Threats to Mexican Democracy
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Lopez Obrador |
In 2001, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the current mayor of Mexico City, ordered the construction of an access road to the back entrance of a public hospital through a small plot of private property that the city had expropriated. A judge ordered him to cease construction, but the mayor disregarded the order and construction proceeded. A few months later, the land, with the road through it, was returned to its original owner.
This issue has become a major political controversy in Mexico. The PGR (Mexico's equivalent of the Justice Department), has asked Congress to strip Mr. López Obrador of his immunity from prosecution, in order to try him for having ignored the judge's order. If the mayor is stripped of his immunity and then tried for abuse of power, he would be ineligible to run for President of Mexico in the elections next year--and he is currently the frontrunner among the possible candidates, with support around 30%. A major debate is raging over the appropriateness and legitimacy of the process, called desafuero in Mexico. This debate has powerful roots in Mexico's political history.
Since 1929, after the Mexican Revolution, the oxymoronic Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as the PRI by their initials in Spanish) had governed the country. During that time, the PRI went to great lengths to fuse itself with the Mexican State. Each President was restricted to one six-year term without the possibility of reelection, to prevent any one politician from accumulating too much personal power; but to compensate for the lack of reelection, PRI Presidents wielded a great deal of power during their terms. Congressmen (Diputados) were derisively called levantamanos ("hand-raisers"), for their habit of rubber-stamping the President's proposals.
The first serious challenge to the PRI's hegemony came in 1988, after a decade that saw a debt crisis, a devaluation of the peso, powerful inflation, structural adjustment that forced Mexico to eliminate many social and human-development programs, and a massive earthquake in Mexico City in 1985. In the Presidential elections of 1988, the left-wing candidate from the PRD party (the Party of the Democratic Revolution), Cuahtémoc Cárdenas, was clearly winning until voting machines mysteriously failed around the country. When the machines came back online, the PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gotari, was declared the winner. The fraud was widely declared by Mexican and international observers. Mr. López Obrador made his entry into national politics at this time, as an ex-PRI founding member of the PRD, along with Mr. Cárdenas.
In 1994, Mr. López Obrador was a gubernatorial candidate in his native Tabasco, the most oil-rich state in the country. He lost the election to Roberto Madrazo of the PRI, and claimed that Mr. Madrazo had only managed to win through fraud. In that year, he organized a march to Mexico City to protest the fraud, becoming, in the process, a nationally known political figure.
In 2000, Mr. Fox won the Presidency and Mr. López Obrador became the mayor of Mexico City. Mexicans were elated. There was a powerful feeling that Mexico had passed into a new era with the electoral defeat of the PRI. The new national government called itself El Gobierno del Cambio ("the government of the change"), and expectations for it were extremely high. Reality, however, has since sunk in. Mr. Fox has seen his major legislative initiatives stymied in the Congress, where the PRI is still powerful. Many Mexicans, accustomed to a practically omnipotent PRI President, have become frustrated with his inability to make major changes. He is criticized from the left for his staunch support of neoliberal economic policies. However, Mr. Fox's government is playing a vital role in the development of Mexico's democratic culture. Many Mexicans may have forgotten how recently it was that to criticize the President and the ruling party was a dangerous activity--now editorials and cartoons lampooning Mr. Fox are a daily staple in the newspapers. In fact, there is now so much criticism that during Mr. Fox's State of the Union speech last September, some diputados actually protested with signs and loud chants in the chamber of Congress. They had to be repeatedly shushed by the Speaker so that the President could continue. This reflects a significant change in Mexican politics, a change toward a more open and pluralistic form of governing. However, a country cannot transition from a corporatist, one-party state to a healthy pluralistic democracy in six years. There is still a great deal of institutional and cultural change that needs to happen in Mexico, but Mr. Fox's term has been a start. This now brings us back to the issue of the desafuero of Mexico City's mayor.
As I have argued, Mexico's democracy is currently a seedling. The PRI, a party deeply corrupted by its unbroken 71 years in power, retains powerful roots in the Congress, in many state and local governments, and across many sectors of society. As any Mexican will tell you, corruption and the use of political power for personal gain was rampant in the old system and continues today. Mexico must continue to work toward a system in which people and groups from across the political spectrum can engage in serious, respectful, inclusive, and transparent dialogue for the good of the country. In a new and healthy Mexico, governmental institutions must be clearly separated from political parties and uses. (That confusion is unfortunately built into the Spanish language--política means both "politics" and "policy".) And in the case of the Mexico City mayor, a thicket of claims and counter-claims continue to obscure those distinctions between politics and governing.
