Los Angeles Times vs. the So-Called "People" of Mexico

The LA Times has a particularly silly editorial today, entitled Nail-biting time in Mexico.

The subtitle is priceless as well: "Election standoff reveals a populist candidate with undemocratic leanings." I'll wait a moment while you attempt futilely to resolve the notion of a populist being somehow un-democratic, then collapse howling with derisive laughter.

Done? Ok, then...

It seems that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has shown contempt for democracy by --horrors-- suggesting that the votes should be re-counted, and this in an election where the majority winner eked out a victory with perhaps less than 1% margin over Obrador.

The Times on the story:

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador showed why he probably would not make a great president of Mexico. A few hours after the polls closed, and moments after independent electoral authorities announced that the race was too close to call, the leftist former mayor of Mexico City took to the airwaves to declare himself the winner, by half a million votes.

Uhm, yeah, well, so did his rival, who, it seems, got perhaps the same number of votes. Back to Times on Obrador:

He urged election officials to "confirm our results" and pledged, menacingly, to protect the people's verdict.

The degree to which Lopez Obrador is a demagogue who considers himself above the law was a question debated throughout the campaign. His actions after the polls closed provided a definitive answer.

That action? Obrador vowed to employ "all legal means" to ensure the votes were counted, and spoke of respecting the process and institutions. Wierdly, this quote - which I heard via radio as well - got scrubbed from the Washington Times version of the story. Compare this to this.

Back to the LA Times:

Fortunately for Mexico, Lopez Obrador appears to have lost this three-way cliffhanger — by no more than 1 percentage point — to conservative candidate Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party. (By law, President Vicente Fox, the current leader of the party, could not seek a second term.)

In fact, nearly 2/3 of Mexico's electorate rejected Fox's heir apparent and partymate, voting instead for candidates from the other two prominent parties, or not participating at all.

The next president will face some of the same hurdles that thwarted many of Fox's aspirations. Calderon's party will only hold a third of congressional seats, which will make it difficult for the government to push ahead with needed reforms. Mexico's energy sector, to name one prominent example, desperately needs private and foreign investment, but the nationalist, leftist opposition continues to romanticize the notion that "the people" should own the nation's oil reserves.

Three points to make here:

First, Calderon is the former energy secretary in Mexico, so it's telling that the question of energy comes up here.

Second, and even more telling, is the use in the LA Times of quotation marks around the phrase "the people," as though the Mexican people don't actualy exist, except as a figment of the imagination of dastardly west-leaning candidates.

Third, if those "people" creatures exercise that "voting" thing, and decide they prefer to have some nationalized institutions, it's still called "democracy." Duh.

Despite the dashed hopes of the Fox years, it is encouraging that Mexican voters resisted the old-style populism and state interventionism peddled by Lopez Obrador.

Here, again, remember that definition of populism cited earlier:

"A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite."

Which is to say, "Don't them gul-durned Messicans know that their national resources are rightly the property of wealthy private concerns located beyond their borders? Uppity Spics."

It isn't just that figment known as "the people" who come in for a drubbing:

And for all the talk that Fox achieved little in his six years in office, his responsible economic policies helped provide novel stability, which led to low inflation and the expansion of credit to lower-middle-class voters.

Note here what is described as an expansion of credit to "voters", rather than to "citizens". Here again, word choice counts, and the modern history of the Global South, and particularly Latin America, is riddled with the corpses of lower-middle-class and poor people who are saddled under a burden of debt by their wealthier and whiter neighboors to the north. If only the Messicans had some kind of means of relieving that debt, but alas, they are merely "the people," who, it seems would best avail themselves of "democracy" by outsourcing their national wealth to private and oligarchich interests.

On Sunday, Mexicans faced a clear choice on the right and on the left — a healthy ideological contest for a maturing democracy.

Translation: Oh, it's so cute! The little brown brothers to the south, why, they're almost like a real country or something! Maybe some day they'll grow up to have clean and clear elections like those of us here in the good old U.S. of A.!
To their credit, the Times goes on to make one sane suggestion: that there be run-off elections in the case of unclear outcomes (would have been great if they'd recommended instant run-offs and preferential voting, but hey, baby steps here), and then goes on to note that "Extremely close elections have a way of testing even the most entrenched democracies, as Americans witnessed in 2000."

Yes, the "entrenched democracy" of America in 2000, onto which the Republican pallbearers were heaping dirt and concrete as quickly as possible.

And yes, it appears that some of the scum who helped steal the American election in 2000 are now helping screw up democracy throughout Latin America, including Mexico.

The other suggestion that the Times makes is: "Now, what Mexican democracy requires is for all the contenders to show more statesmanship and maturity than Lopez Obrador did Sunday night."

News flash to the LA Times: BOTH of the two candidates who got roughly 1/3 of the vote each, declared victory yesterday, so what's with the double standard? If the Times actually wanted to cluck their tongues at Mexican candidates for supposedly sounding unpresidential (whatever the hell that means), they'd have even-handedly dissed Felipe Calderon for doing the same thing that they criticized Obrador for doing. But of course, the Times rhetoric demonstratively had very little to do with what it was actually advocating.

Tossers.