Viva AMLO!

So I'm still rooting for López Obrador to pull ahead in the Mexican presidential race (although it seems increasingly unlikely that he'll actually do so), for all of the usual, boringly obvious Massachusetts-lefty-transplanted-to-the-Bay-Area reasons. (1) The most important reason to back López Obrador, though, is the shocking revelation made Sunday night concerning the true nature of his PAN opponent, Felipe Calderón. During Azteca America's coverage of Calderón's victory-according-to-selected-indicators speech, the wide-angle camera shots revealed that not one but two of the people standing directly in front of the main podium were wearing NY Yankees caps (tan and blue respectively, turned backwards so that the logos were clearly visible). Seriously, PAN, your candidate studied at Harvard and you still can't muster up any love for the BoSox? (2) For shame. That's the final straw - you're dead to me, PAN. López Obrador para siempre! (3)


(1) No, he's not perfect. The cartoon pamphlet that he distributed in 2004 claiming that "dark forces" were working against him was so over the top in its paranoia and sense of self-righteous aggrievement that when I first saw it I thought that it was that it was a piece of cutting satire produced by his opponents. (Then again, the various attempts to disqualify López Obrador from even entering the presidential race certainly lend some plausibility to notions of "fuerzas oscuras.") And the PRD's post-election rumblings and threats to disregard election results have been a bit disquieting (although once more, it's not as if there aren't reasons for PRD supporters to be suspicious of the validity of presidential vote counts). On the whole, though, I think López Obrador has gotten a raw deal from the U.S. press, which seems obsessed with fitting news from Latin America into a "resurgence of the populist-authoritarian left" storyline and which generally insists on measuring the region's leaders using standard Chávez units (according to some quick back-of-the envelope calculations, Fidel Castro tips the scales at a hefty 2.5 Chávezes, Evo Morales and Lula da Silva both come in at a respectable 0.7 Chávezes apiece and Alan García barely registers at only a tenth of a Chávez. To be fair, the López Obrador-Chávez comparison is not the sole creation of U.S. reporters, as the PAN also ran campaign ads linking the two.)While it can be useful to look at events within a regional context, individual and national differences are often as important as the similarities. Expressing concern for the poor does not automatically make a politician a ruthless demagogue, and advocating that wealthy citizens contribute more to their country is not one step away from dressing everyone in burlap and sending them off to collective farms. There are arguments to be made about López Obrador's merits as a politician, but painting him as a Chávez-in-waiting seems to miss the point.

2) Yeah, yeah, the men in the Yankees caps were probably photographers or reporters, and not actually affiliated with the PAN. Still, does a decent presidential candidate allow the Yankees to be supported in his or her presence? That's right, I didn't think so. (Yeah, Hillary. You heard me.)

(3) No, growing up in Massachusetts didn't bias me on this issue at all - why do you ask?