Mexico country risk? An American I know who has spent time in Mexico, including this year, and who reads the Mexican press regularly and hears from friends there, wrote me as follows today:
"From my daily reading of several Mexican papers, and to a lesser extent emails from friends, I think that serious unrest in Mexico is quite possible. I think that AMLO, the populist candidate who narrowly lost the vote count, is staging substantially more than a protest against alleged electoral fraud. I think that he is mounting a kind of revolution against the cabal of business interests, world trade, the television networks, and the wealthy, whose power he thinks will be consolidated irretrievably without radical action. The cabal will start resisting more than it has so far. My theory, I haven't read anyone else say that."
(I don't know that part of the world; aren't there some residents of Mexico who post to this thread? What does anyone think?).
And there's this item coming out over Reuters today:
MEXICO VOTE PROTESTS CRIPPLE CAPITAL
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Street protests led by the leftist candidate in Mexico's presidential election plunged the capital into chaos for a second day on Tuesday, raising fears of a long and increasingly nasty fight over vote fraud claims.
The mass demonstrations called by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to protest alleged vote-rigging in his close defeat by conservative rival Felipe Calderon have turned Mexico City's swanky business district into a sprawling campsite.
On Tuesday evening the leftist asked supporters to remain peaceful but keep the protest camps going.
``We are not here because we want to be, it's because we need to be, because we want there to be democracy,'' he said in the Zocalo square, where hundreds were camped out.
``I ask you to keep going. We've barely been going two days, I ask you to make the effort, the sacrifice to be in the camps day and night.''
European Union observers say they found no evidence of fraud in the July 2 election, but Mexico's long history of voting irregularities has left many leftists suspicious. Lopez Obrador says he has evidence vote returns were tampered with.
He has filed 231 challenges with Mexico's top electoral court and wants a full recount. The court has until August 31 to rule on the cases, meaning street protests could stretch on for at least another month.
Mexico's currency shed 0.85 percent on Tuesday and stocks fell 0.61 percent as the chaos and rising hostility between supporters of Lopez Obrador and Calderon unnerved investors.
Calderon insists he won cleanly, and opposes a recount.
``Mexicans know the July 2 election was clean and democratic. However, there are those who want to try and obtain in the street what they couldn't obtain at the ballot box,'' Calderon said on Tuesday.
Protesters camped along the capital's main boulevard, skyscraper-flanked Paseo de la Reforma, causing traffic chaos in the heart of one of the world's biggest cities.
ANGRY COMMUTERS
Late for work, court clerk Carolina Gutierrez, 22, shook her head in scorn as she hurried past shouting protesters. Three packed trains had passed by her platform before she could squeeze onto the metro.
``It is chaos for everybody who lives here,'' she said. ``It's not fair. There are legal ways to resolve this.''
At one major intersection, commuters locked bumpers, many screaming at police who diverted their cars from the artery. ''This is a disaster,'' one man shouted.
After sleeping in a tent in Mexico City's main square amid thousands of supporters from poor rural areas, Lopez Obrador rose before dawn and strode down Reforma, visiting delighted supporters in makeshift camps.
Abandoning steaming caldrons of food, shrieking women in shawls mobbed him, jostling with men in warm coats for a hug or a photograph with him. ``He is a man of the people,'' supporter Constantino Matias said. ``He is our hope.''
Lopez Obrador is under fire from critics and some longtime allies for paralyzing the heart of the capital.
He is unrepentant, and his supporters show no signs of abandoning Reforma or Mexico City's vast Spanish colonial main square, which now resembles a refugee camp, complete with food kitchens and a small medical clinic.
Lopez Obrador dismissed those who accuse him of inflaming class tensions, saying: ``Only now are they realizing we live in a very unequal country, where a few own everything and most lack bare essentials.'' |
