INTL Mexico General Election 2018

[Housecarl]

Considering the importance of the outcome I figured I'd start the thread now...HC

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mexicos-election-is-in-play-1529862690

OPINION THE AMERICAS

Mexico’s Election Is in Play

The leftist López Obrador leads in the polls. But don’t rule out a surprise result.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
June 24, 2018 1:51 p.m. ET
3 COMMENTS

With one week to go before Mexico’s July 1 presidential election, most polls favor left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Morena Party by at least 10 points. But many Mexicans are still hanging onto the hope that he will be defeated by either National Action Party (PAN) candidate Ricardo Anaya or Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate José Antonio Meade.

These optimists have their reasons, and it’s worth making a record of them ahead of the vote. In previous runs for president, AMLO, as the front-runner is popularly known, has earned a reputation as a bad loser. If he is defeated this time, after his followers were told he was a shoo-in, he won’t react well. Even the Spanish daily El País, which in a June 3 analysis assigned a high probability to an AMLO victory, admitted that it isn’t “guaranteed.”

AMLO styled himself the anticorruption candidate because Mexicans are fed up with a thieving political class. Over the past six years, during the PRI government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, the president’s family, his administration, the state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos and multiple PRI governors—once touted as the party’s new generation of leaders—have been credibly accused of flagrant corruption. Though Mr. Meade is considered clean, PRI baggage has badly damaged his chances.

Mr. Anaya, who is in a coalition with the left-wing Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) and is running second to AMLO in most polls, has also come under suspicion. Earlier this year Mr. Peña Nieto’s attorney general announced he was investigating allegations that the PAN candidate engaged in an illicit land deal and money laundering. Publicizing an ongoing investigation is prohibited and Mr. Anaya, who denied the charges, alleged dirty PRI tricks. But the damage was done to his candidacy.

AMLO is hardly the antidote to any of this. His own record is stained, and he has a problem coming clean about it.

Take, for example, the construction of an elevated highway in Mexico City during his mayoralty from 2000 to 2005. He claims the project records are public. That is not true. Multiple no-bid contracts, including, according to Mr. Anaya, deals totaling $8 million for a single contractor, are part of what Team AMLO marked “classified” before it left power.

Writing on Jan. 20, 2016, in the Mexican daily El Universal, columnist Salvador García Soto observed that inside Mexico City government it is well known that the process wasn’t transparent: “There is much more information that is classified since 2005 and if it were to be declassified it would cause [AMLO] serious credibility problems due to information that speaks of ‘shady or irregular’ handling in the assignment of contracts and the surcharge that was paid for that great work.”

For someone who bills himself as morally superior to his opponents, Mr. López Obrador also has a weird collection of friends and supporters. One of the more colorful is René Bejarano, who worked in AMLO’s city government but is better known for being caught on video in 2004 packing a valise with stacks of cash from Argentine businessman Carlos Ahumada.

To counter facts about shady deals and slippery friends, AMLO also calls himself the “antiestablishment” candidate. Morena, unlike the PRI and PAN, has never held the presidency. That hardly qualifies the lifetime politician as an outsider. But it might explain some of his support.

A lot of uncertainties remain. One problem pollsters have in getting a clear picture of the electorate’s preferences is the high number of Mexican households that refuse to participate in surveys. Add the undecided vote, which runs at least 10% in most surveys and above 30% in a few. By assigning undecided votes to the candidates proportionately, some pollsters may be distorting the picture.

AMLO supporters are hard-core and unlikely to be undecided. Many AMLO opponents, on the other hand, plan to pull the lever for whoever looks like he can beat the left-wing demagogue. They know that if Mr. López Obrador wins, he will bring the PRD into his fold, giving him a likely majority in Congress. If that happens, he will have presidential power not seen since President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-94).

This is unsettling given his authoritarian style, and counteracting it is a priority for many voters. They may be undecided but they are not contemplating a vote for AMLO. If their votes go heavily for, say, Mr. Anaya and if turnout is heavy, AMLO could be defeated.

Those are a lot of “ifs” and the odds today favor AMLO But the vote making Donald Trump the U.S. president, the Brexit referendum and the Colombian referendum on President Juan Manuel Santos’s deal with the terrorist group FARC all surprised pollsters. An AMLO loss isn’t out of the question.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.

Comments

William WahlSUBSCRIBER
33 minutes ago
I'd like to believe none of these corruptions would ever happen in the US but then I look to the long track of accusations against Hillary Clinton and have to correct my thinking. Dishonesty appears magnetic to government.
Likethumb_up
XAVIER L SIMONSUBSCRIBER
42 minutes ago
Good column that very much reflects the state of play and main arguments pro and con of the three main candidates. The only thing I differ on with Ms. O'Grady is that I believe that AMLO is now a shoo-in.
I wish it weren't true because he scares the bejesus out of me, but I am afraid we are stuck with him. This is a man with socialist ideas that when I grew up in Mexico 65 years ago were more than anything else Marxist but have been cleansed from that label since then.
Likethumb_up1
J
SUBSCRIBER
1 hour ago
We live in Guanajuato considered the most conservative and Catholic state in Mexico. It has been the bastion of PAN conservatism for decades.
Everyone we ask here tell us they are voting for AMLO. He should win big, control the Federal legislature and bring along several state governorships.
Trump and AMLO, who knows what might happen but the personal fireworks will give us quite a show.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.newsweek.com/mexico-elec...lled-bloodiest-political-season-modern-990702

WORLD

MEXICO ELECTIONS: TWO MORE CANDIDATES KILLED IN BLOODIEST POLITICAL SEASON IN MODERN HISTORY

BY BRENDAN COLE ON 6/22/18 AT 9:32 AM

wo more political candidates have been slain in a bloody campaign in Mexico where running for office can be a death sentence.

Independent mayoral candidate, Omar Gomez Lucatero, was gunned down on Wednesday in the town of Aguililla in the western state of Michoacan, which is a haven for drug gangs and vigilantes, the Associated Press reported.

On Thursday, Fernando Angeles Juarez, who was running for mayor, was killed as he was leaving his hotel in Ocampo, which is in the same state. He died at the scene and no suspects have been identified.

His leftist Democratic Revolution Party has demanded that the government offer protection for candidates running in the July 1 election.

The governor of Michoacan, Silvano Aureoles, said in a tweet he was committed to finding the people responsible.

The deaths bring the number of politicians murdered since September 2017 to 121, making this the most violent electoral season in Mexico's history, Telesur reported.

Most of the candidates killed had been vying for local posts. The ballot on July 1 will decide the presidency, governorships as well as Mexico’s Congress.

Gangs are fighting for influence in city hall and want people in power who will not disturb their operations. Some politicians have been killed before they could even register as candidates.

Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope told the AP that the number of elections being held at the same time meant that there were up to 15,000 candidates on the campaign trial. Drug gangs have expanded into extortion, fuel theft and other crimes.

"With the evolution of crime, it becomes much more important to gain control over territory, over local governments," he said.

Earlier in June, three female political candidates were murdered within 24 hours.

Vicente Sanchez, a professor of public administration at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, told Reuters in April: “Criminal gangs want to be sure that in the next government they can maintain their power networks, which is why they are increasing attacks.”

Consulting firm Etellekt said there have been 121 murders and 400 attacks against politicians since September 2017, not including the latest two deaths. Of the murdered, 29 were precandidates and 80 belonged to opposition parties.

“It is a situation that presents a serious security challenge for peace and democratic governability in the regions with the greatest presence of criminal organizations and notorious institutional weakening,” it said.

Earlier in the month, Mexican presidential frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador extended his lead to 17 points over his nearest rival Ricardo Anaya, Reuters reported.

 

[TheSearcher]

It sounds like old-school strongmen are taking over Mexico... How would one say "Beer Hall" in Spanish? La Casa del Cerveza, maybe?

 

[Housecarl]

It sounds like old-school strongmen are taking over Mexico... How would one say "Beer Hall" in Spanish? La Casa del Cerveza, maybe?

"cervecería"...

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-election-20180624-htmlstory.html

Fed up with violence and corruption, Mexican voters embrace a seasoned leftist who wants to double the minimum wage

By KATE LINTHICUM
JUN 24, 2018 | 3:00 AM | CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO

Twice-failed Mexican presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador looked out at the supporters packed into the main plaza in this northern desert city to hear his vision for what he calls “radical transformation.”

