The Ominous Shadow of 1988 Hovers Over this July’s Mexican Presidential Election

By John Ross
Blindman’s Buff

June 12, 2006

MEXICO CITY (June 13th): Driving in from the airport, the U.S. reporter asked the usual dumb questions. In his New York Times Magazine hit piece, David Rieff had just reported that airport taxi drivers were being pressured not to vote for leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the July 2nd presidential election. Was this true?

“On our site, they threatened two drivers if they don’t vote for Calderón (Felipe Calderón, the rightwing National Action Party – PAN in its Spanish initials – candidate) but no one is going for it,” corroborated Hector S., a 36 year-old National University business grad who is forced to push a hack for a living, “How can they do that? Isn’t the ballot supposed to be secret?” the driver asked his passenger but didn’t wait for an answer. “To me, it’s a lot like 1988 when they stole the election from Cárdenas. Like I said, we’re not going for it this time.” Hector had been an 18 year-old student about to enter the university in 1988 and had joined the protests that followed the Great Fraud with his older brothers.

As the taxi glided to a stop at the light on the wide slum avenue, a ragged youth threw himself gracelessly on the cab’s hood and started soaping the windshield. Hector waved him off sadly and dropped a coin in his cupped hand. “How can a country so rich have so many poor people?” The cabbie answered himself again. “This is two countries, amigo. One up there for Calderón” – he pointed to a bank of skyscrapers in the distance – “and the rest of us down here with López Obrador.”

The July 2nd Mexican presidential election is the most pertinent one since the watershed year of 1988 when Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, the nation’s last leftist president (1932-38) squared off against a Harvard-trained neo-liberal technocrat named Carlos Salinas in a contest that pitted the Washington Consensus against the revolutionary nationalism of the Mexican left, an election that would decide the future of Mexico at least up until now.

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