Desafuero

Discussing the so-called "desafuero" action, in which Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador was stripped of his official immunity so he could stand trial in a minor land dispute, the New York Times commented yesterday, before the result of the vote was announced:

Last week, a congressional panel voted along party lines to strip Mr. López of his immunity as an elected official. Congress's lower house is expected to take up the issue today and to confirm the decision. Then he'll probably be indicted - and by law, no one facing a criminal trial can run for president.

Mr. López has taken full advantage of the situation, which has distracted attention from serious charges of corruption against his top aides. He has compared himself to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and vowed to campaign from jail. Certainly, he is no Martin Luther King. A longtime PRI official who moved to the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, he has built a machine in Mexico City modeled on the PRI nationwide. He is increasingly a demagogue, and he has fought reforms like making information available to the public. He responded to a huge march against a crime wave by calling it an attempt by dark forces to attack him.

But since the powerful can still get away with anything in Mexico, few people believe his opponents' pious claims that they are just trying to uphold the rule of law by indicting him. He may not be the right man for the presidency, but that issue should be for Mexico's electorate to decide.

With the result now confirmed - 360 in favour of lifting the immunity, 127 opposed and 2 abstentions - the paper's correspondents note that it "casts doubt on the strength of Mexico's fledgling democracy":

Political analysts said that the proceedings were a critical test in this country's transition to a full-fledged democracy that began just five years ago when Mexicans broke seven decades of single-party rule with the peaceful election of Vicente Fox, the first president to come from an opposition party.

The protests, which had largely ended by late Thursday, brought comparisons to the recent pro-democracy demonstrations in the Ukraine that helped lift Viktor A. Yuschenko to power. But while Mr. Lopez said support for him would grow, his adversaries seemed confident the protests would die out soon.

GoLeech points to the obvious dangers to Mexican society that the result of the vote presents:

El problema de fondo es político. Las pasiones se pueden desatar. Las tentaciones heroícas, la calentura, el descontento, las malinterpretaciones, el oportunismo, etc. son ingredientes para que estalle un conflicto social. Ya ni hablar de la imagen que damos al mundo, de las inversiones, de la supuesta construcción de la democracia. El capricho de unos cuantos se les puede salir de las manos.

Por eso desde aquí desapruebo y denuncio el acto antidemocrático que se ha orquestado. Pero también denunciaré y desaprobaré las actitudes malintencionadas y/o manipuladoras que puedan ser usadas para agitar a la sociedad, de parte de quien sea.