Why Mexico Keeps Burning

By Tim Padgett / Mexico City

Even during placid times, Mexico's annual Informe, or State of the Union address, makes for high political theater. And so when outgoing President Vicente Fox arrived at the San Lazaro Congress building in Mexico City to give his final Informe last Friday night, Mexicans were ready for some drama. And they got it. Congressmen loyal to leftist presidential contender Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has spent the past two months protesting the results of the July 2 election, jumped from their seats and surrounded the broad podium, shouting "Fuera!" (Out!). So obdurate were the legislators that they blocked Fox, decked out in his presidential sash, from delivering his speech. All he could do was hand the text to congressional leaders in the lobby and go home.

The confrontation was the latest noisy move by Lopez Obrador's supporters, who condemn his apparent electoral loss as a fraud. It is unlikely to be their last. This week Conservative Felipe Calderon, a member of Fox's National Action Party (PAN), is expected to be declared the winner by a razor-thin margin, after two months of ballot recounts and bitter legal challenges. But thousands of Lopez Obrador stalwarts insist they will continue occupying the Zocalo, Mexico City's main plaza, and the Paseo de la Reforma, its principal avenue, where they have been living for weeks under pup tents and sprawling tarpaulins. "We'll stay here as long as it takes to get Lopez Obrador declared the winner," says Norma Cruz, 48, a poor housewife from the rural southern state of Oaxaca who has been camping with her husband and four children in the Zocalo for almost a month. "This is the only way left to take on the monopolies of economic power in Mexico."

At this point, though, Cruz is more likely to witness the second coming of Montezuma than to see Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, declared President. There is little compelling evidence that victory was stolen from him. To many observers, including prominent Mexican leftists, his refusal to accept the fact that he did lose--if only by 243,000 votes out of 41 million cast--is no longer democratic protest but demagogic petulance. Polls show that Mexicans are exasperated by the massive political street fair, complete with mariachi bands and the aromas of regional cooking. But the most hotly contested election in the nation's history has exposed more glaringly than ever the potentially violent social divide in Mexico. Addressing this split in a constructive way will be crucial to Calderon's ability to defuse the growing turbulence. And that, in turn, could have a beneficial impact on Washington's efforts to curb illegal immigration, which may not be successful until its southern neighbor builds more reliable government institutions and a more equitable economy.

The road ahead will be rough. Mexican democracy only took root in 2000, when Fox defeated the dictatorial Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled the country for 71 years. Lopez Obrador and militants in his Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) have promised to create a "parallel government" and widen their "civil resistance," starting with a disruption of next week's Independence Day celebrations and continuing through the Dec. 1 presidential inauguration. In impoverished Oaxaca, thousands of teachers and other workers striking for better pay have virtually paralyzed the state--and a small but tenacious guerrilla force, the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), has begun to re-emerge there.

Though it has the potential to destabilize Mexico, the revolt of Lopez Obrador and his supporters may have a silver lining, by focusing attention on the country's social ills. Almost half the population of 106 million live in poverty. Most are in the backward rural south, where almost all the states went to Lopez Obrador. His supporters have proved doggedly determined to keep the cause of Mexico's have-nots--many of whom live little better than their great-grandparents did before Mexico's bloody 1910 Revolution--on the political radar screen. "If they don't," says Rogelio Ramirez de la O, Lopez Obrador's economic adviser, "it could take 200 more years for Mexico's economic growth to trickle down to the poor."

The question now is whether Calderon, 44, a Harvard-educated technocrat, has the brass to confront the entrenched corporate monopolies that helped his campaign squeak by Lopez Obrador. A political adviser to Calderon says that, once in office, Calderon may roll back some of the lavish tax and regulatory breaks that Big Business enjoys in Mexico. For many Mexicans, that would be a promising start, since economic reform, or the lack of it, is at the heart of Mexico's mess. After Fox beat the PRI in 2000, Mexicans expected the President (who by law could not seek re-election) to tackle the country's crony capitalism. Instead, he signed bills that seemed to worsen it--like a controversial law that gave away billions of dollars of additional broadcasting spectrum to Mexico's two TV network behemoths, Televisa and TV Azteca.

The fact that Calderon won the July election shows that Mexican society is more conservative than the left cares to admit. But across the political range, there's an emerging consensus that the health of Mexico's democracy depends on closing the gap between rich and poor. That's a big reason why figures such as Ramirez de la O--a Cambridge-educated economist and one of Mexico's most respected business consultants--signed on with Lopez Obrador this year. Ramirez de la O insists that Mexican policy has too long neglected "real job creation, the kind that can reduce Mexico's illegal migrant flow." That would require increased investment in rural infrastructure and small and medium-size businesses, which employ two-thirds of Mexico's workers but are chronically denied bank credit and capital. The World Bank recently announced a $1 billion loan program for smaller enterprises in the region, including Mexico. That's the kind of help, say experts like Ramirez de la O, that the U.S. should prioritize as a way to ease the economic displacement that many Mexicans, especially farmers, have experienced under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Calderon says he is on the same page. "One kilometer of new road in Oaxaca," he has said, "is worth more than 100 miles of fence on the U.S.-Mexico border." Having won about 36% of the vote, he hardly has a robust mandate. But he has smartly stayed calm about his opponent's postelection outbursts, perhaps realizing how raw the memories of decades of PRI-engineered election fraud are in the minds of his countrymen. Calderon last week praised the electoral tribunal for "eliminating the insidious doubts" about his victory that he says Lopez Obrador has planted. Still, when Calderon takes the presidential podium, he will face the more daunting task of eliminating Mexico's doubts about the future of its democracy.

With reporting by Dolly Mascarenas/ Mexico City