Just a few years ago, when he came to Chihuahua to gin up support for the National Regeneration Movement, the leftist political party he founded, Lopez Obrador was lucky to draw even 50 people to his events. Now he was being treated like a rock star, his speech broadcast on a massive screen and periodically interrupted by bursts of white confetti and thousands of fans chanting his name.

“We are going to change the regime," he told them. “There will be peace and tranquility in the country.”

If the polls are right, Lopez Obrador will be Mexico’s next president. A week before the July 1 vote, the 64-year-old former Mexico City mayor, widely known by his initials, AMLO, is beating his closest rival by as much as 25 percentage points.

He owes his remarkable rise to sheer persistence — he has essentially been running for president continuously since before 2006, when he first appeared on the ballot — and savvy positioning. The anti-establishment rhetoric he’s been fine-tuning for more than a decade is finally in step with a recent global shift toward populism as well as local outrage over rising violence, endemic corruption and, above all, a sense that Mexico’s ruling class cares only about itself.

Nowhere is his ascent more evident than here in the north, a politically and socially conservative region whose sprawling factories that produce goods for the United States have made it one of the wealthiest areas of Mexico.

In past elections, voters here consistently eschewed the hard left in favor of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, and more recently the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, the only two parties to have held the presidency in Mexico’s modern history.

Leaders from both parties have long sought to undercut Lopez Obrador, an advocate for the working class who is skeptical of free-trade deals, by warning that he would turn Mexico into Venezuela, which has been crippled by food shortages, crime and inflation. Although Lopez Obrador’s message resonates deeply in Mexico’s more agricultural and left-leaning south, he lost his first two presidential elections in large part because he didn’t receive enough votes in the industrialized north.

But Mexico’s political landscape is rapidly changing, and analysts say it is because voters across the country are fed up.

“This election is about disillusionment and anger,” said political analyst Alejandro Hope. “People have experienced the PAN and the PRI and they want something else.”

Alberto Camillo, a lanky 65-year-old who wore leather boots and a white cowboy hat to the June 17 rally in Chihuahua, said he feels he has nothing to lose voting for a new political party.

“The PRI and PAN, they were all the same, they were all rats,” he said.

Neither party had eradicated organized crime or violence, which Camillo said has hurt business at the two restaurants he owns. In fact, he was sure some officials were actually working with the criminals.

He braved temperatures in the 90s to see Lopez Obrador because he thinks Mexico needs a different direction.

“He’s the last hope we have,” Camillo said. “If he doesn’t do well, I won’t vote for anybody ever again.”

Armando Aldana, a 38-year-old lawyer at the event, said he was voting for Lopez Obrador for the first time because there wasn’t a better option. “A lot of people joke that we are voting for AMLO out of desperation,” he said. “And I think it’s true.”

Given their position in the polls, Lopez Obrador’s competitors have begun to seem like afterthoughts.

In second place is Ricardo Anaya, an attorney and former leader of the PAN who has struggled to connect with voters, and in third is José Antonio Meade, a first-time politician who served in the current administration. Trailing them all is Jaime Rodriguez, an independent known as “El Bronco” who has proposed cutting off the hands off public servants accused of corruption.

Fueling voter anger has been a series of political and human rights scandals that have resulted in widespread distrust of public officials.

The unsolved disappearance of 43 students at a rural teachers college in 2014 continues to be a flash point of indignation, as are the dozen current or former governors facing corruption charges. Pet stores have started selling bags for picking up dog excrement emblazoned with the faces of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and former Veracruz Gov. Javier Duarte, who is accused of stealing especially large amounts of public cash. Both are members of the PRI.

The president’s government is also accused of using spyware to illegally track prominent journalists and human rights advocates and has been criticized for not prosecuting a Peña Nieto ally accused of paying millions of dollars in bribes to a Brazilian construction firm.

Meanwhile, the country’s violence is hitting all-time highs, with nearly 30,000 homicides recorded last year. Many voters blame the bloodshed on Peña Nieto’s predecessor, President Felipe Calderon, whose PAN party will be forever associated with his controversial decision to send tens of thousands of soldiers into the streets to confront drug cartels.

Those factors, along with anxieties about Mexico’s increasingly hostile relationship with the United States since President Trump’s election, have provided a perfect opening for Lopez Obrador, said Miguel Silva Hernandez, a journalist covering the election for the newspaper El Diario de Chihuahua.

Locally, he said, voters are angry about a former PRI governor accused of diverting public funds to help pay for Peña Nieto’s 2012 presidential campaign, and homicide rates that have risen 67% since 2015 under Gov. Javier Corral of the PAN.

“People look at Lopez Obrador as a chance for change,” Silva said.

At the candidate’s campaign rally, held in front of the ornate state capitol, a crowd of about 7,000 danced to a cumbia band and cheered as Lopez Obrador laid out his signature economic plans: Double the minimum wage, reexamine recent free-market energy reforms and make Mexico less reliant on foreign trade.

But Lopez Obrador drew the loudest cheers with his withering critique of Mexico’s political class.

The way he sees it, Mexico is run by a “mafia of power” of business and political elites who have prioritized their own interests at the expense of ordinary Mexicans, about 40% of whom live in poverty. To strip the elite of influence, he has vowed to slash pensions for former presidents and eliminate private insurance for elected officials. He has promised to cut his own salary in half, to sell Peña Nieto’s presidential jet and not live in Mexico’s presidential palace.

“I’m not going to live in any mansion,” he said to roaring applause. Instead, he plans to continue residing in his humble Mexico City townhouse with his wife and 11-year-old son.

Spry and deeply tanned, his silver hair combed back into a boyish mop, Lopez Obrador has long been the most recognizable alternative to Mexico’s two dominant political parties.

During his earlier failed presidential runs as a member of the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, he was known for his messianic ability to draw supporters into the streets in his base in and around Mexico City — and for clashing with opponents who claimed his radical vision represented a “danger for Mexico.”

After his narrow 2006 loss to Calderon, which he blamed on vote fraud, he mobilized his supporters for a months-long protest that crippled traffic on a main street in the capital. His adversaries today point to that protest as evidence that Lopez Obrador lacks respect for democratic institutions, accusing him of a puritanical zeal that borders on authoritarianism.

In recent months, they have repeatedly warned voters again electing him, with one business leader telling his employees in a letter that doing so would bring about “catastrophic effects.”

Lopez Obrador has said the efforts against him are part of a "dirty war" waged by wealthy tycoons “who don't want to stop stealing.”

But he has also softened his rhetoric — particularly on economic issues — to appeal to moderate voters who may have found him too radical in the past.

Breaking from his history of bashing the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he said plunged millions of rural Mexicans into poverty because small farmers and ranchers couldn’t compete with corn, cheese and other U.S.-subsidized imports, he now insists he supports free trade and the renegotiation process triggered last year by Trump.

Speaking in Chihuahua, Lopez Obrador sought to assuage fears that he is the next Hugo Chavez.

“They say this is populism,” he told the crowd. “That is something they use to create fear.”

Real change in Mexico will require a wide coalition, he said, and that means welcoming in members of other parties. “We need to have our doors open,” he said.

To make inroads in the north, he chose as his campaign manager an ex-PAN legislator who lives in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. He has also traveled frequently with Alfonso Romo, a wealthy businessman from the industrial city of Monterrey who Lopez Obrador is expected to name as his chief of staff.

Lopez Obrador has made the north a priority this election, launching his campaign in the violent border city of Juarez and pledging to reduce taxes in border communities and lower the cost of gasoline, which has risen significantly as part of Peña Nieto’s effort to end the state monopoly of the oil industry, and which has been a particularly big issue here.

His critics accuse him of making promises that will be impossible to fulfill. Along with cutting gas prices and raising the minimum wage, he has pledged to create an array of social programs for the elderly, the sick and for students, all without raising taxes. Lopez Obrador insists he will pay for the new program with money saved by stamping out billions of dollars in annual corruption.

Exactly how he plans to eliminate corruption is unclear. Lopez Obrador has said he will lead by example, but critics say that may not be enough in a culture where bribe-paying is regarded as a fact of life.

Even some supporters say they know he may be promising too much.

