Blogging the democratic revolution
Nogales is a city on the border, split right down the center, with a wall running down the middle of it. The line separates more than the city itself, though. The two sides are worlds apart. In American Nogales, tourists cruise across the border within minutes into a mile-wide arena of discount pharmacies and craft shops. There’s a McDonald’s right there; it’s tall, golden arch visible to the south, a constant reminder of American prosperity. Coming from the other direction, swarms of beat up cars scramble for the chance to cross into the land of opportunity, where they can transport…
Less than TEN DAYS to go for the most important, as well as the very closest race of the entire year – MEXICAN ELECTIONS! As Mexican voters make up their minds, Boz has the latest poll numbers, showing a slight lead in many cases for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But it’s not all of them – see Boz’s list of polls in this link here. He’s also got items on whom Guatemalans really respect, whether Peruvians will ever be fair to outgoing anti-Chavez Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, and whether Santa Cruz province will seek autonomy from the leftist grip of…
Hates Free Trade: Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Source: EFE, via Yahoo! Mexico If polls are right, Mexican leftist presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has probably taken the lead in Mexico’s upcoming presidential election July 2. If he comes to power, we will have a leftist on our border who’s going to be causing us a whole lot of trouble. He hasn’t said anything openly anti-U.S. that I know about, but that is likely to be tactical. He hates free trade and foreign investment but he says he wants to build a bullet train all the way…
A new flavor Frito Bandito? Source: Venezuela Today Have you ever wondered whether leftist populist Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was really cut out of the same kind of cloth as his natural ally, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez? This informed essay by Gustavo Coronel, on Venezuela Today lays the two of them out, side by side, for your own comparison, well worth reading here. UPDATE: Real Clear Politics has found a second essay on AMLO on The New Republic, delving deeply into this issue, telling us what AMLO is really like, that’s well worth reading here. UPDATE: Two…
Mexico held its presidential debate last night, and pundits are divided as to who won. Boz has some fascinating commentary here, and this Reuters piece here gives further reliable detail, as does this excellent longer EFE piece. Goldman Sachs summarizes it well: Calder????n Had a Slight Edge on the Second Televised Debate Yesterday, the five presidential candidates conducted the second presidential debate, which went on for two hours. The format of the debate was rigid, limiting spontaneous debates or fluid discussions. The debate covered six topics: governance, security, international affairs, immigration, Federalism versus regional government, and the reform of the…
Why is this man smiling? And why should we smile back? This may shock you, but he’s happily, shamelessly taking credit for the U.S. House and Senate votes on immigration this week. He didn’t have all that much to do with it, except a little and except that it was none of his business. Nevermind. We gotta smile back. Fox’s political party is reaping big from these immigration reform bills being hashed out in Washington. And Mexican elections are around the corner. With World Cup headed at us like a freight train in June, something that will stop all political…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is nothing more than a brutal leftist thug with aspirations of being the next Simon Bolivar, the next Fidel Castro. He seeks to unite all the nations of Latin America under his wing, so that together, they may challenge the United States. He would lure them into his axis with the promise of U.S.-financed cheap oil, yet punish and intimidate any who don’t go along with his direction by cutting off that same oil. He’s telling all nations that it’s either him or the U.S., and the U.S. has nothing to offer them. Every last nation…
In a little-reported story last week, Mexico experienced some fearsome riots, with Sweetness & Light reporting that they were about opposition to a new Wal-Mart. In San Salvador Atenco, in central Mexico state, not far from the capital, over 200 people were arrested, protesting a new Wal-Mart about to go up. One 14-year-old was killed, and President Vicente Fox has said over the weekend that the government overreacted. Naturally, the Marxist Zapatistas showed up, led by blue-eyed, white-skinned, failed, wanna-be professor Subcommandante Marcos, who says he represents the Indigenous people. But his opportunism (and he’s all about opportunism!) doesn’t obscure…
