While the gutsy, imaginative and energetic Mexican online-born “student revolt” movement, “#Yo Soy 132” (“I am number 132”), is exciting the attention of political junkies — and journalists — the world over, veteran Mexican hands, while cheered, are somber about the results.
It seems clear that the much-loathed Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will win the presidency with its hugely financed campaign. Many voters will be merely voting July 1 for change, any change at all.
“The desperation ballot,” as one Mexican political analyst calls it.
And not a few of these same voters had been delirious with joy in 2000 with the toppling of the PRI’s 71-year-long corrupt, predatory and brutal rule by Vicente Fox of the pro-Church, pro-business National Action Party. It was a short-lived fiesta, lasting only until the middle of Fox’s term. His co-religionist successor, Felipe Calderon, has failed disastrously with his recklessly-declared war on drugs. The error: Calderon simply had no idea what he was doing. And Mexico’s law enforcement corps — twinned with a notoriously corrupt justice system — lacked the most basic characteristics, and certainly the training, to oppose better financed, more experienced, more canny drug cartels. It seemed to some as though Calderon had just arrived in Mexico with an excellent sense of Spanish and a fine knowledge of Mexican history, but no idea of how the Mexican political culture worked — or didn’t work. Naiveté is not a useful tool in waging a war of any kind.
The well thought-out entry of the students — not backing any of the three major candidates — pleasantly surprised experienced onlookers. The protesting students are not enthusiastic about any of the three candidates, because Peña Nieto and Josefina Vazquez Mota appear hollow, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is totally shorn of his former heartening political touch that embraced those closed out of Mexico’s political culture. In this, they agree with the family Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, lead by Javier Sicilia, a poet, who was turned into a political activist by the murder of his son. Another killing that has not been solved.
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