But what matters most to backers such as Maria Isabel Perez Cervantes — a 57-year-old teacher in Chihuahua who has been voting for him since 2006 — is not whether he achieves every goal, but that he continues to be honest, she said.

Even though his opponents have tried, “they’ve never found any dirt on him,” she said. “As long as he gets the rats out, I’ll be happy.”

Perez said she was heartened to see larger crowds supporting Lopez Obrador, even if it meant that she couldn’t snap a selfie with him, as she had at small events with him in the past. She smiled at the hordes of people surrounding him as he stepped off the stage and tried to walk to his motorcade.

“Back then,” she said. ‘They always said we were crazy.”

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

Twitter: @katelinthicum
Kate Linthicum is a correspondent in Mexico City who covers Latin America. Since joining the newspaper in 2008, she has covered immigration, local and national politics, and has reported from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. She contributed to the L.A. Times coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and has won two Overseas Press Club awards. She grew up in New Mexico and graduated from Barnard College.

 

[TheSearcher]

Yes, because the best way to eliminate corruption is to embrace socialism. :sb:

Good Lord. What was the point of the Cold War, anyway? Nobody learned a damned thing.

 

[Housecarl]

Yes, because the best way to eliminate corruption is to embrace socialism. :sb:

Good Lord. What was the point of the Cold War, anyway? Nobody learned a damned thing.

Just proves Churchill's "3 Bs" work on the ignorant...(Bullshit Baffles Brains)

 

[tiredude]

obrador is bad news....this is worth watching

 

[Dozdoats]

Best seen at the link …
================

http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/06/viva.html

Friday, June 22, 2018
Viva!

Greetings, pinche norteamericanos, from the failed state to your south!

Well, Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man is rightfully concerned that this year's Maximum Leader likely winner - Comrade Obrador (and I mean Comrade in exactly the way you might suspect) - in the Clowncarnucopia Of Fail that is Mexican politics for the last two centuries, i.e. pretty much every waking minute the country has existed as its own national (or should that be notional?) entity, is promising to take up the cause of their cruelly oppressed campesino migrantes everywhere (but especially here).

“And soon, very soon — after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world,” Obrador said, adding that immigrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.”

He then declared it as “a human right we will defend.”

Unless they defend it better than they defend their northern border, that's not really much to worry about.

Pay no attention to the fact that this year, cartels have already murdered 110 (and counting) government officials, and that anything that threatens the BILLIONS of US dollars wired back home to mamacita from her family members working in Los Estados Unidos is pretty much like threatening to cut the country's jugular with an airplane propeller rotating at speed. That's just a pure coincidence.

Peter even offered some prognostication, and some advice that's good pretty much 24/7/365:
"If Mr. Obrador follows through on his threat, the Wall won't be anything like adequate. Minefields, barbed wire, Claymore mines and robotic weapons turrets will be more like it. There won't be any other way to stop what will be, in effect, "human wave" attacks on the US border.

If it comes to that, I'm likely to be very grateful that we have President Trump in charge, and General Mattis as his Secretary of Defense. At least they won't hesitate to defend this nation's sovereignty. If Clinton had won, she'd simply roll over and surrender.

Better brace yourselves, folks. This could turn nasty. Oh - and if you live within a couple hundred miles of the border, stock up on firearms and ammunition while you can. You may need them."

It's probably not really as bad as all that.

Like looters in riots, you only have to shoot the first one in the head.

That generally takes the wind out of everyone else's sails, and they find other options, most of them centered around not getting their heads all exploded, and staying home.

And in the modern social media age, we don't even have to kill anybody; just post a picture of one such notional border crosser, with the bullet hole SFX'ed right into place, send out the tweet, and let ripples in the electronic pond do the rest.

As Calvin said to Hobbes about the monsters under the bed,
"They lie. I lie."

And if Obrador wants to be the shortest-term president in Mexico in a century, and see what Shock and Awe regime change looks like from the pointy end, he's going about it the right way.

Of course, neither the CIA nor the Marines are shy about dropping in personally to liven things up for him right at home, if necessary. There's even some history to that effect, IIRC. Something about "the halls of Montezuma", or somesuch.

So keep yapping about bringing us "the mother of all immigrant hordes", and see how that plays out for you when the jets don't even need a carrier, they can just stage out of Miramar, Davis-Monthan, and Lackland. The guys at Whiteman can pretty much get to Guatemala and back on less than half a tank.

It's also often pointed out that Mexico City and Cancun are closer to Dallas than is Washington DC.
Word to su madre: so are the 1st Armored and 1st Cav Divisions, and opposed by the entire might of the mighty Mexican Army, both brigades, they'd be eating burritos in the capitol NLT Tuesday luncheon. Wednesday if they stopped for gas and some tourist snaps along the way.

It'd never get that bad, though. We'd just sanitize a five-mile wide corridor along the border, push everybody south of it in perpetuity, sew it silly with landmines, and sit back and call in the occasional artillery mission.

I mean, it's not like we've got an entire military that's fought two desert wars for pretty much 12 of the last 18 years, and pounded multiple countries' real estate and armies into so much kindling, mainly for practice,or something. Oh wait, we've got that.

Course, we'd probably have to sort everyone here, for national security reasons, and the detainees could look forward to long hot summers in football stadiums while the background checks were processed.

Probably be a booming market for other kids from minority 'hoods to get the newly vacant jobs at Taco Bell and Mickey Ds.

Call that toss in the air, idiotas.

But really, isn't one Alamo, one San Jacinto, and one Chapultepec enough already to last everyone for a few hundred years?

But the biggest risk isn't that some blowhard idiot in the Palacio Nacional manages to egg us into squashing their pissant failed state. It's that after we do it, some jackhole do-gooder in D.C. would want to try to fix the damned thing, as if such were even possible, rather than building The Great Wall Of Trump from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of California, with or without a miles-wide buffer and a few million land mines, just to keep everyone honest.

And then we'd be saddled with the only possible national albatross capable of making Puerto Rico or Gaza look like well-run operations by contrast.

I would relent on one condition: everyone registered to vote Democrat here has to move there for 20 years or so, to show us the glorious possibilities of socialism on a country-wide scale. Like D.C., Detroit, and Chicongo aren't proof of concept already.

I've elsewhere laid out my plans for Baja California: we keep it as a protectorate, like Hong Kong was, for, say, 200 years. The Pacific side as one long nearly 800-mile resort and vacation hotel strip that'd put Vegas and the French Riviera out of business in about a year. The Gulf Of California half as a pristine national park camping eco-preserve and whale breeding zone that'd make Greenpeace and the Sierra Club wet themselves with rapturous glee. Only native Mexicans get jobs there, anyone convicted of any crime is banished to the main country for life, and for every person employed there gainfully, Mexico remits as payment to the US one barrel of Mexican crude oil, per annum.

The profits of the zone get split 50/50 between Mexico and the US, and it's a federal territory, administered by a federally-appointed governor, under U.S. laws. If the guy doesn't make a profit every two years, he gets canned. If he does, he and his administrative team get a piece of the take. Maybe ½-1%, or something like that. You know, like every business in the Western world since about...ever. The US half of the profits get statutorily plowed back into infrastructure for the peninsula, like housing, schools, hospitals, etc. More jobs, better lives.

Violent criminals, and any drug cartel members, get the treatment that was customary during the Mexican Revolution.

It's always important to respect local precedents.

In twenty years, the rest of Mexico would be begging us to do the same thing, followed in short order by Central America. They'd vote it in. (Even faster, at that point, if we promised to treat the Democrats like cartel members, above.)

(Back before he decided to get all political, I always figured the guy to run the Baja Plan would be...wait for it...Donald Trump. Now, well...let's just note that regarding myself and nearly 63M of my friends and neighbors, GMTA. Now, he can hire the job out, if someone can get the State Department on the case to do something worthwhile for a change.)

And the beauty of the U.S. Constitution is that there's no copyright; anyone else is free to try it, or any modified version of it, as they please. Every dope-smuggling law-breaking migrante you turn into a hard-working capitalist Bible-clinging rifle-toting homeowner and shopkeeper is one less family we'd need to build cages for at the border.

¿Comprenden, amigos?