Officially, the President is not in charge of the desafuero process. The office of the Mexican Attorney General presented the charges to Congress, which is the only body with the power to strip the mayor's immunity. It is clear from his public statements, however, that Mr. Fox supports the desafuero. He accused the mayor of "using public resources to defend popular causes," called his actions "unacceptable," and suggested that "they are only a sign of what he will try do in the future." It is unlikely that the desafuero process would have moved forward without the President's (at least implicit) backing.
The President is also being accused of directing the desafuero in order to dispose of a powerful political opponent of his party (since he personally is prohibited from running for President again). In September of 2004, the Mexico City daily Milenio reported that Mr. Fox had met to discuss the desafuero with Supreme Court Justice Mariano Azuela, the federal prosecutor Rafael Macedo, and Santiago Creel, his Minister of the Interior and PAN's candidate for the Presidency in 2006. And La Jornada reports that on March 12th, an agreement was reached between diputados from the PRI and the PAN (who combined control three out of every four votes in the Congress), to vote to strip the mayor of his immunity in April. Mr. López Obrador and some political analysts see in these meetings evidence of political motivation for the process and of the domination of the judicial branch by the executive.
Many public figures and groups have entered the debate on the desafuero. José Woldenberg, a former president of the Federal Electoral Institute, the agency which coordinates the country's elections, is a member of a group of fifty-six artists, intellectuals, and other public figures who have called on the government to cease the desafuero proceedings. Subcommander Marcos, speaking for Zapatista communities, condemned the desafuero, calling it "a preventive coup d'etat". He declared it illegal and illegitimate [Marcos should know!] and called on Mexicans to resist it through peaceful protests, while clearly maintaining that opposition to the process is different from political support for Mr. López Obrador. The famous and well-respected writer, Carlos Fuentes, recently warned in a meeting with senators that if the left wing is marginalized in the coming election via the desafuero, that it may feel like it has no choice but to "go back to the mountains." A group of civil society groups from around the country, in an open letter, have pressed Congress not to act on the desafuero. The Union of Mexico City Government Workers has spoken out against it. In the March 18 La Jornada, Adolfo Sánchez Vásquez, a professor emeritus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), argued against the desafuero on the basis of several factors: 1) that the process is politically motivated, 2) that Mr. López Obrador's case has been expedited among thousands of pending cases, 3) that previous similar offenses have gone unpunished, and 4) that there is no corresponding penalty for Mr. López Obrador's offense. These calls are being made in an atmosphere of seriously strained relations and mutual accusations of abuse of power between Mr. Fox and Mr. López Obrador.
One of the accusations against President Fox is that he has not prosecuted more serious offenses on his watch. These include the misuse of billions of dollars by Pemex, the national oil company, and a scandal in the state of Morelos, in which top police officials were found to be escorting cocaine shipments. The Congress is considering impeaching the governor of that state. Critics of Mr. López Obrador reply that his disobedience of the judge's order shows that he feels himself to be above the law. Certainly a Mexican President willing to disobey judicial authority would not inspire confidence in the rule of law.
In addition to the desafuero controversy, Mr. López Obrador has also been politically harmed by serious corruption scandals during the last year. Mexico City's finance chief, Gustavo Ponce, was found to have received $1.67 million in wire transfers during his gambling trips to Las Vegas, much of it believed to have come from Carlos Ahumada, an Argentinean businessman who is now in jail on charges of fraud. Then, after the Ponce story broke, Rene Bejarano, a former campaign manager of Mr. López Obrador and the head of the PRD caucus in the Mexico City legislature, said of Mr. Ponce's actions, "This kind of thing offends me." He was then interviewed on national television by a clown named Brozo, who showed a tape of Mr. Bejarano receiving $45,000 in cash from Mr. Ahumada, stuffing into his pockets the cash that would not fit in his briefcase. He has been charged with conspiracy and accepting money from an illegal source. Mr. López Obrador has denied that he had any knowledge of the actions of his associates.
Adding to the tension and confusion, the mayor recently announced that he would run a Presidential campaign from prison if he were convicted. Mexico City is flooded with a "No desafuero" publicity campaign and there have been big rallies in support of the mayor. Not only that, but there is disagreement among legal experts as to whether Mr. López Obrador would be disqualified from being a candidate during his trial. The effects of a desafuero are unpredictable--it could, for example, actually help the mayor's political position if more people begin to see him as a victim. His disqualification from the presidential race could call into question the legitimacy of the results if large numbers of his supporters were to abstain.
Congress is due to decide soon whether to strip the Mexico City mayor and presidential frontrunner of his immunity from prosecution. The consequences will be critical not only for the outcome of the 2006 presidential contest, but for the growth of democracy, transparency, and pluralism in Mexico.
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