[lit-ideas] Mexico and "people power"
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: polidea@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 10:09:18 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1844618,00.html
'People power' is a global brand owned by America
The US and the western media back protests over
controversial elections when it suits them, but are
silent over those in Mexico
Mark Almond
Tuesday August 15, 2006
The Guardian
A couple of years ago television, radio and print
media in the west just couldn't get enough of "people
power". In quick succession, from Georgia's rose
revolution in November 2003, via Ukraine's orange
revolution a year later, to the tulip revolution in
Kyrgyzstan and the cedar revolution in Lebanon,
24-hour news channels kept us up to date with
democracy on a roll.
Triggered by allegations of election fraud, the
dominoes toppled. The US secretary of state,
Condoleezza Rice, was happy with the trend: "They're
doing it in many different corners of the world,
places as varied as Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and, on the
other hand, Lebanon ... And so this is a hopeful
time."
But when a million Mexicans try to jump on the
people-power bandwagon, crying foul about the July 2
presidential elections, when protesters stage a vigil
in the centre of the capital that continues to this
day, they meet a deafening silence in the global
media. Despite Mexico's long tradition of electoral
fraud and polls suggesting that Andrés Manuel López
Obrador - a critic of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (Nafta) - was ahead, the media accepted the
wafer-thin majority gained by the ruling party
nominee, Harvard graduate Felipe Calderón.
Although Mexico's election authorities rejected López
Obrador's demand for all 42m ballots to be recounted,
the partial recount of 9% indicated numerous
irregularities. But no echo of indignation has wafted
to the streets of Mexico City from western capitals.
Maybe Israel's intervention in Lebanon grabbed all the
attention and required every hack and videophone. Back
in 2004 CNN and the BBC were perfectly able to cover
the battle for Falluja and the orange revolution in
the same bulletins. Today, however, even a news junkie
like me cannot remember a mainstream BBC bulletin live
from among the massive crowds in Mexico City. Faced by
CNN's indifference to the growing crisis in Mexico,
only a retread of an old saying will do: "Pity poor
Mexico, so far from Israel, so close to the United
States."
Castro's failing health gets more airtime than the
constitutional crisis gripping America's southern
neighbour, which is one of its major oil suppliers.
Apparently, crowds of protesters squatting in Mexico
City for weeks protesting against alleged vote-rigging
don't make a good news story. Occasionally
commentators who celebrated Ukrainians blocking the
main thoroughfares of Kiev condescend to jeer at
Mexico's sore losers and complain that businessmen are
missing deadlines because dead-enders with nothing
better to do are holding up the traffic. Ukraine's
Viktor Yushchenko was decisive when he declared
himself president, but isn't López Obrador a demagogue
for doing the same?
The colour-coded revolutionaries of the former Soviet
Union had a pro-western agenda - such as bringing
Georgia and Ukraine into Nato and the EU - but in
Latin America radicals question the wisdom of
membership of US-led bodies such as Nafta and the WTO.
The crude truth is that Washington cannot afford to
let Mexico's vast oil reserves fall into hands of a
president even half as radical as Venezuela's Hugo
Chávez.
But didn't the western observers certify the Mexican
polls as "fair", while they condemned the Ukrainian
elections? True, but election observers are not
objective scientists. The EU relies on politicians,
not automatons, to evaluate polls. Take the head of
its observer mission, the MEP José Ignacio Salafranca:
as a Spanish speaker in Mexico, Salafranca had a huge
advantage over many of the MEPs in Ukraine who draped
themselves in orange even while en mission - but he is
hardly neutral. His rightwing Popular party is an ally
of Calderón's Pan party, which is in power in Mexico.
Calderón was immediately congratulated by Salafranca's
colleague Antonio López-Istúriz on the "great news".
The days of leftwing fraternalism may be over, but the
globalist right has its own network, linking the
Spanish conservatives, American Republicans and
Calderón's Pan party - and they provided the key
observer. To paraphrase Stalin: "It doesn't matter who
votes, it matters who observes the vote."
Salafranca has a track record as an election observer.
In Lebanon's general elections in 2005 he had no
problem with the pro-western faction sweeping the
board around Beirut with fewer than a quarter of
voters taking part and nine of its seats gained
without even a token alternative candidate. "It is a
feast of democracy," he declared. His mood changed
when the democratic banquet moved to areas dominated
by Hizbullah or the Christian maverick General Aoun.
Suddenly, "vote-buying" and the need for "fundamental
reform" popped up in the EU observation reports.
Unanimity on the scale seen across Lebanon suggests
that the cedar revolution - despite the hype - did
nothing to promote real democratic pluralism.
Hizbullah's hold on the south is the most
controversial aspect of the sectarian segmentation of
Lebanese society, but everywhere local bosses dominate
their fiefdoms as before. Similarly, more scepticism
about Ukraine's revolution would have left people
better informed than the orange boosterism that passed
for commentary 18 months ago.
But Mexico is different because it is so
under-reported. The cruel reality is that "people
power" has become a global brand. But like so many
global brands it is owned by Americans. Mexicans and
any other "populists" who try to copy it should beware
that they're infringing a copyright. No matter how
many protesters swarm through Mexico City or how long
they protest, it is George Bush and co who decide
which people truly represent The People. People power
turns out to be about politics, not arithmetic.
· Mark Almond is a history lecturer at Oriel College,
Oxford
mpalmond@xxxxxxx
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