Mexico

[Gordon Fitch]

Chris Burford:
> At 12:18 03/07/00 -0700, you wrote:
> >>Any thoughts on Fox's win in Mexico?
> >>
> >>Doug
> >
> >Wish that it had been Cardenas instead of Fox, but a successful 
> >transfer-of-power-via-election is something to cheer loud and long about...
> >
> >Brad DeLong
> 
> 
> Clinton's praise for the election is the acceptable face of the global 
> neo-liberal human rights agenda of interfering in other countries internal 
> affairs in the name of human rights.
> 
> Indonesia, Montenegro, and the election in Croatia were also acceptable 
> faces of this policy. The interventions in Zimbabwe and Serbia are the less 
> acceptable faces.
> 
> Russia and Chechnya the unacceptable face of *non*intervention.
> 
> Should progressive people still welcome this, or does it just prepare the 
> ground for more rational economic domination by the global forces of 
> finance capital?
> 
> As I am out of touch with Latin American events, I do not know the 
> significance of Brad's reference to Cardenas.

Cardenas was the leading leftist candidate.  Fox, who defeated
the candidate of the ruling PRI*, as well as Cardenas and
several other persons, is apparently a sort of Whig.
_Norteamericano_ media are naturally ecstatic at this turn of
events, and news reports in CNN and the New York Times have
generally cast the election as a two-party contest, thus making
Sr. Cardenas an unperson and constructing the PRI as the
mainstream left party, the Mexican equivalent of the Democrats,
compromised, bureaucratized, bloated and corrupt.

Interestingly, the reports say that large numbers of the
Mexican working class voted for Fox as a sort of anybody-
but-the-PRI candidate; Cardenas had this role in a prior
election, but failed to win.  The Mexican Green party also
supported Fox.  Had Fox not succeeded, there was danger that
the next, perhaps successful move against the PRI would have
come again from the Left.  The ecstasy alluded to above tells
us that Mexico has been saved.  What's _Anschluss_ in Spanish?
+--------------
| * PRI: Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the ruling
| party of Mexico for the last 70 years or so.
+--------------