by conchita
I was in Mexico during the last election, the one in 2000 when Vicente Fox, the PAN candidate, shocked the nation by defeating Ernesto Zedillo and, more importantly, the PRI party which had been in control of Mexican politics for nearly 90 years.
The night Ernesto Zedillo conceded to Fox, the sleepy coastal town where I was staying sprang to life with a night-long, raucous procession of cars and trucks circling the Zocalo – horns honking, passengers cheering – nearly all sporting enormous blue and white PAN banners, some even spray painted blue. It was a vibrant display of joyous and incredulous bravado celebrating liberation from the corruption that had dominated electoral politics for nearly a century. I watched from my hotel balcony above the Zocalo eager to head down to join in the festivities, but my Mexican boyfriend at the time, a local, cautioned “no, it would be too dangerous.” He found it difficult to believe that Fox had truly won, that PRI had allowed an accurate vote count, and feared reprisals from the area’s PRI party. Even after we watched the election results and saw Zedillo’s concession speech on television Martin was reluctant to join the revelers. I thought how strange and how sad and how – that would never happen in the U.S.
Other Mexican friends responded differently. Gil, mi mejor amigo, celebrated with Mezcal and used the election as an excuse to stay drunk for two days. When he emerged from the Mezcal haze he was all smiles and told me how this meant that the Mexican people had taken back their country. Conchita, the dueña of the bed and breakfast where I stayed in Oaxaca was ecstatic. She had created a shrine around a photo of Fox and lit a candle each day in the months prior to the election. William, her son-in-law, was more sanguine, warning against expecting too much of Fox – how much could he realistically be expected to accomplish after decades of PRI control? Fox had traveled the countryside campaigning, and Mexicans in general, for the first time that many could remember, were optimistic that they had finally been listened to, their concerns would be addressed, and Fox would not turn out to be just another politician making empty promises. Even if PAN was a conservative party, the fact that PRI had been defeated spoke volumes for them.
I could not help but compare this Mexican election experience with elections in the U.S. Call it naievete, but I felt certain that this could never happen in the U.S. – that the country could fall under the extended control of one party. Yes, I know we essentially have that now, but in 2000, I was one of those who was foolish enough to want to believe W might be a compassionate conservative. While I wasn’t ready to accept he had truly won the election without a bonafide Florida recount, I saw Al Gore as taking the high road when he accepted the SCOTUS decision. I thought “we’ll take it back in 2004, it’s only four years.” Never did I dream that the US and Mexico would converge in 2004 and 2006 in a place where corrupt electoral politics are the norm.
I treasured the opportunity to have been a part of that landmark election in Mexico. I hoped for the best for the country and even wore the experience as a badge of honor of sorts. In early 2003 when part of a MoveOn group meeting with representatives of the Mexican Mission to the U.N. to urge the Mexican government not to support the U.S. invasion of Iran, I referred to having been in Mexico on the 2000 election, remembered how much it meant to my Mexican friends then to think that Fox had listened to them, and how I hoped now that he would listen again, this time to the citizens of the world who protested the possibility of an illegal and unjust war. The fact that twenty of us were seated in a conference room speaking with the Mexican government gave me hope that as Fox, through his representatives, was listening to the people, so would Bush. When we gathered weeks later in the streets of New York and cities throughout the world I never dreamed we would not be heard. I never dreamed that over 500,000 voices in the streets of New York, over 10,000,000 throughout the world, would be ignored by the U.S. government. Now it seems that the Mexican government, intransigent in its refusal to recount last week’s presidential vote, would like to disregard the 100,000 who raised their voices in the Zocalo last Saturday in support of Lopez Obrador.
Mexico and the U.S. have converged in a dismal place where citizens of both countries cannot be assured of free, verifiable, transparent elections. However, the Mexican people, perhaps because of their history are passionately resisting. Sadly, north of the border we have seen two fraudulent elections with barely a protest. Those of us who did protest were dismissed as conspiracy theorists and sore losers. John Kerry, stating he was not able to prove fraud, conceded the election and the country wanted to move on. Lopez Obrador has cases of evidence supporting the allegation of election theft and with his supporters – which is at least half of the country – will challenge the results in court. Mexicans are amassing from all over the country to peacefully protest; two million are expected to arrive in Mexico City this weekend in support of his fight and in support of democracy. It is my fervent hope that, like Chavez, he and the campañeros will succeed in throwing off the yoke of U.S. interference and defeat corruption.
The Mexicano in this photograph left his country twelve years ago, scaling a fence and scrambling through a no man’s land in the dark of night, to arrive in a country where he hoped for a second chance at life, but where instead he was treated like a second class citizen. Now a "legal alien" he wonders if he might be better off returning home where freedom fighters like Emilio Zapata and Manuel Andres Lopez Obrador are national heroes. This image we created together is about the quiet despair we both feel living in America* today.
*Note for clarification and with respect for the non-U.S. Americans: America, as my Mexican friends taught me, encompasses more than just the U.S.
