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Why Mexico's Young and Wealthy Support Left-Wing Obrador
NAM Editor's Note: To privileged young Mexicans being groomed for
leadership at an exclusive university, supporting presidential
candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador makes good economic sense. New
America Media contributor David Wielenga is a former OC Weekly
senior editor now living and teaching English in Mexico.
By Dave Wielenga, New America Media
MAZATLAN, Mexico–The banners promoting presidential candidate Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador -- "AMLO," for short -- hang mostly in
Mazatlan's rough and ragged barrios, several blocks backstage from
the carefree sand-and-sea showcase this resort city puts on for
tourists. That makes sense, considering the slogan they bear: Por el
Bien de Todos, Primero los Pobres (For the Good of All, First the
Poor).
Those signs are even further from the campus of Tecnologico de
Monterrey, a gated oasis of manicured lawns, tennis courts and
higher education carved into the scrub-covered hills beyond El
Conchi, one of Mazatlan's poorest outlying districts. That figures,
too. The city's most-fortunate sons and daughters come here, driving
their late-model cars and carrying their wireless laptops, to
confirm their reservations in the upper echelons of Mexico's future.
I come here to teach them English.
Yet during a campus debate presented as a mid-term project by my
advanced students, it became obvious that they haven't been
automatically insulated or numbed by their advantages. Not only have
they seen AMLO's humble banners; many of them have taken to heart
his egalitarian mantra. "For the good of all," these rich kids
repeated, without irony and with pretty good pronunciation in
English, "first the poor."
Although the furor over illegal Latino immigration is dominating
off-year-election politics in the United States, most Americans
remain unaware of the equally intense campaigning on the flip side
of the issue and the border. Mexicans go to the polls July 2 to
elect their next president and 628 legislators.
"Most Mexicans are embarrassed by conditions that force so many
citizens to leave our country for a better life," said Francisco
Gaxiola, 20, a computer-engineering major, wrapping up his opening
statement before an applauding crowd in the university auditorium.
"Improving Mexico must begin by helping the poor people. That begins
by electing Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador."
Nearly 40 percent of the student audience supported AMLO, surpassing
the percentage that kept him atop national polls for a year. That's
hard to reckon. Tec de Monterrey is no liberal arts school, where
students concoct touchy-feely theories and consider utopian
scenarios. It's a technological institute, where students think in
nuts and bolts -- and computer chips -- and bet their futures on a
Mexico that is practical, modern and internationally competitive.
Voting for AMLO, the candidate of an alliance of left-leaning minor
parties whose campaign platform of 50 promises includes eliminating
tax breaks for the wealthy, implementing universal old-age pensions,
reversing privatization of the oil industry and renegotiating
provisions of NAFTA, would not seem to best serve the personal
interests of these students. "To me, voting for AMLO is a question
of patriotism," said Aline Jara, 19, an information-systems
marketing major, when she arrived at the podium. "I ask myself if I
really love my country, my people, or if I only care about myself."
Such idealism holds little weight among the majority of Mexico's
wealthy class, which fears AMLO's strong candidacy. They ridicule
everything from his qualifications to his accent to his followers --
calling them nacos, a slang term perhaps best translated as
"hillbilly." Carlos Luken, a Mexico City pundit, assigns the Tec
students' support for AMLO to their youth, and doubts they will
follow through at the ballot box. "I was part of the 1968 movement
against the establishment," he said, "but eventually I learned to
appreciate and fall back on my comfortable position when voting."
But the goal of raising living standards for Mexico's poor and
discontented majority also strikes many moneyed Tec students as
sound practice.
Kidnapping rich people for ransom is still so common in Mexico that
it is a campaign issue. Drug cartels -- filled with foot soldiers
unable to find legitimate, living-wage employment in a country where
the minimum wage is about $6 a day -- corrupt politicians at the
high end and battle military convoys at the low end. That hurts
everything from honest competition to property values. The
near-ruination of the Mexican family farm by NAFTA, which has
flooded the country with crops from subsidized U.S. agribusiness,
has turned rural communities into ghost towns and fueled the stream
of people into the outskirts of big cities -- or across the northern
border.
"I'd like to start a business someday," says Maria del Rosario
Michel, 20, an aspiring architect. "How am I going to do that with
all Mexico's instability? Where am I going to find customers? I'm
starting by voting for AMLO."
The enthusiasm among Tec students is an example of the goosepimply
sense of democratic possibility that has swept through Mexico since
2000, when National Action Party (PAN) candidate Vicente Fox became
the first Mexican president in 71 years not from the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI).
It's all sweetly nostalgic for a jaded expatriate American
progressive who worked on the doomed presidential campaigns of
AMLO-esque candidates like George McGovern, Jesse Jackson and Ralph
Nader.
Lopez Obrador, by contrast, led national polls for a year after his
candidacy was ensured in April 2005 by millions of protestors who
reacted in anger to an attempt by the PRI and PAN to disqualify him
on a technicality. But recent attack ads have been relentless. Some
ads characterize AMLO as part of a dangerous wave of populist
leftists -- like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia,
Michelle Bachelet in Chile -- who are winning elections and
threatening stability across Latin America. AMLO's nearly
double-digit advantage has dwindled into a dead heat with Fox's
protégé, Felipe Calderon.
AMLO's supporters at Tec try to maintain a brave face, but some are
already searching for a silver lining in case their hero falls.
"No matter who is elected, the new president will have to answer to
AMLO's ideas," insists Gaxiola, in a tone far from his forcefulness
when he opened the debate. "He has shown that, for the good of all,
the poor cannot be ignored."
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