Defeating the False Quetzacoatl

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Defeating the False Quetzacoatl
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa
The Wall Street Journal Europe
06 Jul 2006

It is now almost certain that Felipe Caldern, the center-right candidate of the National Action Party in Mexico’s presidential election, has beaten Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador, the left-wing candidate of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, by a tiny margin.

The optimistic view is that Mr. Lpez Obrador was gloriously defeated by Mr. Caldern, a modernizing reformer. But pessimists will point out that a third of all Mexicans voted for Mr. Lpez Obrador, and between a fifth and a quarter for the center-left PRI (the third party in the race). This means that the majority remains divided between the kind of leftwing populism that has kept Mexico underdeveloped—now represented by Mr. Lpez Obrador—and the PRI, a complex system of vested interests responsible for blocking every attempt at reform made by President Vicente Fox over the last six years. Both optimists and pessimists have a point.

Indigenous mythology and Westernstyle social utopianism—of the kind that pits good revolutionaries against evil reactionaries, and local values against foreign perversions—tend to produce populist messiahs like Mr. Lpez Obrador. In the early 1900s, Mexican folktales began to be recorded again after a three-century hiatus. Many evoke a local king—reminiscent of Montezuma, the Nahua ruler defeated by the conquistadors in the 16th century— who has gone underground, but who will one day come back to save his people. Many of Mr. Lpez Obrador’s voters see him as that sort of redeemer.

Mr. Lpez Obrador represents a renunciation of the idea that development comes from transferring responsibility from the state to civil society and embracing a full exchange with the world. He offered a presidency favoring popular legitimacy over institutional checks and balances (witness his promise to use referendums); a government that acts as the engineer of social justice (hence his promise to give a 20% raise to anyone earning under $800, and to spend $8 billion in social programs and

another $20 billion in infrastructure projects); and limits to foreign capital... read more...