???????America is a nation of immigrants!??????? ???????America is the melting pot of the world!??????? America is whatever we want it to be. It is once in a blue moon that we discuss American politics here at Publius — the much looked-over world of frozen separatist conflicts, democratic movements, and Hugo Chavez keeps us pretty busy. But today is a bit different. Today is May Day, and Mexican immigrants are out to demonstrate for the right to be just as American as anyone else. Today is different because America is facing a challenge to its democracy that it rarely encounters. There…
Blogging live from Los Angeles – on a too tight schedule and deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. Here’s what is going on on this Day Without An Immigrant: 1. Highways very quiet, no blockages, but traffic rushing through as if everyone expects some and wants to get to work first. The Santa Monica freeway (10) is especially this way, the San Diego freeway (the 405) is less so. 2. At work, none of the cleaning crew have shown up. Even the ones who told me (en espanol) that they would be here … are not. Must be 30 people missing. 3. Cardinal…
…of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico. It’s a thing of beauty. The latest poll shows that the right-leaning free-market PAN party candidate’s lead is now E-X-T-E-N-D-I-N-G well ahead of AMLO’s. This is the third straight poll showing this awesome trend ahead of the July 2 presidential election. Here’s what’s cool about it: Tonight is the first Mexican presidential debate. Calderon can cream PRI dinosaur candidate Roberto Madrazo easily. AMLO, meanwhile, thinking his two-year-long lead was permanent, opted to sit this debate out. Now, the heavy TV exposure for Calderon against Madrazo is likely to extend his lead even further.…
Boli-Nica has a tremendously important piece about the role of the Internet is having on burning down Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s lead in Mexico’s presidential election to be held on July 2. Well, we here certainly don’t like the guy! But more importantly, Boli points out how Mexico’s bloggers are warning, criticizing, exposing and ridiculing the supposedly untouchable AMLO, whittling down the leftist demogogue’s once-powerful presidential lead, which is now down to 3 or 4 points at most and still falling – with a good long three months for it to fall farther. Mexicans can’t stand this kind of nonsense,…
Boz has his weekly polls roundup from around the Americas, and first, the best part: Spanish voters rank Chavez and Castro as rock bottom from among the region’s leaders. Chavez’s trips to Spain, where he made an incredible fool of himself, obnoxious all the way, must have had something to do with this. Castro, meanwhile, speaks for himself. He’s also got updates from Mexico, Colombia and Nicaragua, all well worth seeing here.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is really starting to tumble in the Mexican presidential polls, to be held July 2. He’s still ahead, but now only by 3 or 4 points. And with three months to go before election day, his trajectory is down. Reuters has a new story here showing that for the first time in three years, he’s starting to really look shaky. AMLO is the favored candidate of the Hugo Chavez left in Mexico. But Chavez, ironically, is the main cause of AMLO’s downfall. The more Hugo Chavez talks, the more anti-U.S, rage he spews, the more insanity…
You thought commissars were a thing of the past? Not at UCLA. Here in the states, a fierce debate is going on as to whether illegal immigrants should all walk out on their jobs on May 1 to make a political point, one that says the U.S. economy cannot function without illegal immigrants. It’s a takeoff on a clever movie that came out recently called ‘A Day Without A Mexican.’ The problem is, if the immigrants do this, they’ll probably be fired from their jobs, negating the point of being an illegal immigrant altogether. And being fired could leave such…
Conservative PAN party candidate Felipe Calderon, who’s leading or nearly leading the polls in Mexico’s July 2 presidential election, is determined to drive home that his opponent, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is a second Hugo Chavez. I wasn’t sure if he was going to do this – both Chavez and AMLO himself said that he shouldn’t do it, something that I read as signs of panic on both their parts, but I wasn’t sure if PAN saw it the same way I did. After all, PAN had pulled a television ad they ran for a week that had compared…
