PVCC Puma Press: April 2006

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	Ap Photo
	Former Mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Mexican presidential candidate for the leftist Democratic Revolution Party {PRD), adresses a crowd of supporters at a campaign rally in Tijuana, Mexico.
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While Mexican immigrants have illegally flooded across the U.S. border and caused stirring internal debate on immigration reform, Mexico will hold presidential elections on July 2. Results of the election will heavily influence the future tide of illegal immigration.

Throughout recent history, the Mexican government and its elected officials have failed citizens in their inability to deal with poverty and corruption. As a result, many citizens take a pessimistic view of national politics and voter apathy is rampant. The current Mexican economy, while slowly growing, is unable to provide opportunities for many of its people as they enter the work force.

The majority of undocumented Mexican immigrants that are currently illegally living in the U.S. will say they have done so in order to find better employment opportunities and escape impoverished backgrounds.

In order to stem the tide of illegal immigration and ensure that Mexican citizens can subsist on opportunities available in their own country, they must elect a candidate who will work to raise the entire country from its current third-world status. That candidate is, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, (PRD) the current front runner in polls to become the successor to Mexican President Vicente Fox.

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	'For the better of everyone, first the poor'
	—Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (PRD)
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Obrador, the candidate for the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, (PRD) has been compared by his political enemies to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez for his leftist radical reform policies.

Anyone who has visited Mexico can attest to the rampant poverty that afflicts the international border and many of the rural southern states. Evidence of that poverty becomes embarrassingly obvious the moment you cross into Nogales, Mexico. Barefooted children sell gum and flowers in the streets. Others wait patiently for you to park your car at a convenience store where they immediately begin washing your windows in the hopes of receiving a few pesos.

Obrador’s campaign slogan, “Para el mejor de todos, primero los pobres,” or “For the better of everyone, first the poor,” reveals his intention to change Mexico’s status as a third world country and reach out to the country’s impoverished population..

As former mayor of Mexico City, Obrador, was successful in re-building city infrastructure and implementing an extremely popular elderly pension fund, and he now says that if elected, he will save the Mexican federal government $9.1 billion in his first year by simply cutting wages for himself and other government officials.

Obrador refused to participate in the first of two presidential debates where he would have had the chance to outline his policies. However, it can be fairly assumed that he will utilize many of the same goals he had as Mayor of Mexico City; achieving social justice, combating crime, promoting real-estate construction, and expanding the country’s transportation system.

Another policy that needs to be a cornerstone to Obrador’s promise of change is the modernization and validation of the country’s public education system. As mayor of Mexico City, Obrador founded the first new university in three decades, offering engineering, humanities and social sciences degrees. The nationwide development of an effective public education system would battle poverty at its roots by working to lower ignorance and illiteracy among citizens while helping them develop job skills.

Obrador’s most significant opponent is the candidate for the incumbent National Action Party, (PAN) Felipe Calderon Hinojosa. Harvard educated, he is a lawyer and economist who served as Fox’s energy minister.

Calderon is the son of one of the founders of PAN and places implementing free market policies as well as providing universal health care on the tip of his campaign spear. In the last month, he has cut the gap in the polls between himself and Obrador in half.

His campaign slogan, “Para que vivamos mejor,” or “so that we live better,” plays to a similar trend in U.S. politics where politicians point out that they deserve to remain in power because citizens’ lives are currently better than they were at the time of their election.

The third place candidate for president of Mexico is Roberto Madrazo Pintado. A career member of Mexico’s political machine, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, (PRI) he is credited in helping reunify PRI after its loss in the 2000 presidential election.

While many Mexicans believe he utilizes ruthless political tactics to achieve his goals, his campaign slogan for 2006 claims that PRI is “en equipo contigo,” or “on your team.”

Despite the fact that Madrazo and the PRI are currently third in the polls; a rapid comeback and an eventual victory are not out of the question for the political party that controlled Mexico for 71 years. Madrazo controversially defeated Obrador in the state of Tobasco governorship race in 1994.

There is a laundry list of necessary political reforms for Mexico. Reduction in gang motivated violence and political corruption are certainly at the top of the list. But in a country with a population of over 107 million people, where the per capita income is one fourth that of the U.S., battling poverty needs to be any president’s number one priority. While under the guidance of the President Fox and the PAN party, the economy has grown, but has not produced enough opportunities to keep Mexican children from illegally seeking their fortunes in the U.S.

Free market policies that would be implemented by PAN and PRI would benefit only those with access to capital and the ability to turn it into profit. Meanwhile, the uneducated impoverished majority would remain in its current status of anonymity, and be forced to search for better lives in foreign lands.

Obrador’s (PRD) declaration of his intent to reach out to Mexico’s impoverished population is the best thing that any politician can do in country where the population has lost much faith in the political process. If elected, Obrador will have the same opportunity to jump start his country that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he implemented the New Deal, a package of border-line socialist reforms intended to pull the U.S. out of the depression and get its large unemployed and impoverished population back to work.