In a nation still struggling along its path toward democracy, Andrès Manuel Lopez Obrador, the mayor of Mexico City and PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) candidate for president in 2006, is a banner of hope for the Mexican people. However, after his involvement in a miniscule break with the law, Obrador faces an incongruous impeachment that could bar him the race. Lunging at the opportunity to destroy Obrador’s candidacy, the Mexican Congress, composed of members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and incumbent Vicente Fox’s National Action Party (PAN), voted to strip him of the mayoral immunity that would protect him from arrest and prosecution. Although designed to aide the incumbent party, the scheme is transparent and has potential to backfire on Fox and his currently slumping polls.

The PAN’s field day began when Obrador refused to listen to court rulings which demanded that he halt a road construction project. The road in question was intended to provide better access to a city hospital in the Mexico City area, but it risked penetrating private land. Obrador’s defiant move in this case reflects his consistent deference to the people, often in spite of government, and has been a recurring trend in his career. Such populist decisions that have been rewarded with an eighteen month lead in the presidential polls may now be the Achilles’ heel of his campaign.

The PAN’s impulse to penalize Obrador so severely reveals understandable desperation on Fox’s part and has met wide criticism. According to Common Dreams News Center, “That a low level administrative dispute of this sort could be parlayed into an impeachable offense reflects the backsliding of Mexican politics under President Fox.”

Fox’s presidential career got off to a rough start and never seemed to improve. After a campaign full of huge promises and jeers directed to the members of other parties, particularly the long-standing PRI, Fox has failed to deliver the democracy that was such an essential component to his campaign. Moreover, after having won the presidential seat with only 43% of the popular vote, his heckling caught up with him, and he was obliged to sit before a Congress composed of the very members he had lambasted in his campaign. According to Wikipedia, “he [Fox] managed to infuriate the members of Congress from the first minute of his term when, immediately after being sworn in as president and donning the presidential band, he began his speech to Congress by greeting all of his sons and daughters by name; [after which] he addressed the Congress, breaking the protocol of the swearing-in ceremony.” It is also interesting that after teasing the former ruling party PRI and the oppositional party PRD throughout his campaign with such names as “tepocatas, alimañas, and vìboras prietas,” (various names for farm vermin and pests), Fox sought to make amends by including several of them in his Cabinet. However, despite such actions, Fox has been unable to keep many of the arrogant promises he made during the campaign (although this is not particularly surprising for any politician), including fixing the Zapatista guerrilla problem in “fifteen minutes” and ensuring an annual economic growth of seven percent for Mexico.

It is no wonder that Obrador evokes so much fear in the PAN party. Reckless Fox sits on the other side of the spectrum when compared to Obrador, whom the Mexican people voted second-best city mayor in the world. As Head of Government (equivalent to a city mayor in the U.S.), he has closed down Pemex oil ducts in order to get the company to pay Native American farmers whose lands have been contaminated. He has broadened the democratic privileges of the Mexican people by instituting electronic media and modern polling, and he has provided social aid allowances to the elderly, handicapped, single mothers and youth living in areas of increased crime. Another testament to Obrador’s strong populist ideals lies in his refusal to accept the necessity of Daylight Savings Time, which he believes interrupts the biological clock (he was only able to perceive its practicality after much convincing). Indeed, this brief list belies the many achievements Obrador has won for his constituents. Even his critics “accuse” him of showing “disregard of both law and institutions coupled with an insistence on the authority of the ‘People’ over established institutions.” According to the World Socialist Website, “If the elections were held today, opinion polls indicate that Obrador would beat his closest opponent by 10 percent of the vote.”

The extent of his popular support has led members of the PRD to participate in a rotational hunger strike outside the official residence of Vicente Fox. According to World-AP Latin America, one lawmaker of Obrador’s party sits in hunger for the duration of 24 hours, after which he is relieved and replaced by a peer. Other recent forms of protest include the interruption of congressional sessions with banners and chants, a protest camp erected on Mexico’s national Independence Monument, and attempts to break into Fox’s family ranch.

Nevertheless, Fox continues to stand by his party’s sole, weak platform against Obrador, stating: “[this is a] shining example to the world of law and order in action in a democracy.” Nonetheless, Obrador’s bellowing response shows his optimism and assurance that the Mexican people can publicize the irrationality of his impeachment: “I am proud to be accused by those who deceived Mexico, who offered change and then defrauded the public.” When Obrador describes the deception of the Mexican people, he touches upon years and years of corruption and manipulation that have not come close to ending with Fox’s presidency.

Having languished for seventy years in near-dictatorship conditions under the PRI, the PAN’s frantic decision to impeach Obrador promises to be nothing more than a repetition of the past. The political establishment of PAN, with Fox rising to power in 2000, had been met with high hopes for change by the Mexican people, but has only provided more of the same. According to CDNC, “Mexico’s current rulers apparently hope that by the time Mexico’s election arrives in the summer of 2006, few will remember what they did to deprive Mexicans of a real choice.” If not, the elimination of Obrador will be more than a backfire. It will be the ironic end of Vicente Fox and his party.