Polls can be unreliable but this news is truly radical: Goldman Sachs, in its daily emerging market report, says: Grupo GEA Reports Calder????n Ahead of AMLO in the polls According to GEA (a consulting firm), in a poll conducted between March 18 and 21, Felipe Calder????n (PAN) overtook AMLO in the opinion polls. According to GEA, Calderon rose to first with 36% from 32% (in February); while AMLO fell to second to 34% from 41% in February. Madrazo remained in third with 28% (up 1%). According to El Universal, AMLO said that these polls showing him down reflect the desperation…
Thousands of Mexican campesinos in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas have taken to the streets to protest the government’s neglect of their poor state. This isn’t the Subcommandante Marcos blond-haired, blue-eyed internal Sandalista crowd at work, but a spontaneous protest by the poor to seek concrete action from the government to improve their lives. The protestors don’t seem to want a new socialist collective, they just want the darn bridge, devastated after Hurricane Stan, fixed. The other reason for the protest is land. The Chiapas protestors are saying they’ve lost land due to the diversion of a river, making…
Sunburnt and exhausted, I return from the biggest rally for immigrant rights in the history of Los Angeles. Five hundred thousand mostly Latino, mostly young, and mostly protest-babe-caliber people marched in the streets of This Proud Capital Of The Third World to demand a halt to various immigration control measures in Congress – like building a wall and making it a felony to help illegal immigrants – and, more importantly, to plead for opportunities for advancement and citizenship. There has never been anything like it. This is a seismic shift in the political landscape of the U.S.A How very unlike…
Mexico’s governor of Sonora state makes an impassioned declaration about how free trade works awesomely in his state and in neighboring Arizona. He explains how free trade lifts businesses across the board. How great it is to look on Mexico as an equal neighbor instead of a problem issue. That’s the beauty of free trade and I commend this governor for standing up for his experience with the matter and trying to get it through the heads of the ignorant on both sides of the border that free trade works! Hat tip: Real Clear Politics
It’s written all over the visa lines, stretching from Mexicali to Caracas, from Havana to San Salvador, from Buenos Aires to Guayaquil, from La Paz to La Paz – and like the Drug War, its most violent edge is at the 1400-mile-long U.S. Mexican border, from Matamoros and Brownsville to Tijuana and San Diego where thousands of immigrants from all over the hemisphere and elsewhere walk through scorched no-man’s-land deserts and dangerous smuggler routes full of human barbarians – all for the chance to come here illegally as something better than living in their hellish homelands. There’s an immigration crisis…
Speaking from Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa really gave it to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. The short news account is here. It follows recent condemnations of the Venezuelan dictator by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, here.
Venezuela’s Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has a stunning piece translated from the Mexican press about the extent of Hugo Chavez’s and Fidel Castro’s political meddling in Mexico and its elections. That’s MEXICO – right on our border, walking distance from San Diego and El Paso and Laredo and Matamoros and Yuma – that Mexico! The extent of the cash shoveling and gunrunning is far deeper than anyone knew, and extends even to violent groups who have commenced blowing up banks in Mexico these days, over free trade. Which just happens to be what Chavez has declared war on. With Chavez’s…
…through free trade. It’s put Mexico on the world map as a player, while Venezuela grows ever less significant. The Fox-Chavez spat just brought it all to everyone’s attention. Investor’s Business Daily has the editorial here. Meanwhile, via Boz, I read in Marcela Sanchez’s pretty good column of the critical need for free trade and all the Neanderthals in Washington who are blocking it. She’s right, but doesn’t mean they should not be fought. The whole story is here. Andres Oppenheimer hit a true home run, one of his best columns, called ‘Chavez Started It’ describing what went on at…
In the wake of the Fox-Chavez spat, Mexico’s leftist presidential frontrunner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has slid by nearly 8 basis points in the presidential polls. From a Goldman Sachs research note: Gentlemen, Start Your Engines – AMLO Slightly Down on the Polls According to pollster Mitofsky, in November Lopez Obrador (AMLO) lost some ground in the opinion polls, falling to 29.5% in November from 37.9% in August. Most of the intentions to vote lost by AMLO went to PANista candidate Felipe Calderon, who climbed to 24.4% in November from 20.2%. Madrazo (PRI) remained stable in second place in the…