According to the Associated Press on Sept. 15, the tent city erected seven weeks ago on the main streets of Mexico City to protest the election of conservative President-elect Felipe Calderon has now come down.
Despite the fact that the independent election authority delcared Calderon the winner on Sept. 5, the leftist candidate Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador planned to swear himself in as the shadow president in a street theater inauguration. Bad idea. His PRD party started to split and key supporters went on vacation.
Lopez Obrador failed to provoke President Vincente Fox into a violent reaction to the protests. The patient residents of Mexico City just waited for the protests to run their course. The slate for PRD leadership that Lopez Obrador wanted in the Congress did not win. Two governors of the PRD party have now recognized Calderon as the legitimate president of Mexico. The founder of the PRD party has condemned the tactics of Lopez Obrador in an open letter.
Leftist demonstrations for Mexican Independence Day tomorrow have been scaled back or cancelled. Many former supporters of Lopez-Obrador have just gotten tired of his act. The chamber of commerce of Mexico City says the protests cost the jobs of 3,000 people as 67 businesses had to close.
Lopez Obrador lost. It was not like Florida in 2000. He lost by more than 240,000 votes out of 42 million cast. It was close, but not razor thin. The margin was about six-tenths of one percent for the winning candidate. There was a race for governor in a Mexican state that was won by a PRD supporter of Lopez Obrador that was much closer on a percentage basis and in that case the PAN opponent had to grudgingly recognize that result. Losing graciously is not yet a tradition in Mexico for any party.
Lopez Obrador made many allegations of vote fraud and few checked out on investigation because over one million Mexicans participated as local election judges and international observers saw no evidence of fraud.
Mexico now has a chance for an orderly transition from President Vincente Fox to President Felipe Calderon, both of the PAN party. This will be a historic first since the PRI party lost power for the first time in 71 years in 2000. If he had won, Lopez-Obrador might well have forced Mexico to follow Fidel Castro's groupie Hugo Chavez of Venezuela off the left wing cliff.
Nicaragua is holding an election in a few weeks and guess who is leading in the polls after an absence of 15 years? Our old buddy Danny Ortega of Sandinista infamy. In some parts of Latin America, radical chic is back just in time to declare elections are no longer necessary because they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Hugo Chavez is broadly hinting that he is doing such a good job in his opinion that elections may no longer be needed in Venezuela. Yes, there have been many examples of right-wing dictators in Latin America over the last sixty years who did not like voting either. But Chavez is just the latest left-wing president who thinks elections are bad once he comes to power. After all, Castro and the Cubans never needed true and free elections once Fidel came to power in 1959. If elections are not good enough for Fidel, they are not good enough for Hugo.
President-elect Felipe Calderon is a conservative economist and a friend of the United States. His certification as president is a good thing for America but a better thing for Mexico because he brings hope for a better democracy and a more prosperous country. If Calderon's vision of a new Mexico can create jobs, that might help keep more Mexicans in Mexico close to families and friends.
