Viva Democracia!

(note: why isn't that upside-down exclamation point on my keyboard?)

While we hear this bluster about spreading democracy and freedom around the globe, our closest neighbor directly to the south is having some trouble with it and we're not about to throw a lifeline. After 71 years of one-party rule in Mexico, Vicente Fox ran a "populist" campaign to get his PRI party into the Presidency. Now he's fending off a possible challenge by a real populist, Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, by basically conspiring with his Congress to make him ineligible to run for office. On Friday the legislature waived Lopez Obrador's immunity protection stemming from a minor offense (he allegedly ignored a court order in 2001 to stop building an access road to a private hospital). By the country's bylaws, anyone who is under criminal charges cannot run for the Presidency.

It's not like Mexico has a sterling record of democracy to begin with. Now the party in power is trying to rewrite laws to eliminate challengers. This has wide-ranging effects. Not only would a Lopez Obrador government have a chance to lift Mexico out of poverty, helping to stem illegal immigration by giving the working class a chance to thrive in their own country. But the symbolism of a creeping totalitarianism directly to our south has a debilitating effect to our rhetoric of leading the world in spreading democracy. Of course, we only want democracy on our terms, and paranoia over a leftist winning the vote in Mexico will cause a certain inertia by the Bush Administration to speak out against Fox and the Mexican Congress.

Meanwhile 150,000 Mexicans turned out to support Lopez Obrador:



Why are we the only country on the planet that doesn't give a crap about their own government? It's hilarious to hear conservatives so laudatory of street protests they presumably support, in Ukraine and Lebanon for example, and then turn around and call protests they reject "traitorous". The cognitive dissonance would be funny if it weren't so sad.