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In the hills outside of Mexico City, the temperature rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, heating the political pressure-cooker that, today, Thursday, April 7, may boil over beyond the city limits of the capital and even the national borders.
The world may learn today that the work of the Mexican revolution is unfinished. Eighty-six years ago this week Mexican revolutionary General Emiliano Zapata was assassinated in a State-plotted ambush, on April 10, 1919. Eleven years ago, also at this springtime of year, leading presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated on the campaign trail, in Tijuana: on March 23, 1994. What President Vicente Fox, together with his former adversaries of the once-monolithic PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for seven decades prior to Fox’s 2000 electoral victory), are attempting today is nothing less than a pre-emptive coup d’etat: a political assassination, dressed up in legal technicalities no more serious than a parking ticket, to remove Mexico’s leading presidential candidate from the 2006 contest.
At 9:30 a.m. (Central Time Zone) Mexico City Governor Andrés Manuel López Obrador will address a multitude in the Zocalo, the village square of this country of 100 million Mexicans, a crowd that as of 7:30 this morning included at least a million of them...
From there he will go to the hall of the national Congress, in the neighborhood known as San Lázaro, and address the legislators, who will then debate and vote on whether to strip him of his political rights to run for president based on the thinnest of technicalities.
The rest of the country, awakening under this punishing heat wave, will watch the speech on television. Mexico’s mass media, which for a week has been a gaggle of “all Pope all the time” networks, last night pushed the death of Pope John Paul II – a pope that visibly loved Mexico and came here repeatedly - aside: John Paul is big news but today it is Andrés Manuel and his crucifixion at the hands of Pontius Fox and and the high priests of the PRI that spike the ratings, like the thermometer, into the red zone.
Unable to play and win by the rules of democracy – a word that supposedly means that the people decide their destiny – Fox and the PRI (urged on from Washington from the very day that Condoleeza Rice, in January, took the helm of the State Department) are likely to win a battle today – a vote in Congress – to declare López Obrador guilty until proven innocent and rob from the Mexican people the right to vote for him – he now towers 20 points, at 44-percent in the polls, over his nearest rivals – to be their president next year.
And that – as a 12-percent crash in recent days of the Mexican stock market presages – will set in motion a political war dance with steps already planned by Mexico City’s activist (and strategist) governor. López Obrador is ready to go to jail and lead the fight from there. And much of Mexico is declaring its will to, if need be, join him behind bars by launching what would be the country’s first-ever campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience.
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