In Mexico, a Class War Looms

The Nation ^ | September 6, 2006 | John Ross

[A. Pole]

The country is divided in half geographically (Calderón won the industrial north, López Obrador the highly indigenous, resource-rich south) and by critical issues of class and race. The breach between the brown underclass and the tiny white elite that Calderón represents will limit his ability to institute the free-market neoliberal policies that his campaign championed.

Bump

[expatpat]

Leftiy fulminating as usual.

[M-cubed]

GAWD -DAMN reality!

[skinkinthegrass]

EGADS!....build the DAMN FENCE NOW! :(

[NewRomeTacitus]

While it would seem to be the best policy to try to help Mexico I see every attempt to do so opening up American institutions to the corruption and venality that cripples them.

Let them rot. That we owe them that back for certain. We have overt capabilities if they don't like fairness.

[Tallguy]

Relax. This is "The Nation" -- the same magazine that employs David Corn. They just make this stuff up as they go along.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

"...merky election..."
Not really.

[Billthedrill]

The UMC trust-fund darlings at The Nation have been breathlessly awaiting a class war since they first read the Communist Manifesto in the seventh grade and saw God. It's a safe enough prediction - to them everything is a class war.

[goldfinch]

The breach between the brown underclass and the tiny white elite that Calderón represents will limit his ability to institute the free-market neoliberal policies that his campaign championed.

And yet, Calderon won the election...

[Rb ver. 2.0]

It's a sad state of affairs when a country could remove a million+ disgruntled citizens per year to a neighboring country and still be in danger of revolution.

[William Terrell]

The breach between the brown underclass and the tiny white elite that Calderón represents will limit his ability to institute the free-market neoliberal policies that his campaign championed.

So. The latter want to dump the former on us, and have the gall to call us racists when we object.

[Wuli]

"Calderón, a 44-year-old former energy minister and the scion of a founding PAN family. The party was birthed by Catholic bankers to beat back "Bolshevik" President Lazaro Cardenas during the Great Depression."

Calderon plans to pick up where Vicente Fox left off, in PAN's immigration demands on the U.S., after our November elections. And, outside of the American left, John McPain, Kennedy and the open borders crowd, what great American institution has been on the side of the illegal invasion of the U.S.????

[TexasRepublic]

It's a sad state of affairs when a country could remove a million+ disgruntled citizens per year to a neighboring country and still be in danger of revolution.

I guess you have to go down there to see it to really understand it. It is FUBAR.

[dfwgator]

I won't defend the leftist nuts, but the fact is, Mexico is corrupt and just about the most racist, elitist country since Apartheid-era South Africa.

Someday a hard rain is going to fall in Mexico, it's just a matter of time. Sadly there will be no middle ground.

[skinkinthegrass]

Relax. This is "The Nation".... They just make this stuff up as they go along.

*Smack to Forehead*

Daggit! ....It was from that Shrillary lovin' rag.
....next time, I'll pay more attn: to the sourcing... :^/

[BunnySlippers]

Ping!

[StJacques]

"Relax. This is "The Nation" . . . They just make this stuff up as they go along."

You have no idea how right you are here Tallguy. Unless you're very familiar with the way the Mexican Electoral Tribunal handled the recount you might not have noticed how The Nation is manipulating the facts when they wrote in the above article:

". . . The TRIFE, in a partial recount of less than 10 percent of the 130,000 precincts held two weeks before the final decision, had annulled 237,000 votes, more than Calderón's supposed margin of victory. . . ."

Now; from the way that reads you would think that the tribunal declared Calderon the victory even after they annulled more of his votes than his margin of victory. Nope. What the electoral tribunal did was to annul about 80,000 of Calderon's votes, about 76,000 of AMLO's, and roughly 80,000 of everyone else's. Do you see the trick? The Nation is advancing an argument that there was such widespread fraud that we should all suspect the legitimacy of Calderon's victory and, supposedly, even the electoral tribunal recognized it. But they noticeably leave out the fact that only 80,000 of the 237,000 votes annulled were Calderon's. According to the irregularities revealed before the tribunal, AMLO and Calderon supporters were almost equally at fault. We weren't told that in the article, were we?

Now; on the "class war" theme. . . .

There are class tensions in Mexico to be sure, and it would be accurate to say that Lopez Obrador carried the vote of the so-called "underclasses." But did you notice that The Nation didn't crunch any numbers for us? What would have been shown in those numbers is that the geographical distinctions are more recognizable as differentiating the vote than class. The poor and ethnic minorities in northern Mexico voted overwhelmingly for the PAN. In southern Mexico they voted overwhelmingly for AMLO. Can you do the math? It's simple; there are more poor and ethnic minorities in the south than there are in the north, something the article actually did allude to when it pointed out that development in the north is ahead of that elsewhere.

And everyone should be very careful with taking The Nation at face value when they write that the south of Mexico is the "resource rich" area of the country. What the author of the article is obviously basing this claim upon is the fact that the Mexican oil industry is most heavily concentrated in the Bay of Campeche, off the Yucatan coast, and leaving the reader to assume that, of course, these people living in the "resource rich" south, voted for Lopez Obrador. Not so fast there! If you pop-up the vote statistics by state you will see that Calderon didn't do too badly in that area overall. He just barely lost the state of Campeche (32.38% to 31.85%) and in the state of Veracruz (35.23% to 34.21%), and he carried Yucutan by a large margin (46.17% to 15.86%). Of all the oil-rich states, it was only in Tabasco that Calderon took a beating (56.28% to 3.51%) and it is my understanding -- I've never read the official report -- that both Lopez Obrador and the PRI were stripped of votes in Tabasco by the Electoral Tribunal.

And it is also not mentioned that some of the richest mining areas are in the north; silver in Guanajuato, copper in Durango, and more. And as for agricultural resources, the PAN states produced quite a bit more in agriculture than the PRD states (the PRD's real strength is in a few major urban areas, including Mexico City). So the implication that the residents of the "resource rich" areas of Mexico are exploited by the rich, white PAN elite is just plain false.

Finally; the author left out the importance of PAN's strict Roman Catholic identity as a source of their power. In the opinion of many informed observers, this may have been the primary reason for Calderon's victory.

So may I conclude by saying that the above article is nothing more than a piece of crap? The American Liberal MSM just has no clue as to what it takes to look at the rest of the world. Even when it's right across our own border.

[BunnySlippers]

Glad you found it. :-|

[Tallguy]

This is why I enjoy hanging around on FreeRepublic. You meet people, like yourself, who are really plugged-into particular issues.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions about "The Nation" in such detail. Interesting!