April 15, 2006
DEJA-VU ALL OVER AGAIN
A new deal from the ‘Mexican messiah' (Alan Feeman, Globe and Mail, April 15th, 2006)
Filogonio Gaspar Rios is a small man with weathered skin, a Pancho Villa mustache and a straw hat. And he loves Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Mexican presidential candidate known by his initials AMLO.“I'm a campesino. I travelled with 100 other campesinos for 2½ hours to see him,” Mr. Rios explained. “We're all extremely poor peasants, but we like AMLO's project. . . . He is a campesino like us.”
Mr. Rios has joined a large crowd in the central plaza of this hill town in the state of Puebla, 200 kilometres from Mexico City, to see the man who says he will deliver Mexico's struggling millions out of poverty.
When he climbs out of an SUV, the 52-year-old candidate for the left-of-centre PRD party is thronged by the enthusiastic crowd who shout his name and reach out to touch him. Dressed in a traditional guayabera, the long white shirt popular in Latin America, his head and neck topped with garlands of white and yellow flowers, Mr. Lopez Obrador looks like a cross between a 1960s guru and a Roman emperor.
Mr. Lopez Obrador, who rose to prominence as Mexico City's activist mayor, is leading the pack (although his lead is shrinking) in the race to replace Vicente Fox as Mexican president in the July 2 vote.
“We need a transformation, a purification of our public life so that there is no longer so much poverty and so much marginalization,” Mr. Lopez Obrador told the crowd. “Mexico belongs to everybody, not just to the few.”[...]
He then mapped out an ambitious program for reform, including enriched pensions for the elderly, payments for the disabled, expanded health care and a massive investment in schools and universities.
He also promised to protect peasants such as Mr. Rios by guaranteeing prices for their crops and stopping tariff-free imports of corn from the United States that are to be phased in by 2008 under the North America free-trade agreement.
“We have to protect our producers from the invasion of foreign products,” he said. “You cannot have a rich government with a poor population.”
Some days, one does despair of clear-headed common sense ever breaking out of the Anglosphere.
You cannot have a rich government with a poor population.
Sorry, Charlie, you can and will have it every time you try to impose socialism on the poor.
O.J. do you still think the growing che crowd is not a threat here?
Posted by: tony martin fan at April 16, 2006 1:34 AMThere is no "growing Che crowd".
Evo Morales talks the talk, but privately told us that he won't walk the walk.
Castro will be dead or incapacitated within five years.
Chavez won't last a decade - he's ignoring the one industry that gives Venezuela any importance.
Letting the oil infrastructure fall apart is incredibly stupid, but hey, that's Chavez in a nutshell. (Emphasis on "nut").
Lulu turned out to be a sensible leftist, and is well-liked in Washington.
Che himself, by the way, was widely considered to be an incompetent laughingstock in Cuba, after the revolution.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://brothersjuddblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 16, 2006 2:58 AM
Then why do I see more and more che t-shirts about?
Posted by: tony martin fan at April 16, 2006 3:52 AMHa !
OK, in that sense the Che crowd is growing.
It's just ignorance and romanticism. They're no threat, since although some like to talk a lot, and maybe protest or wave signs, they're largely incapable of higher-level organization, the kind that actually changes things.
at April 16, 2006 7:08 AM