* Frenemies: PRD and PAN chiefs Jesus Ortega and Cesar Nava (center).
Here are my posts at La Plaza documenting the results and implications of the July 4 gubernatorial elections in Mexico. Check 'em.
I'm not sure it's possible to find any kind of silver lining in how the voting played out. Unlike, merely for comparison, the characteristically rosy portrait the New York Times tends to paint of this process -- with the help, as usual, of the conservative nationalist elites.
The day started with the discovery of four bodies hung from a bridge in Chihuahua and ended with word that the PRI bolstered its return to power by taking nine governor's palaces. As in regional elections held last year, candidates with alleged ties to narco cartels were declared victors. But the "sudden good news" was that the PRI lost three big states it had previously held. How? By an "unholy" alliance between left and right.
The only way, it seems, to beat back the PRI is to throw principles and platforms out the window and team up against the looming monster. Sort of like 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend,' but only more twisted. When Enrique Krauze says the results from Sunday are "cause for great optimism," he sounds just plain delusional.
Talking with a table of friends last night, the uniform mood was one of hopelessness for the democratic process in Mexico. "There are just no options," one said. The willingness of the PRD to team up with the PAN is particularly disheartening. No memory of the bitter battle between Felipe Calderon and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in 2006?
Last year, facing no worthy options for their vote, scores of fed up Mexicans cast a ballot for no one, anulling their ballots and sending a defiant message to the political parties. Results showed it was a rumbling movement that could have potentially shifted the discourse among the elites who essentially just swap power among themselves.
The voto nulo people were not just rejecting the parties but demanding specific democratic reforms: the right to referendum, independent candidacies, and drastic reductions in the bloated public funds for campaigns. Regrettably, and as often happens in Mexico, the grassroots movement was swallowed up and broken apart by the parties at a national anulacionista convention last year in Guadalajara, which I covered.
Next year, the state of Mexico elects a governor in a vote that will be a referendum on the PRI's Enrique Peña Nieto, front-runner for the presidency in 2012. If the PRI holds on to the estado, stopping them from taking the presidency would be all but impossible. If the PAN and PRD orchestrate an upset, then we'll have a nasty conundrum leading into the Mayan millennial year. The left and right will end up battling it out once more to the bitter end for the right to take on the looming monster.
Somewhere along the way, you can bet, the rest of us will be conventiently forgotten. * More at Gancho, The Mex Files, and David Agren.
** Image above via La Jornada.