(And before anyone asks, Canada would be even easier - but then, they're politer, and they can spell. We simply grant the Quebecois there unlimited right of return to Detroit, St. Louis, and Nawlins, in return for which their former province goes back to unilingual, we invite the rest of the country to unite with us, and we probably put 12 new stars on our flag and gain two additional territories, at which point Europe and the rest of the world can kindly Eff Off and leave North America alone, and we'll return the favor. The average IQ and per capita economy of the new uni-nation would increase, and the demographics of three of our most famously failed cities would even out, with a commensurate return to both sanity and their traditional roots, while increasing the local atmosphere, dining opportunities, and patois more than enough to compensate for any problems. It's not like Michigan, Missouri, and Louisiana aren't used to dealing with problem children already, for some time. There's no help for D.C. though, so the best thing to do would be to move the national capitol to from Washington to Ottowa or Montreal, which are both prettier and safer, and colder, which would incline those sent there to leave as rapidly as possible 8 months out of the year, and limit their predations on liberty in the rest of the nation quite handily. And it would help ensure that when things fall apart, the remnant in Formerly-great Britistan have a friendly place to land, come the day. The courts and Congress will have so much on their plates for the next 50-80 years, they'll have no spare time to oppress the native peasantry hereabouts to any meaningful level. Everyone wins.)

Otherwise, we're left with the status quo, which only proves what every dweller in suburbia knows all too well:
Your next door neighbors are a punishment from the heavens to make the company of the deadbeats and nutbags in your own family look sane and preferable by comparison.

Posted by Aesop at 5:00 PM
Labels: Build The Wall

18 comments:

 

[20Gauge]

It sounds like old-school strongmen are taking over Mexico... How would one say "Beer Hall" in Spanish? La Casa del Cerveza, maybe?

That will work

 

[20Gauge]

obrador is bad news....this is worth watching

Ain't it. This ought to be fun!

I expect one of them to get shot or disqualified before the election. Then once the election is done, someone will incite violence since they didn't win. This should help with the wall. Assuming it gets to the news.

 

[NCGirl]

It sounds like old-school strongmen are taking over Mexico... How would one say "Beer Hall" in Spanish? La Casa del Cerveza, maybe?

Cantina

That's the commonly used term down there

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ant-stadium-for-campaign-finale-idUSKBN1JN0HD

World News June 26, 2018 / 10:13 PM / Updated 29 minutes ago

Mexican leftist heads to giant stadium for campaign finale

Frank Jack Daniel, Christine Murray
4 Min Read

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican presidential favorite Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is due to wrap up his election campaign on Wednesday in the country’s largest soccer stadium, fortified by a new opinion poll showing his already-commanding lead growing even further.

After failing in two previous runs at the presidency, Lopez Obrador’s popularity has grown in tandem with Mexicans anger at traditional parties’ failure to subdue record levels of violence and end corruption.

Related Coverage

- Leftist holds 20-point lead in polls days before Mexico president vote

- Mexico's Lopez Obrador extends lead ahead of presidential vote: El Financiero poll

A new poll published on Wednesday by Mexican firm Parametria showed him with 45 percent of the vote, compared to 19 percent for rival Ricardo Anaya.

If victorious in Sunday’s election, Lopez Obrador, 64, will become Mexico’s first left-leaning president in generations, promising to end politicians’ perks and raise living standards for the poor.

“We are going to purify public life in Mexico,” he said at a rally in Cancun on Tuesday, vowing he would live in his own modest apartment if elected, turning the presidential residence into an arts center.

A former mayor of Mexico City, Lopez Obrador plans to review a 2013 opening of the oil industry to private producers. His history of protest politics has unnerved some investors, although he has courted Wall Street throughout the campaign.

While Mexico’s peso sank to a 1-1/2-year low this month, its weakness has mostly been blamed on a global selloff in emerging markets as well as a deadlock in talks to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Lopez Obrador’s strong will, sharp tongue and determination to upend politics have drawn comparisons to U.S. President Donald Trump. Victory could heighten tensions between Mexico and the United States over trade and migration if the two men clash.

Like Trump, he is an adept user of social media. On Tuesday, he took to Twitter to accuse Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) of showing a documentary series that was unfavorable to him as part of a “dirty war.”

STADIUM POLITICS
His rivals, ruling party candidate Jose Antonio Meade and Ricardo Anaya of a right-left coalition, are fighting each other for second place on the last day of campaigning.

They will close their campaigns at events in the center and north of the country.

Lopez Obrador, who faced an almost an empty stadium at a rally last week that coincided with Mexico’s World Cup soccer match against South Korea, is aiming to fill the 87,000 capacity Azteca stadium, helped by a performance by pop star Belinda.

His preferred venue for major events, Mexico City’s vast Zocalo main square, is being used to host public viewings of World Cup matches, including a game pitting Mexico against Sweden on Wednesday morning.

The alternative choice of the iconic Azteca, owned by top TV network Televisa, is widely seen as symbolic of a new, begrudging acceptance among Mexico’s political and business elites.

Televisa has for decades been associated in Mexicans’ minds with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the stadium hosted outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto’s campaign finale in 2012.

Successive Mexican governments embraced market capitalism since the PRI veered away from statist economics in the early 1980s, breaking with presidents stretching back to the Mexican revolution and including Lazaro Cardenas, who nationalized the oil industry in 1938.

While Lopez Obrador vows an end to “neoliberalism,” it is not yet clear how radical he would be. Supporters say he has mellowed, and he has invited former rivals to join his MORENA party.

“Andres has evolved. He is a better person... more grounded, a more mature man,” said senior campaign aide Tatiana Clouthier, previously a member of a conservative party.

Reporting by Frank Jack Daniel and Christine Murray; Editing by Darren Schuettler

 

[20Gauge]

After the NY upset, I can actually see him winning.

 

[tiredude]

idiots are voting for him to end corruption....... he was the DON of Mexico City for years........tribute in Mexico flows one way........ they are severely misguided......

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/133-politicians-murdered-ahead-mexico-elections-study-012135879.html

133 politicians murdered ahead of Mexico elections: study

Joshua Howat BERGER, AFP • June 28, 2018

Mexico City (AFP) - A total of 133 politicians have been murdered in the run-up to Mexico's elections on Sunday, the consulting firm Etellekt said, as the violence gripping the country exploded into politics on a record scale.

The murders -- mostly of local-level politicians, the most frequent targets for Mexico's powerful drug cartels -- were recorded between September, when candidate registration opened, and the close of campaigning on Wednesday, when an interim mayor was killed in the western state of Michoacan.

The victims included 48 candidates running for office -- 28 who were killed during the primary campaigns and 20 during the general election campaign, Etellekt, which carried out a study of election-related violence, told AFP Thursday.

"This violence has been concentrated at the local level. At least 71 percent of these attacks have been against elected officials and candidates running for office at the local level," said the firm's director, Ruben Salazar.

"This is the result of very serious problems of governability at the local level," he told Mexican radio network Formula.

Just one of the victims was running for federal office, he said.

It is by far the most violent election on record in Mexico.

"In the 2012 elections... there were only nine politicians murdered and one candidate, according to our records," said Salazar.

The country also registered a record number of murders across the board last year: 25,339.

And the record is on track to be broken again in 2018. May was the deadliest month since the government began keeping national homicide statistics in 1997, with 2,890 murders.

- Drug war blowback -

Mexico has been hit by a wave of violence since the government deployed the army to fight drug trafficking in 2006.

Since then, more than 200,000 people have been murdered -- though the statistics do not track how many of the cases were linked to organized crime.

Another 30,000 people are missing.

Salazar says political violence has been driven by the fragmentation of the cartels since the drug war began.

"The new cells that emerge... get rid of the (politicians) they don't manage to strike a deal with," he told AFP in a recent interview.

Mexico will elect a new president, Congress and thousands of state and local officials Sunday, following a campaign where corruption and violence have been dominant issues.

Rights group Amnesty International called on the Mexican government to do more to guarantee human rights in the violent electoral context.

"Faced with the most violent elections in its history, Mexico needs to take serious measures to guarantee its people can exercise their human rights, including the right to participate in public matters, during the elections this Sunday," it said in a statement.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/0...s-to-fight-trump-with-left-wing-policies.html

THE AMERICAS
4 hours ago

Mexico presidential election front-runner vows to fight Trump with left-wing policies

By Samuel Chamberlain | Fox News

Video

A left-wing populist who has railed against President Trump's immigration policies in no uncertain terms appeared set to ascend to Mexico's presidency as voters went to the polls Sunday.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known popularly by the acronym "AMLO," is the consensus front-runner in the race, having promised a "transformation" of a country plagued by violence and political scandal. His Morena party was founded less than a decade ago.

