Democracy

What's going on directly to our south deserves some attention:

Backed by hundreds of thousands of followers, the leftist who lost Mexico's presidential vote vowed on Sunday to launch a civil resistance campaign to protest at fraud and force a recount.

Huge crowds chanting "You are not alone," cheered Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, runner-up in the July 2 election by a fraction, on a march through the capital to the Zocalo square.

The size of the protest, bigger than a similar demonstration last week, gave Lopez Obrador a lift in his attempt to persuade an election court to declare him winner.

"We are going to start peaceful civil resistance to defend democracy," Lopez Obrador told supporters, some of whom walked, travelled on battered old buses or even rode on horseback to the capital from around the country [...]

Lopez Obrador did not say what kind of civil resistance he envisaged. But as a local politician in the state of Tabasco in the 1990s he blocked oil wells and encouraged tens of thousands of people not to pay energy bills to protest at alleged vote fraud and environmental damage by the Pemex oil company.

Despite Lopez Obrador's ability to put supporters on the streets, an opinion poll on Saturday showed most Mexicans do not agree with his call for a vote-for-vote recount. A recount of tally sheets has already confirmed Calderon as the winner.

This is a fairly partisan article, and it gets some facts wrong. There was not a recount of tally sheets, but a count. Everything so far has been standard electoral procedure in Mexico. Nobody has authorized a recount.

Mexico's electoral tribunal is so far very well respected, so perhaps their decision will be honored by the losing party. But AMLO is ratcheting up the rhetoric (and perhaps with good reason, if you think about Mexico's recent electoral past, and if you read Greg Palast's dispatch about the present). His civil resistance campaigns have met with success before, and certainly he's building this up as the type of revolution we've seen in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

The consequences of this affect every American, so it'd be good to hear a little more about this in the media. There are plenty of reports from Mexican bloggers (if you speak Spanish). I'll continue to keep a close eye on this.