Johnny Hazard: Mexico Commemorates a Fraud

His new book, the subtly-entitled THE MAFIA STOLE THE PRESIDENCY, is one of many on the subject that have been released in the past few weeks. His Ibsenian spirit of resistance intact, he didn´t say anything particularly new at the rally. (The day before, one of his key advisors had suggested that the public be ready for an announcement of new actions to take: the ballots haven´t been burned yet, and there´s still time to trace the trail of corruption, he said.) The real news, participants and many media people agree, is that the movement still exists.

A survey of 899 persons in Mexico City (a more left-leaning and educated population than the rest of the country) released Monday by a centrist newspaper indicates that if the election were held (again) today, 62 percent would vote for López Obrador, compared with 60%, according to official figures, who voted for him a year ago.

The tendency to create a cult of personality around him has not abated; for some reason, in spite of our egalitarian beliefs, we tend, on the left, to canonize charismatic figures: Che Guevara, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Emiliano Zapata, Subcomandante Marcos, Hugo Chávez. The slogans present at this march were not as funny, as radical, or as transcendent as those of the marches last summer; scatological insults directed at Calderón and extremely generalized boycott calls predominated this time.

One columnist commented on Monday that López Obrador´s fortune and that of the movement that surrounds him will probably rise as that of Calderón inevitably falls. Calderón has governed with Bush-like fearmongering strategies. The war of this official government is against "drug traffickers," and the result, like in Iraq, is more violence in the affected areas than before the "war." It turns out that the "drugs" in question are principally marijuana. This has led more Mexicans to call for its legalization, now that it´s more clear that the fight to repress cannibis causes much more damage than its consumption.

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