This is Lopez Obrador's third bid for the presidency and some analysts see it as his best shot after 12 years of near-permanent campaigning. However, his opponents warn he could set the country back decades with an interventionist economic policy that has led previous opponents to compare him to the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Lopez Obrador has presented himself as a champion of poor and rural Mexicans who would root out corruption, give scholarships or paid apprenticeships to youth, and increase support payments for the elderly. He's also promised to grant amnesties to some criminals amid a wave of violence that's the bloodiest seen in at least two decades -- and to take a reduced presidential salary.

But while Lopez Obrador has railed against Mexico's "mafia of power," he's saved some of his strongest words for Trump. He launched his presidential campaign in the border city of Ciudad Juarez and vowed that Mexico would reassert itself as a "free, sovereign and independent" nation. He returned to that theme Wednesday in his closing rally at the massive Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, vowing that Mexico "will never be the piñata of any foreign government."

In between, Lopez Obrador has ripped the Trump administration's policy of separating families who cross the border illegally as "arrogant, racist and inhuman." He's also vowed to roll back some of outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto's policies toward Central American migrants who cross Mexico's own southern border, saying that his government would no longer do Trump's "dirty work."

The other candidates include conservative Ricardo Anaya, of the National Action Party, or PAN, in a right-left coalition, and Jose Antonio Meade of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Independent candidate Jaime Rodriguez has been polling a distant fourth, in single digits.

All four presidential contenders have lambasted Trump's policies and rhetoric toward migrants and Mexico, but backlash also has landed heavily on Pena Nieto, who critics say has not pushed back hard enough against the president on trade, migration and the proposed border wall.

Only two parties have occupied the presidency in modern Mexican history: The PRI, from 1929 to 2000 and again since 2012 under current President Enrique Pena Nieto; and the PAN, from 2000 to 2012.

The election winner will take office Dec. 1.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

[Lilbitsnana]

I don't speak Spanish, but anyone who does speak Spanish can watch/listen live here:
http://ow.ly/3Gn330kKGaE
https://www.facebook.com/Noticieros...=1530470182809747&notif_t=live_video_explicit

Noticieros Televisa
‏Verified account @NTelevisa_com
2h2 hours ago

#MéxicoDecide Cobertura especial de la jornada electoral con @DeniseMaerker y @CarlosLoret http://ow.ly/3Gn330kKGaE

google translation:
Televisa News
Verified account @NTelevisa_com
2h2 hours ago

# MexicoDecide Special Coverage of Election Day with @DeniseMaerker and @CarlosLoret http://ow.ly/3Gn330kKGaE

 

[Lilbitsnana]

This is only an "exit poll"

Denise Maerker
Verified account @DeniseMaerker
1m1 minute ago

. @ MYunesMarquez: we have exit polls that give us the victory for more than 200 thousand votes #Veracruz

 

[summerthyme]

Better get that wall built NOW! With Venezuela North on our southern border, it's going to be even uglier that it has been.

Summerthyme

 

[northern watch]

AFP news agency‏Verified account @AFP · 20m20 minutes ago

#BREAKING Leftist Lopez Obrador wins Mexico presidential election by large margin: exit polls

 

[Echo 5]

Things are about to get exponentially worse on both sides of the border.

 

[L.A.B.]

Better get that wall built NOW! With Venezuela North on our southern border, it's going to be even uglier that it has been.

Summerthyme

Wife is on The Spanish Channels, they’re saying The Leftist candidate is leading in the exit polls by 10 points.

 

[JF&P]

I can see TRUMP's response to this....

This will not end well for Mexico.

 

[NC Susan]

Example:

Cuba
Venezuela

Nuff said

 

[thompson]

Links at the source


https://theconservativetreehouse.co...-election-hugo-chavez-2-0-now-running-mexico/

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (“AMLO”) Easily Wins Mexican Presidential Election – Hugo Chavez 2.0 Now Running Mexico

Posted on July 1, 2018
by sundance

The official announcement is coming momentarily. All other candidates have conceded. Looks like Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an avowed soft-Marxist, will EASILY end up with 53 to 59% of the vote and is the next President of Mexico:

Primary platform points: ♦Amnesty to all drug cartels. ♦No longer will work with U.S. immigration enforcement. ♦Nationalize oil industry. ♦Farm subsidies. ♦Elimination of multinational corporate influence on farming. ♦Support and assistance for economic growth plan: using •mass migration of Mexican nationals into Southern U.S., •create AmeriMex border region, and •remittance of earnings back to Mexico as initiative for rapid domestic economic growth.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Leftist outsider Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won Mexico’s presidential election handily on Sunday, exit polls showed, setting the stage for a government that will inherit tense relations with Washington and the scrutiny of nervous investors.

Jose Antonio Meade, the candidate of the ruling centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, conceded defeat to Lopez Obrador, a 64-year-old former Mexico City mayor, within minutes of the polls closing.

“For the good of Mexico, I wish him the very best of success,” Meade said in a speech. Lopez Obrador’s other rivals also conceded that the race was lost.

Lopez Obrador is expected to move Mexico in a more nationalist direction as he becomes the first leftist to rule the country in decades. He has pledged to reduce economic dependence on the United States. (read more)​

 

[JF&P]

I just emailed the President....pleading that the WALL BE BUILT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!!

 

[Pinecone]

Primary platform points: ♦Amnesty to all drug cartels. ♦No longer will work with U.S. immigration enforcement. ♦Nationalize oil industry. ♦Farm subsidies. ♦Elimination of multinational corporate influence on farming. ♦Support and assistance for economic growth plan: using •mass migration of Mexican nationals into Southern U.S., •create AmeriMex border region, and •remittance of earnings back to Mexico as initiative for rapid domestic economic growth.

So, basically they want the US to fully subsidize Mexico. Just like good Socialists, they want someone else (US) to pay for it.



BUILD THAT WALL

 

[marsh]

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/mexeconomy.jpg

Anti-establishment Leftist Lopez Obrador Wins Mexican Presidency In A Landslide

Sun, 07/01/2018 - 22:08

As expected, Mexico has just elected its first leftist president in decades, with Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO) winning in a landslide and a near majority outright, or 49% of the vote early exit polls showed; right-left coalition leader Ricardo Anaya, in distant second place with 27% and the incumbent PRI party's Jose Antonio Meade, with 18%.

And, as Bloomberg headlines flash red, Obrador is now de facto president as his main rivals have conceded:

MEXICO'S LOPEZ OBRADOR SET TO WIN AS MAIN RIVALS CONCEDE
And, adding to the concerns that AMLO may start rolling back energy privatization programs and issue more debt, is that his Morena party just won a majority in the Lower House:

MEXICO'S OBRADOR POISED TO GET MAJORITY IN LOWER HOUSE: POLL
The victory of AMLO, who suffered defeats in the last two presidential votes, will hardly come as a surprise, as has led by double digit numbers throughout this campaign. His popularity stems from his antiestablishment platform (sound familiar?) which has been riding a public revolt against entrenched corruption, rampant violence and an economy that’s failed to deliver higher living standards for the common man and especially the poor, which comprise about half of Mexico’s 125 million population. He also campaigned with promises for economic reform that has been underlined by a desire to freeze prices of gasoline in Mexico for 3 years, as well as a reduction of external investment in the energy sector.

AMLO has also promised to ramp up social programs and, like so many of his antiestablishment peers, has vowed to fund them without deficit-spending by eliminating graft, a claim which as Bloomberg laconically adds, "has been greeted skeptically by economists." He’s also promised not to nationalize companies or quit Nafta. Investors are worried however that he may cancel oil contracts signed as part of outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto’s energy reforms.

* * *

The victory of a leftist in Mexico is a stark reversal for the Latin American nation which unlike most of its peers has not had a socialist leader in decades.

As Bloomberg notes, Lopez Obrador has promised to govern as a pragmatist. Still, his procession toward victory has alarmed many investors and business leaders, who worry that he’ll roll back privatization of the energy industry and push the country into debt by spending more on social programs.

Those concerns will be amplified if Lopez Obrador’s Morena party wins majorities in both houses of Congress, which earlier surveys had suggested is likely.

