, Mexican presidents have only been allowed to serve one term. Of course, each president generally had a hand in selecting the next one. Fox broke the pattern, since he was the first president not a member of PRI. In fact, he did make some reforms. He's not exactly a carbon copy of W.

[JanMichael]

13. Excellant!

Tick tock tick tock...The Revolution is creeping NORTHWARD!

[dooner]

14. He probably hates us for our freedom... n/t

[oneighty]

15. But who will work

our fields who will feed us if Mexico creates its own well paying jobs?

The factories exported to Mexico from United States of America will have to return to their beginnings to find cheap labor.

180

[meow2u3]

20. I can just picture this: Americans crossing the borders into Mexico

in search of good-paying jobs. Mexicans would probably call us wetback gringos.

[Judi Lynn]

16. What really must make them wild in that country, is that our trade systems

have wiped out their agriculture, and the jobs so many, many Mexican people had filled for so very long, even many generations. Those people were left with NOTHING to do, and no way to make money, just like the factory workers in towns nearly leveled by factory closings in the States.

I've read multiple times that U.S. subsidies have made it possible for our corn producers, and our sugar producers to undercut Mexican corn and sugar cane farmers, and decimated those industries, the actual farming, and the processing, etc.

When the disposed workers try to make their way here, they are treated like TRASH.

A very strong government in Mexico, one not open to corruption should be able to turn things around, and put Mexican people FIRST, AHEAD OF OUTSIDERS. They are going to have to be able to "just say "no" to American bullying, threats, and bribery. They need to look after Mexico, and encourage American Presidents to stop shoving them around.

This man looks like someone who might help them regain their honor and well-being. That is, if he doesn't get assassinated first.

[Peace Patriot]

22. Nope, they cannot "assassinate" the leftist movement in So/Cent America--

it's too big. And I think we should stop predicting it. I've seen the same prediction in many threads on Chavez and Morales. Any good news from So. America gets posted, people jump right in and start with the assassination talk. I think we all--us distraught No. American leftists--need to deal with our deep wounds and shadow projections. I'm not saying the Bush junta is not dangerous to So./Cent American leaders, and doesn't have its dirty rotten plots--it clearly does. But I think that our fear of their success is coming partly from ignorance of the enormity of the changes and movements in Latin America, and partly from our own battered condition as a democratic people. We have bitter memories of our own shocking realization of what OUR gov't was doing, in the 1960s-1980s--and CURRENT bitterness and regret at our inability to stop these evil elements from re-gaining power here. We also have the more subterranean guilt--not everyone has made it conscious--that the Clinton administration's support for extremely damaging and exploitative trade agreements has destroyed THIS economy as well as inflicting even worse pain and destruction on others. And that leaves us with almost no leadership that we can trust.

The Latin Americans have struggled long and hard, and have suffered much, to achieve their day of joy. And it is joy that I see in the faces of Evo Morales, Huge Chavez, Amlo and others. These are enlightened people, and truly good leaders. They are expressions of the triumph of democracy, despite every effort of our government and of the Latin American fascist elite to kill it. We now have to undergo this struggle for democracy HERE, in "the land of the free and the home of the brave." And I feel that somehow this DARK projection of ours, that OUR fascist gov't WILL stop their joy--their achievement of democracy, their transformation from victims into free people--is coming from our fear of the struggle that WE must face.

[sundancekid]

21. bookmarked, k & r -- let's get this thread to the Greatest Page -- we

all need to be reminded that a whole lot of people are fighting like it's their 1776 and not their 1984 ... us, here at DU, included

btw, election day for Mexico will be July 2, 2006

on edit: sorry, it's past the 24 hour period -- too late to recommend -- I had not noticed the time stamp of the OP being sooooooooooooooo early yesterday morning!)