Beware of Mexico

With the world's attention fixed on the Middle East and Cuba, there has been scant notice of the leftists protesters who demand a vote recount in the recent presidential election they say was stolen from their candidate.

Their civil disobedience is being organized by supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, better known as AMLO, who narrowly lost to conservative ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon. Although European Union observers declared that the vote was fair, Mexico has a long history of election fraud and many leftists are deeply suspicious of the electoral system.

For good reason says The Scribe, the de facto Southern California-Mexico correspondent for Kiko's House, who writes at his Highway Scribery blog that:

If you’ve just had the “cleanest, fairest, most transparent elections” in Mexican history, you wouldn’t have people camping out in the streets protesting the results.

Mexico is a stunning country; rich in geographic beauty, natural wealth, and three levels of culture (pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, Mexican modern), but also, as an gallery owner down in Rosarito Beach (Baja California, Mexico) told The Scribe a year or so ago, full of huevones.

What’s that mean?

Never mind. We run a PG-13 enterprise here at highwayscribery, but needless to say Mexico is a people burdened with the cross of terrible corruption – top to bottom – and anyone calling the victory of Felipe Calderon, a nice boy from Harvard, clean and transparent, has erased a few decades of Mexican history from the hard drive.

What we’re seeing across the world, from the United States to Italy to Mexico, are elections that reflect perfectly the failure of neo-liberal politics en vogue for the past 26 years – politics that put an end to wealth redistribution and make a fetish of the businessperson’s creed.

Politics that swell the wallets of one half a country and leave the other half without hope . . . Politics that generate elections which illustrate the divisive nature of the free market credo.

To wit: if your policies are working for all, you don’t have 49 percent of the people voting for the other guy who’s calling for wiping them from the books, and you don’t have a goodly portion of them camping out in the streets with nothing better to do.