With the election outcome widely expected, there was little reaction in markets aside from the USDMXN which has enjoyed a relief rally, although as in the case of the Turkish Lira, many expect this will be short-lived as many anticipate Mexico's problems are set to worsen under the new administration.

What is more notable is that like so many other nations, Mexicans have also opted for change and turned their back on the establishment and the only two parties to have run the country in almost a century. There are plenty of reasons they might want to kick out the governing class.

“We need a complete transformation in Mexico,” said Sergio Oceransky, 45, as he voted at a polling station in central Mexico City. “We’re experiencing a tremendous political crisis that’s no longer sustainable.”

On the campaign trail, many voters say physical security was their top concern. A decade-long war on drug cartels has pushed the murder rate to record levels.

His predecessor, Pena Nieto, also started off on the right foot, opening Mexico’s energy industry to private investors and winning a reputation as an economic reformer early on. However, a surge in violence, and a string of graft scandals that dragged in the president and his family, Pena Nieto is ending his six-year term with some the lowest approval ratings in the history of the presidency. He will remain in office until December when Mexico's 5 month gap between elections and inauguration lapses.

And since both Obrador and Trump won on an antiestablishment platform, we look forward to them getting along just great.

* * *

As discussed previously, here are the main campaign issues that dominated the presidential campaign (via Reuters): go to the site to view the platforms

















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ShortTheUS Sun, 07/01/2018 - 22:09 Permalink
Socialism has an unblemished record of doing extraordinary things for every country it's ever been implemented in. I look forward to seeing Mexico feel the Bern!

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Handful of Dust ShortTheUS Sun, 07/01/2018 - 22:11 Permalink
Who knows. Those 45 million illegals in the USA may move back if the Free Chit from this new guy is big enough.

On the other hand, another 45 million might flood across the border to USA to escape the chaos, hunger and widespread murders there that usually go hand in hand with socialism.

On the bright side, we know where to send our socialist if they get too out of hand.,....just pack George Klooney, Meryl Creep, whoopi, Maxine, etc up in a truck and drive them south to the socialist utopia!

In reply to Socialism has an unblemished… by ShortTheUS
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[Housecarl]

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-martinez-mexican-elections-amlo-20180701-story.html

Mexico's López Obrador wants to take his country toward a future that looks a lot like its grim past

By ANDRÉS MARTINEZ
JUL 01, 2018 | 4:05 AM

Mexico is united in collective delirium. El Tri, the beloved national soccer team, plays Brazil on Monday in the second round of the World Cup in Russia. Fingers of all political persuasions and socioeconomic backgrounds are crossed, hoping for a win. But first, Mexico has to elect a new president on Sunday.

Competitive elections remain a relative novelty in Mexico. It wasn’t until 2000 that an opposition party managed to dislodge the PRI from the presidency after seven decades, and it didn’t take long for democratic disenchantment to set in. Hence the opening for the man who will probably win: Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

AMLO, as he’s known, is the 64-year-old former mayor of Mexico City, and now the leader of a new leftist party, Morena, or the National Regeneration Movement. He has held a commanding and consistent lead in polls for months in what is essentially a three-candidate race, also featuring Ricardo Anaya of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, and José Antonio Meade of the governing PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which won back the presidency in 2012. Anaya and Meade are capable politicians with sound policy proposals to expand Mexico’s engagement with the world, but they suffer from voter disgust and exhaustion with their respective parties.

AMLO ran and lost in 2006 and 2012. Now voters appear to have adopted a “what do we have to lose” acceptance of his populist message for much the same reason many Americans turned to Donald Trump: They’re fed up with the status quo and its standard-bearers.

At a glance, Trump and López Obrador would appear to have little in common: AMLO, unlike the American president, comes from a humble background. His parents ran a store in a village in the remote state of Tabasco. A lifelong politician, he openly disdains wealth. Still, the temperamental similarities between the two are intriguing: AMLO views himself as rising above the pesky norms of institutionalized politics and legal niceties because he is looking out for Mexico’s “forgotten man.” He considers that his own intuition, forceful leadership and personal example will suffice to defeat the “mafias del poder,” the power mafias, that plague Mexico with the “cancer of corruption.”

AMLO’s base and Trump’s share some qualities as well. López Obrador leans to the left, and Trump to the right, but both men are peddling nostalgia to the disaffected. They aspire to lead their nations to a better past, not a better future. They see in the world beyond their borders threats and aggravation rather than opportunities and prosperity. They face inward and backward, as if wanting to stuff a genie back in the bottle.

Their similarities will surely make them antagonists, if AMLO wins as predicted. Given his own ambivalence about NAFTA and about more recent energy reforms meant to encourage foreign investment in Mexico’s oil sector, he won’t hesitate to take a confrontational approach with Washington. It may not hurt him or Mexico as much as feared: Trump seems to relish making deals with opponents more than rewarding allies.

It’s difficult for Americans to appreciate the magnitude of Mexico’s transformation over the past generation. It went from a highly managed and closed economy to a wide open one, firmly committed to the discipline (or whims, depending on your orientation) of global markets. Both PAN and PRI presidents adhered to prudent, orthodox policies that placated international bondholders, and millions of Mexicans have appreciated the resulting access to consumer products, the global standards and norms that have spread across the private sector and the nation’s overall financial stability.

But the economic opening that modernized Mexico also has left millions behind, exacerbating glaring inequalities. Less centralized power has rendered the once omnipotent one-party state apparatus incapable of curbing local corruption and organized crime. Mexicans are frustrated by high levels of intractable violence and the failure of the rule of law that belie their leaders’ first world pretensions.

If the polls are correct, AMLO commands a lead because he is reaching beyond his hardcore leftist base, winning over a broader segment of the middle class tired of PAN and PRI’s uneven progress. López Obrador has wooed such voters with a reassuringly vague campaign, and by softening his socialist rhetoric and even by resisting the temptation to make U.S. bashing a staple of his campaign.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion »
López Obrador’s critics warn that as president, he would resemble Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, whose radical “Bolivarian” revolution is credited with turning that country into a desperately impoverished nation. The comparison may be overwrought; AMLO is far too much of a “Mexico First” nationalist (and pragmatist, his supporters stress) to model himself after foreign revolutionaries.

The more likely scenario, one that even his advisors acknowledge, is that AMLO will use his popularity to cement an almighty presidency in the old PRI mold — part big-city ward boss, part Aztec emperor. To some, that would be reassuring: an empowered, trusted father figure who will trade the economic liberalization wrought by recent technocratic leaders for a state that once again determines industrial policy and divvies the spoils “for the people.” AMLO talks wistfully of turning Mexico into a self-sufficient nation again.

Back at the World Cup in Russia, El Tri’s leading all-time scorer, Javier “Chicharito” Hernández, has been exhorting his countrymen to dream big, to aspire to “cosas chingonas” (a folkloric way of saying “great things”) — like beating every other nation to win the World Cup. Sadly, whatever great things might be possible on the pitch, cosas chingonas do not appear to be on today’s ballot.

Mexico’s choice is between capable men from discredited parties who missed their chance to adequately reform the nation’s governance and a candidate urging disenchanted voters to join him in a comforting fantasy about a brighter future that in reality looks a lot like the nation’s grim past.

Andrés Martinez is a professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and a fellow at New America.

 

[L.A.B.]

In lieu of current Southern Border political events, I would recommend to our President Elect DJT that he make ready to move his chess pieces into Kalifornyah before Mehhe-kilo sets up a deeper Sino-Brown relationship.

Run the bulldozers at the border fence in high speed fashion as a diversion. Then take care of the 60’s activist off of I-5.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm…...

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...-to-reshape-nation/ar-AAzsmHj?ocid=spartandhp

Leftist Wins Mexico Presidency in Landslide With Mandate to Reshape Nation

By AZAM AHMED and PAULINA VILLEGAS
2 hrs ago

MEXICO CITY — Riding a wave of populist anger fueled by rampant corruption and violence, the leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected president of Mexico on Sunday, in a landslide victory that upended the nation’s political establishment and handed him a sweeping mandate to reshape the country.

Mr. López Obrador’s win puts a leftist leader at the helm of Latin America’s second-largest economy for the first time in decades, a prospect that has filled millions of Mexicans with hope — and the nation’s elites with trepidation.

