Flames Across the Border

If he were still around, Ben Franklin might be saying to Mexico, “A democracy – if you can keep it.” Today the Mexican Election Tribunal did its duty, confirming that Felipe Calderón won the presidency last July in what was probably the most transparent and fraud-resistant major election ever conducted in this hemisphere. The electoral process was robust enough to put the outcome beyond rational doubt, despite the fact that the winning margin was less than one vote out of every 200 cast. A decade ago, every significant election in Mexico was rigged. The Tribunal’s decision puts the capstone on a remarkable political structure built in an astonishingly short time.

But will it last? The second place finisher, Castroite Andrés Manuel López Obrador (“AMLO” to his hard core of leftist acolytes) plans to stage a “national convention” on September 16th, Mexican Independence Day, at which he threatens to declare himself president of a “parallel government”. It’s conceivable that this pronunciamento will collapse as AMLO partisans take stock of their leader’s slipping popularity and edge away from his cause. If that happy outcome doesn’t occur, the alternatives are pretty awful. Either the government will surrender some of its effective power to AMLO, rewarding his treasonous conduct and nullifying much of the substance of democratic rule, or the country will slide into civil war between the “official” and the “parallel” regimes.

Following longstanding custom, hardly anyone in the U.S. is paying more than a modicum of attention to what is going on to our south. If war breaks out, though, we won’t be able to ignore it. The AMLO forces have a strong chance of winning. They face a Mexican army whose military qualities are untested and can count on aid from Cuba and Venezuela. The legitimate government, by contrast, can expect no help from the United States. Anything that the Bush Administration tries to do is sure to draw strident opposition from both the Left and the nativist segment of the Right.

Mexico would, of course, suffer most from an AMLO dictatorship, which would at best mark a return to corrupt one-party rule. At worst, El Supremo would emulate his amigo Hugo Chávez, wrecking the economy, picking fights with the U.S. and importing Islamofascist terrorists. (The last is not fully confirmed in Venezuela, but Latin American radicals have been developing close ties with their Moslem counterparts and share an overriding hatred of Western society. It’s a match made in Hell.)

From our perspective, a Mexican civil war will be bad and a victory by AMLO’s fascists disastrous. The turmoil will exacerbate our border security problems, jeopardize an important oil producer and give terrorists a safe haven just across the Rio Grande. It is not too far-fetched to predict that, if President-elect Calderón fails to establish himself quickly, the next big theater for American armed forces will not be Iran or Syria or Lebanon but a place much nearer to home.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “Mexican Drama”
A. M. Mora y Leon, “Mexico’s Curse of the Left”
Enrique Krauze, “Mexico: Democracy Under Threat”