Mexico City mayor defiant in face of impeachment
By John Authers and Sara Silver in Mexico City
Published: April 6 2005 on www.ft.com
If Andrés Manuel López Obrador's plans go well, more than 1m people will
arrive early on Thursday morning in the Zócalo, Mexico City's huge central
square, to rally in defence of the wildly popular leftwing mayor.
After giving the crowd instructions for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience, Mr López Obrador will go to Mexico's Congress, where he faces an impeachment trial. There he will almost certainly be stripped of his political immunity, over a charge that his administration ignored a judicial order in the building of an access road to a hospital four years ago.
Supporters of the impeachment say a vote against would be a vote against the rule of law. The Business Co-ordinating Council (CCE), Mexico's biggest employers' organisation, has run advertisements in newspapers urging Congress to uphold the principle that no politician is above the law.
Mr López Obrador's supporters counter that egregious acts of corruption by politicians routinely go unpunished, and that a vote for the impeachment would be a vote against democracy.
Stripping him of his immunity would lead to his removal from office. If a judge issues an arrest warrant, a decision that must be made within a week, he will also lose his political rights. If he is found guilty, or if no decision is made by January next year, he is barred from registering as a candidate for the presidency next year, a race which all polls show him leading comfortably.
The 150 deputies of President Vicente Fox's centre-right National Action party (PAN) will vote en bloc for the impeachment, along with perhaps all but 40 of the 224-strong deputation of the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI).That appears to guarantee the simple majority of the 500-member House needed to dismiss him.
The mayor says he will not pay bail and would go to jail, something that could happen within days. Then he intends formally to launch his presidential campaign from behind bars.
George Grayson, an academic at the College of William & Mary who is writing a book on Mr López Obrador, warns that his opponents are playing into his hands. “This would dramatise his willingness to suffer like a latter-day Jesus or a ‘Mexican Mandela' at the hands of advocates of neo-liberalism whose exploitative policies have ‘inflicted poverty, unemployment and misery' on the masses. Thus, the PRI and PAN run the risk of converting a popular public official into a national martyr.”
Once the impeachment happens, two questions will become paramount. The first is whether he can regain his political rights, which would happen if the case was dismissed, he won an injunction or was found innocent. Appearing on the ballot after all this could give him an aura of invincibility.
Supporters of the impeachment argue that once the early publicity dies down, Mr López Obrador will find himself in an abstruse legal process where his enemies are judges, who will be harder to demonise than the politicians he has been attacking over the last few weeks. He will also lose his access to the resources of the city government for funding publicity.
Further, Federico Doring, a PAN congressmen, said on Wednesday that more charges could be added. This would make it harder for him to clear all of them in time to be nominated. His support might slowly wane as people forgot about the issue.
Mr López Obrador's supporters argue that a judge would normally throw out the charges, on the basis that they should be directed at the planning official responsible for the decision. Further, Mr López Obrador says that Mexico's constitution, which removes political rights from those under prosecution, rather than from those who have been convicted, breaches international legal treaties by not according him the presumption of innocence.
A second question is the scale of the civil disobedience. If he successfully organises blockades of main highways and airports, the damage to Santiago Creel, the interior secretary and likely PAN presidential nominee, would be severe, points out Alejandro Hope, a political analyst with the GEA think-tank in Mexico City. But violence could deter many of the more moderate voters who currently consider Mr López Obrador the victim of an injustice.
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