Laura Carlsen is director of the IRC Americas Program in Mexico City, where she has worked as a political analyst for two decades.
Mexico’s elections are not over yet. And the final results, when in, will determine one of two very different paths for the future of the country and of U.S.-Mexico relations.
The events of the past week have left Mexico in turmoil. After the July 2 vote, preliminary results showed conservative party Felipe Calderón the winner of one of the tightest races in Mexican history. When Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) disputed those results, the Federal Electoral Institute began the official vote count that declared Calderón the victor by one-half of 1 percent.
But the premature announcement was only the beginning of a process that could take weeks to resolve. López Obrador rejected the official count of poll tally sheets and has asked that the ballot boxes be opened for a vote-by-vote recount. The PRD will present evidence to the Federal Electoral Court to call for a review of electoral results. Calderón, meanwhile, has declared himself the winner and begun to chart out his new government.
The problem facing Mexico today goes far beyond a matter of legal technicalities arising from a close and hotly contested election. The two candidates offer roadmaps for Mexico’s future that would change its geopolitical alignment in a region that finds itself at a crossroads.
It’s tempting to view this crossroads as the divergence of north and south. In many ways, the geographical metaphor is accurate. Within Mexico, López Obrador´s message of eliminating the privileges of the rich and attending to “first the poor” appealed to the southern states where poverty continues to be a fact of life for the majority of the populace. Of the 16 states officially recognized as PRD victories—half the national total, counting Mexico City—seven are in the south. Calderón won in the wealthier northern states.
The regional split between north and south, rich and poor, mirrors the global situation and also defines the orientation of the foreign policy espoused by each candidate. Calderón is a champion of a free market economy and promises a close alignment with positions of the U.S. government. Both he and his party, the National Action Party (PAN), have been criticized for catering to these interests. PAN president Vicente Fox went so far as to provoke a continental divide at the Americas Summit in Mar del Plata in November by attempting to force a declaration in favor of the U.S. project to form a Free Trade Area of the Americas. His failed attempt came close to causing a rupture with Venezuela and Argentina and stirred resentments that still linger.
Although Calderón has declared his intentions to repair relations with Latin America, his uncompromising free-market policies place him squarely in the U.S. camp at a time when Mexico’s southern neighbors are calling for deep modifications to the “Washington Consensus”—policy prescriptions based on free market principles and monetary discipline.
One indication of this is his refusal to seek to renegotiate the agricultural chapter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which would completely liberalize trade in corn and beans in 2008. Despite studies predicting a heavy negative impact on Mexican small farmers, the United States refused categorically to reopen the chapter. Calderón announced he will not attempt to renegotiate, stating that, given the U.S. political context, “I don’t see broad possibilities of Mexico coming out the winner in a renegotiation” and citing benefits to other rural sectors under the agreement.
López Obrador, on the other hand, has demanded renegotiation of the NAFTA agricultural clause to protect the livelihood of three million farmers. He has also called for government programs that do not rely solely on the ability to compete in international markets but foment subsistence production and local markets, and create social safety nets in the form of pensions and subsidized services for the poor, elderly and persons with disabilities.
His platform has earned him the label of “populist” from the international business sectors in Mexico and the United States. In Mexico, the business community contributed to the campaign of fear against López Obrador, spending millions of pesos on advertising that issued dire warnings of economic collapse and crisis under a center-left presidency.
The U.S. State Department uses the populism label to discredit democratically elected governments that don’t fall in line with U.S. economic and political strategies in the region. Although before the elections the State Department stated it will work with either candidate as president, it’s no secret that a Calderón presidency committed to “liberty in the three markets: goods and services market, investment and labor” would be good news for the Bush administration as it faces showdowns over free trade agreements in other parts of the world. But is it good news for Mexico?
In 12 years of NAFTA, between 1.5 and 2 million farmers have been displaced due to cheap imports of corn. Thousands of them joined the ranks of immigrants to the United States. Scenarios of high economic growth and job generation with economic integration withered as the average annual growth rate came to just over 2 percent per capita and unemployment soared, mitigated only by the growth of the informal sector and remittances from the United States.
Half a million Mexicans disaffected by these policies filled Mexico City’s central plaza on July 8, where López Obrador denounced electoral fraud and demanded a count of all the votes based on numerous irregularities. In a country where historically fraud has been the norm rather than the exception, a full vote count has become for many the litmus test of democracy. The Federal Electoral Court must decide in the next days whether to undertake the count.
In the midst of this maelstrom on its southern border, the U.S. government must act responsibly and respect Mexican legal processes. The only proper U.S. role in the complex post-electoral turmoil is clear: to stay out of it. However, President Bush is one of only four heads of state to have called Calderón to congratulate him for his victory. This is technically a breach of protocol, since Calderón has not been certified president-elect by the Federal Elections Court—the only body authorized to certify the elections.
Given that the election results have been legally disputed, it is also a form of political meddling. Conservative media in both the United States and Mexico have sought to ignore the legal process at hand and present Calderón as the new president-elect. If the U.S. government follows this course, it will be violating national sovereignty and taking sides in a delicate situation where both legality and public confidence in electoral processes is at stake.