The outcome represents a clear rejection of the status quo in the nation, which for the last quarter century has been defined by a centrist vision and an embrace of globalization that many Mexicans feel has not served them.

The core promises of Mr. López Obrador’s campaign — to end corruption, reduce violence and address Mexico’s endemic poverty — were immensely popular with voters, but they come with questions he and his new government may struggle to answer.

How he will pay for his ambitious slate of social programs without overspending and harming the economy? How will he rid the government of bad actors when some of those same people were a part of his campaign? Can he make a dent in the unyielding violence of the drug war, which left Mexico with more homicides last year than any time in the last two decades?

And how will Mr. López Obrador, a firebrand with a tendency to dismiss his critics in the media and elsewhere, govern?

In the end, the nation’s desire for change outweighed any of the misgivings the candidate inspired.

“It is time for a change, it’s time to go with López Obrador, and see what happens,” said Juan de Dios Rodríguez, 70, a farmer in the state of Hidalgo, a longtime bastion of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has dominated politics in Mexico for nearly his entire life. “This will be my first time voting for a different party.”

In his third bid for the presidency, Mr. López Obrador, 64, won in what authorities called the largest election in Mexican history, with some 3,400 federal, state and local races contested in all.

A global repudiation of the establishment has brought populist leaders to power in the United States and Europe, and conservative ones to several countries in Latin America, including Colombia after an election last month.

“The recent elections in Latin America have exhibited the same demand for change,” said Laura Chinchilla, the former president of Costa Rica. “The results are not endorsements of ideologies, but rather demands for change, a fatigue felt by people waiting for answers that simply have not arrived.”

Mr. López Obrador, who vowed to cut his own salary and raise those of the lowest paid government workers, campaigned on a narrative of social change, including increased pensions for the elderly, educational grants for Mexico’s youth and additional support for farmers.

He said he would fund his programs with the money the nation saves by eliminating corruption, a figure he places at tens of billions of dollars a year, a windfall some experts doubt will materialize.

Realistic or not, the allure of his message is steeped in the language of nostalgia for a better time — and in a sense of economic nationalism that some fear could reverse important gains of the last 25 years.

In this way, and others, the parallels between Mr. López Obrador and President Trump are hard to ignore. Both men are tempestuous leaders, who are loath to concede a political fight. Both men lash out at enemies, and view the media with suspicion.

On Sunday night Mr. Trump posted a tweet congratulating Mr. López Obrador.

Donald J. Trump
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@realDonaldTrump
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Congratulations to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on becoming the next President of Mexico. I look very much forward to working with him. There is much to be done that will benefit both the United States and Mexico!
8:01 PM - 1 Jul 2018

50,304 Retweets
115,945 Likes

And even as the electoral rage propelling Mr. López Obrador’s rise is largely the result of domestic issues, there will be pressure for the new president to take a less conciliatory line with his American counterpart. Mexico’s current government, led by President Enrique Peña Nieto, has suffered a string of humiliations at the hands of Mr. Trump with relative silence.

But Mr. López Obrador is not the typical Latin American populist, nor does his branding as a leftist convey the complexity of his ethos.

In building his third candidacy for the presidency, he cobbled together an odd group of allies, some with contradictory visions. There are leftists, unions, far-right conservatives and support from religious groups. How he will manage these competing interests remains to be seen.

Mr. López Obrador will inherit an economy that has seen only modest growth over the last few decades, and one of his biggest challenges will be to convince foreign investors that Mexico will remain open for business.

If he fails to convince the markets that he is committed to continuity, or makes abrupt changes to the current economic policy, the country could find itself struggling to achieve even the modest growth of prior administrations.

There is some evidence that Mr. López Obrador knows what is at stake. Though political rivals have painted him as a radical on par with Hugo Chavez, the former socialist leader of Venezuela, Mexico’s president-elect has vowed not to raise the national debt and to maintain close relations with the United States.

Mr. López Obrador, who is commonly referred to by his initials, AMLO, has a history of working with the private sector, and has appointed a respected representative to handle negotiations the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Today AMLO is a much more moderate, centrist politician who will govern the business community with the right hand, and the social sectors and programs with the left,” said Antonio Sola, who created the effective fear campaign that branded Mr. López Obrador as a danger to Mexico in the 2006 election he lost.

“The great difference between then and now is that the dominant emotion among voters is fury,” Mr. Sola said. “And anger is much stronger than fear.”

On the issue of violence, Mr. López Obrador has largely failed to articulate a policy that goes much beyond platitudes. At one point, he said that amnesty for low-level offenders could be an option, as a way to end the cycle of incarceration.

When the suggestion summoned widespread criticism, he claimed the idea was merely an effort to think outside the box. But analysts say there is little that distinguishes his platform from those of other candidates, or even his predecessor, Mr. Peña Nieto.

More likely, he will find himself in the unenviable position of managing the crisis, as opposed to ending it.

Mr. Peña Nieto came to office in 2012 with a promise to bring Mexico into the 21st century, forging consensus with opposition parties to pass a slate of much needed reforms that overhauled the calcified energy, education and telecommunications sectors.

But to Mr. López Obrador, who has spent much of his political career concerned with the nation’s have-nots, these reforms meant to modernize institutions trapped in the past were little more than assaults on the people.

He has promised to review the contracts for oil exploration awarded to international firms, and to respect those that are clean — and take legal measures against those that are not.

It is possible that the awarding of new contracts will cease, potentially placing Mexico’s future oil exploration and production back into state hands. From there, it is unclear whether Mr. López Obrador would hand the rights back to the nation’s state-run oil company, Pemex, which has suffered severe problems with corruption and inefficiency.

For many, the future of the nation’s oil industry exemplifies the central concern of a López Obrador presidency: uncertainty.

For all the talk of change, many worry his presidency will be a back-to-the-future sort of moment.

“What concerns me the most about the energy and education is the ambiguity of the alternative road ahead, if he decides to roll them back,” said Jesus Silva Herzog, a political-science professor at the School of Government at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education.

Some worry about how the president-elect will handle the opposition, as his fiery personality has both delighted and concerned voters.

He has a history of ignoring his detractors, or taking them on in public ways. He refers to the nonprofit community in Mexico, which has been a force for change and democracy, as “bourgeoisie.”

For his opponents, this election cycle has brought the three main parties of Mexico to a crisis point. Mr. Peña Nieto’s party will be vastly reduced in size and power in the new Congress, while the leftist Party of Democratic Revolution may not even survive.

Perhaps the only party with enough power to serve as a counterweight will be the National Action Party, despite having endured a bruising split in the campaign.

On the issue of fighting graft, perhaps the signature element of his campaign, few believe that it will be easy to address the complex realities of systemic corruption.

That could set up Mr. López Obrador to be a continuation of the disappointment that so many voters are reacting to.

“The biggest problem I see are the expectations he has built,” said Carlos Illades, a professor of social sciences at the Autonomous Metropolitan University and a historian of Mexico’s left. “The problem is going to be what he is not able to do. There are people who are expecting a lot.”

 

[Mixin]

President Trump's tweet from the above post:

Donald J. Trump
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Congratulations to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on becoming the next President of Mexico. I look very much forward to working with him. There is much to be done that will benefit both the United States and Mexico!
8:01 PM - 1 Jul 2018

50,304 Retweets
115,945 Likes

I was amused when I read that; I bet he really is looking forward to working with him. It's hard to believe that the future leader of a country that is so dependent on us would cop such an attitude. I think our president will probably adjust that attitude a bit during talks.

 

[The Mountain]

Trump had better start moving quicker on that Wall. With an open Socialist, and a Chavista no less, in power, it's only a matter of time before Mexico starts looking like Venezuela. Once that happens, there really *will* be hordes of refugees seeking asylum in the US, and we're going to need to be able to exert better control over the influx.

 

[LightEcho]

There is no end to interesting events unfolding. This is getting absolutely fascinating. My take is that AMLO is trying to play all the sides like a true politician. He even plays nice with drug cartels. In that environment there will be two left standing: drug cartels and government. The people will feel the pain of Venezuela. The contagion will spread through all of South America and into Mexico. We need a bigger wall.

Something to watch for..... The opportunist China will make visits to size up what they can plunder, offering deals to carry the socialist leeches (at least in the minds of the leeches) but imposing strong borders of contracts so that China can only win without losing a drop of blood.

