Mexico Is On the Move;
What's Wrong with U.S. Democrats?
by Gretchen Small
Since Mexico's July 2 Presidential elections, candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador has provided a lesson in the kind of leadership required, if a world suitable for human beings is to emerge out of the ongoing collapse of the international financial system. Declared the loser in Mexico's highly contested Presidential elections, painted as an authoritarian demagogue who refuses to play by the rules of today's system, offered a seat at the table of power would he but bow before its masters, López Obrador has not cowered, but instead has gone to the Mexican people, and offered them a strategy to defeat the private economic interests that seek to loot Mexico and its people to death.
A "rapacious minority" would silence any questioning of the legitimacy of the declared results of the election, in order to install their loyal instrument, National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderón in the Presidency, López Obrador declared, but we will force them to count the votes again, ballot by ballot, because fraud was committed and a majority of the population is with us.
Addressing the estimated 500,000 Mexicans who on July 8 answered his call for a post-election rally in support of that demand, López Obrador identified the real issue at stake in this election fight:
"We are conscious that we are facing an economic and political power group that is accustomed to win at all costs, without moral scruples of any kind. They really don't care about the country, much less the suffering of the majority of the Mexican people. Their only goal is to maintain and increase their privileges. It has been precisely the domination by this group, of this rapacious minority, which has brought the country to ruin, and has converted it into an ocean of inequalities." It is they who have driven millions of Mexicans "to abandon the country and their families to go look for work on the other side of the border."
López Obrador may not have named those economic interests as the offspring of the synarchist financial cartels that created Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in their day, but he has not hesitated to call the black propaganda against him what it is: a fascist campaign of lies fed by economic interests clinging to power.
Lyndon LaRouche promptly endorsed López Obrador's warning that Calderón and Co. are out to rape Mexico, and must be stopped. Mexico is now positioned to join the battle for Ibero-American unity being led by Argentine President Néstor Kirchner, LaRouche pointed out, while specifying the crucial programmatic measures and credit facilities required for Ibero-America to finally grow again. LaRouche's statement, now circulating widely in Mexico and around the continent, was quickly published by Mexican and Bolivian political websites.
At the July 8 rally, López Obrador acknowledged that this fight will be neither quick nor easy. Let's agree to come back the following weekend, on Sunday, July 16, and this time bring in delegations from all of the 300 electoral districts, he proposed. To come back with greater force, each person should assume responsiblity for bringing others to the next rally. So, too, we should set up "informational committees" to keep everyone informed, because the media will black our efforts out, he said.
LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) organizers at the rally described an atmosphere of revolutionary mass ferment. People sense that this is a historic moment, in which change must be secured, because it will be impossible later. There was a sense of fight, of renewed pride in being citizens, and that the policies which had gone so horribly wrong could be changed. When LYM organizers told people, as they handed out the LaRouche movement's newspaper, about the role of Lazard Frères's Felix Rohatyn as the epitome of the synarchist financial enemy behind Mexico's crisis, people would turn, listen closely, and then there would be a chorus of, "Give me one of those," "To me, too," as people reached for every paper the LYM had.
As LaRouche Has Been Telling You ...
EIR publishes López Obrador's speech in its entirety in the pages which follow [available to subscribers to EIR Online]. Events are already proving that López Obrador is right when he proposes that if people refuse to grovel, victory, while not guaranteed, is possible. LaRouche's hammering at Democratic Party leaders, that victory lies in doing as Franklin Roosevelt did, mobilizing the lower 80% of income brackets which financial interests abandon, is being vindicated in the streets of Mexico today.
Calderón and outgoing President Vicente Fox's PAN government are refusing to budge, insisting, desperately, that Mexican law does not permit a general vote recount, and that the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), which ran the election, is not to be questioned. (On a humorous note, according to investigative reporter Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, not only was IFE head Luis Carlos Ugalde's previous job at the CIDE, a think-tank of PAN-aligned ideologues from the Mont Pelerin Society's fascist Austrian economic school, but his favorite pastime is magic!)
Calderón and crew, however, now find themselves in the unusual situation, of bucking demands from the international financial interests they otherwise so readily obey. Recognizing the truth of those Mexican and international figures—including LaRouche—who warn that an attempt to impose Calderón by sheer force will produce such an explosion that Mexico will become ungovernable, on July 7, the New York Times, followed on July 10 by London's Financial Times, published editorials calling for precisely the vote-by-vote recount López Obrador is demanding. "It would be foolhardy for Mexico's elites to underestimate the dangers that this situation represents, especially bearing in mind the country's history," the Financial Times warned.
Feeling the heat, on July 13, IFE officials announced they would suspend any further opening of electoral packets. The announcement came two days after López Obrador called a press conference to present evidence that the IFE had broken the seals on warehouses where ballots are being stored, and that this was a bald and illegal attempt to cover up fraud. Only the Federal electoral court, which is reviewing challenges to the election results, is authorized at this stage to open the ballots, López Obrador pointed out. IFE officials insisted that it was not illegal for them to review ballots, but said that as their "contribution to the tranquility of all of Mexican society," they would let the Federal Electoral Court make any such decisions in the future. The next day, however, López Obrador charged that the IFE was continuing to illegally enter warehouses.
Breaking with Mexico's Would-Be Rohatyn
According to some reports, López Obrador has also distanced himself from the would-be "Rohatyn of Mexico," billionaire Carlos Slim. Slim had visibly sided with López Obrador earlier in the campaign, and in some deluded circles in López Obrador's Democratic Revolutionary Party, the word had gone out that López Obrador would not need to rely on foreign investment—or a reform of the international financial system—because Slim's "Mexican" money would bail Mexico out.
Slim, touted as the third richest man in the world, is no more "Mexican" than Rohatyn is "American." A telecommunications mogul, whose big boost to riches came when he bought Mexico's state telephone company from the Carlos Salinas regime in 1990 for a song, Slim is now an integral part of the global telecommunications cartel, tied closely to AT&T. In recent years, he has promoted himself as "anti-IMF" and concerned about development—all the while promoting private construction of infrastructure. Among his expanded family business empire—which was said to employ a quarter million Mexicans in 2003, and now extends across Ibero-America and into the United States—is Grupo Inbursa, Mexico's seventh largest bank (as of 2004). As EIR noted in its July 2, 2004 feature, "Spanish Banks Recolonize Ibero-America," Inbursa specializes in "activities of a volatile nature," making "financial investment in corporate paper and international bonds of a speculative rating." Included in Inbursa's "volatile" business, was a 1996 partnership with Lazard Frères in Mexico Partners Trust, a jointly managed risk capital fund investing in Mexico.