 

[SSTemplar]

AMLO is a nationalist so how can he be a leftist. The best thing about him is he is not a globalist.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm…..

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.americanthinker.com/blo...illegal_under_mexicos_new_president_amlo.html

July 2, 2018

Will we get a better quality of illegal under Mexico's new president, AMLO?

By Monica Showalter
Comments 37

The question sounds weird, but it's worth asking, given that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico's newly elected president, has declared he considers emigrating illegally "a human right" and in the tradition of Mexico's political class, likely intends to drive the more politically troublesome elements of Mexico's population northward.

Here's what he was saying ten days ago, as reported by The Daily Caller:

Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared mass immigration to the United States a “human right” for all North Americans during a speech Tuesday.

“And soon, very soon — after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world,” Obrador said, adding that immigrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.”

He then declared migration “a human right we will defend,” eluniversal.com reports.


So who is likely to be the most troublesome? Not the illegals we see now -- the Mexican nationals who sop up welfare benefits and serve Democratic Party interests in everything from larding up the electoral college count, to bringing more federal funding to Democrat-run districts, to actually voting illegally in our elections. And why is that? Because AMLO, as he is known, intends to bring those very benefits to Mexicans back home. Basically, his election signals a bid to grab back Mexico's underclass from the United States, and shower them with benefits at home to keep himself popular. On the social services front, things really are bad over there. Last election day, I did visit Tijuana, and went to slum asking Mexicans who had 'served' as illegals here what they were up against now that they were back home. Several told me they had to pay high fees to get their kids educated (or else no school for them), and pensions for the old were virtually non-existent. There were also the usual complaints about drugs and corruption, but it was striking how weak Mexico's social services were.

AMLO, presumably, would enact these new giveaway programs, and to be fair, some are probably necessary. Cripes, making poor kids pay for school? What an awful system. There's also likely to be a lot of pie-in-the-sky porkbarreling, a lot of corruption which always comes of such money-shoveling, and good times for the least-productive members of society. Result: Fewer reasons for Mexico's indigent classes to come here illegally.

But it would be a cost, as nervous investors are already noting.

Taxes are likely to skyrocket. Good jobs are likely to shrink. And the people who will be hurt from that? Mexico's middle class, the hard-working, educated Mexicans who have jobs, pay taxes and aren't going to like AMLO's skyrocketing taxes as he insults them with claims that they are 'the rich' and need to be taxed a little more.

How else is he going to pay for these handouts?

Such people are likely to think they have better prospects up north, and some may well come, many legally, and some illegally. Socialist regimes are famous for driving out their middle classes, and in Mexico's case, with rising incomes, there are plenty of middle class people who will consider it.

The Venezuela and Cuba examples show that first it's the middle class who flee, then the lower middle class, and then the poor, after their home country has run out of other people's money. Mexico at the front of its new socialist administration will likely have money from taxes and will drive out its middle classes first. The poor, meanwhile, will likely stay put, at least until the Other People's Money runs out.

Net result: immigrants from Mexico (who are declining in numbers here already due to Mexico's own population declines and rising incomes) will be less likely to want welfare here and more likely to want opportunity here.

There's no doubt AMLO will drive people out of Mexico, based on his statements as well as the effects of his domestic policies. Will he like the result? Probably, because he will be pulling Mexico's underclass from here back to Mexico based on his promises of goodies, as well as driving Mexico's middle class north. Will Democrats like the result? Probably not, since AMLO will be stealing back their politically useful illegal immigrant base. And the rest of us? well, we certainly could be getting new people here who are better equipped and able to succeed in the U.S. and quite possibly people of conservative values. It's worth keeping an eye on, because events can take unexpected twists and turns.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm…..

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.americanthinker.com/blo...losers_in_mexicos_election_the_democrats.html

July 2, 2018

The biggest losers in Mexico's election? The Democrats

By Monica Showalter
Comments 1

Every election has winners and losers, and Mexico's is no exception. While the press is making much of Mexico's centrist PRI and center-right PAN parties being the big losers in last night's election of socialist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, the real loser is actually up north, in the U.S. Democratic Party.

Sounds strange, until you look at the details.

After all the ideological compatibility between AMLO's new lefty MORENA party and the increasingly socialist U.S. Democrats seems to be identical.

Both favor heavy social spending, forced unionization of workers, political patronage, Chicago-style political muscle, and fealty to the ideals of the Socialist International. It's what most socialists do, until they run out of Other People's Money.

Democrats have staked their future on uneducated, needy illegals forming the base of their party's fortunes. In Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has done the same thing. The problem comes because the Mexicans in question are the same people.

AMLO's social spending policies are likely to draw Mexicans illegally here in the U.S. quite likely back to Mexico. If you have a choice of taking welfare benefits here, or welfare benefits there, it's very likely you'll go for them in your home country, where the language is the same, the Migra isn't out looking for you, and you know your way around the culture. That's bad news for the Democrats, who rely on illegals to lard up their electoral college votes in blue states, increase federal spending based on headcounts here, and actually vote illegally in elections, particularly in districts where very few people are in the country legally.

It goes to show that even with ideological conformity, nations have interests, and interests most certainly can conflict.

For many years, I had wondered why what passes for Mexico's conservatives always seemed to be so fiercely aligned to U.S. Democrats. Why was former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Mexico's first elected conservative via the PAN party, always such a shill for Democrats? Why was sitting and former President Felipe Calderon who came after him almost as obnoxious as Fox? Why did these people so advocate for an end to U.S. borders and denounce the American people as Nazis for opposing them, despite their being fairly conservative and ideologically recognizable on every other issue?

It turns out their political fortunes were built on getting as many indigent Mexicans out of the country as possible. Their governments benefited from their absence, both from remittances, and in the way they lowered social costs for the Mexican government in terms of housing them, educating them, and providing them with income and health care among other things. For a conservative government focused on fiscal discipline, it was most certainly in their interests to drive as many of Mexico's poor to El Norte, the better to get gringo to pay, an old Mexican custom dating from the war of 1848.

Democrats in the U.S., in turn, lapped up the new migrants, with California's Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown announcing 'you're all welcome here.' His party benefited, and the more the better. The Catholic bishops also benefited, hence, Steve Bannon's admittedly harsh analysis that the Church was all in for illegals even as it claimed it believed in rule of law, because of its interest in 'filling the pews.'

Now comes AMLO, whose big plan is to enact social welfare programs in Mexico, a move that is sure to draw many Mexicans back to their home country. It makes sense from his point of view and the viewpoint of his national interest, given that Mexico can no longer afford to lose people. Demographically, the median age is rising there, the population growth has gone flat, and incomes have passed the $7,000 a year threshhold, below which is said to trigger illegal immigration.

Nations always have interests and this one conflicts with the U.S. Democratic Party's interest, which up until now, aligned with the interests of Mexico's conservatives.

AMLO, if you look carefully at his words, seems cognizant of Democrats recognizing this and maybe getting angry about it, and thus, has offered up to his ideological coevals in the states the 'human right' of illegal immigration to the U.S. as a sop, using other people's countries instead of his own. Here are his words:

Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared mass immigration to the United States a “human right” for all North Americans during a speech Tuesday.

“And soon, very soon — after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world,” Obrador said, adding that immigrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.”

He then declared migration “a human right we will defend,” eluniversal.com reports


What we are looking at here is a bid to ship illegals from other countries through Mexico to the U.S., (to keep Democrats happy), while implicitly discouraging Mexican illegal immigration, which has drained the country of talent. There is no other explanation for such a policy. Turning Mexico into a roadstop for illegals from Central America and elsewhere by calling it a 'human right' is frankly toxic for Mexico, because it will empower cartels and give Mexico's government nothing, not even remittances, and plenty of enmity with the U.S. What's more, it should serve as an electoral mobilizer for Republicans, who will be angry at the move.

Net effect, another loss for Democrats, both in terms of lost people it intended to build its party fortunes on, and in energizing Republicans. They're not going to like this.

 

[Millwright]

Nightdriver found this...

Very relevant.

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?538817-Aesop-is-ON-FIRE!!

 

[Laurane]

Tax the remittances on money going back to Mexico and pay for the Wall now......

forget about getting money from Congressional budgets to pay for it.

Mexico will pay for the Wall......

La Raza is now fully in play.