THE United Kingdom is our crucial military ally. Australia, with its feisty love of liberty and strategic location, grows more important to us every day. Canada treasures the role of abused spouse. But no country is more important to our future than Mexico.
With oil, a growing economy, a huge expat population in the United States (legal and illegal), its leadership role in Latin America and a population of over 100 million – more than three times Canada’s – Mexico should top our list of strategic interests. Instead, we pay more attention to South Korea and show more respect for Qatar.
Our fates are intertwined. For better or worse. It only makes sense to do what we can to make our relationship healthier.
It’s a challenge. Mexico’s a country where politicians steal everything in sight, then blame us for local poverty. Drugs sold by Mexican cartels kill more Americans than terrorists do in Iraq. Even the presidency of Vicente Fox – the first opposition candidate to hold the office since the Mexican Revolution – has been a lost opportunity.
Now our neighbor to the south faces a political crisis that will determine the country’s future. At the center of the storm is a single man, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the mayor of Mexico City and the most popular politician in the country.
President Fox and his conservative party, PAN, have united with their bitter rivals in the PRI, the party whose control of the state lasted longer than the Communist Party’s rule in Moscow: No one in the establishment wants Lopez Obrador to run for president next year.
Because he’d win. And he owes nothing to the kingmakers.
As I write, the mayor has returned to the office from which the federal government tried to bar him for “criminal activities.” He may already be under arrest. And what crime did Hizzoner commit? He built a hospital access road on a strip of private property.
Wrong? Yep. But given Mexico’s whopping corruption at the top, this is akin to arguing that an American can’t run for president because of a parking ticket.
Lopez Obrador’s real “crimes” are that he’s popular, incorruptible and a champion of the people.
For almost a century, Mexico’s politicians have made beautiful promises to their impoverished fellow citizens. Then they stuffed their own pockets, counting on the safety valve of illegal emigration to the U.S. to keep society from exploding.
Along comes Lopez Obrador, to the in-crowd’s consternation. He actually improves the lot of the poor. He lives in a simple apartment, not a mansion. And he seems to be a genuine man of conscience.
The inner workings of the Mexican political system are opaque even to Mexicans. We never know what deals are being cut. But we can hear what the men who’ve failed Mexico say for our consumption.
Washington has been warned that Lopez Obrador is “another Hugo Chavez,” the Venezuelan colonel who dresses up as Castro. It’s a lie. Lopez Obrador is more of a cross between William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long, an “every man a king” kind of politician who puts at least a drumstick, if not an entire chicken, in every pot.
And he isn’t anti-business, either. Just anti-corruption.
But even if Lopez Obrador were a leftist demagogue, we need to stop and ask ourselves why recent elections in Latin America have installed left-wing governments in office.
The truth is that the populations between the Rio Grande and the Rio de la Plata are sick and tired of broken promises and poverty. They’re not voting for extremist philosophies. They’re voting against those in power, against those who failed them.
Our position on Lopez Obrador will be a test. If Mexico’s established powers bust him on phony charges and we stay mum, we’ll have betrayed our own rhetoric about spreading democracy – while alienating Mexicans who view the United States more positively than ever before in their history.
Which brings us to the big lies told about Mexicans who live and work within our borders. The nuttiest fable is that Mexican immigrants want to “take back the Southwest” for Mexico. On the contrary, having experienced the decency of American society, those immigrants, legal and illegal, want to make Mexico more like El Norte.
No one wants to live in a society where bribes determine your fate.
The paradox of illegal immigration is that immigrants want to stay here because they’ve learned to value the rule of law. Mexicans come here because the United States offers opportunities and a level of justice they can’t find at home. They’re fleeing poverty, corruption and degraded lives. Why on earth would they want to turn Texas into Jalisco?
What’s really changing Mexico is Mexican exposure to the society, economy and constitutional integrity of the United States. Even the illiterate now realize that things don’t have to go on as they always have south of the border. Mexicans may be changing the United States, but our impact on Mexico is incomparably deeper. And Mexican pols are scared.
If he isn’t assassinated – another grim Mexican tradition – or jailed on trumped-up charges, Lopez Obrador will be Mexico’s next president. He’s the people’s choice. We must support fair treatment of him now. As president, he might not make us happy every day – but he could be the best thing that happened to Mexicans since they whipped the French army at Puebla on Cinco de Mayo.
Mesmerized by Iraq and the War on Terror, we neglect the neighbor whose future will have the greatest influence on our own. No foreign policy development would be better for the 21st-century United States than a prosperous, rule-of-law Mexico.
Ralph Peters is a regular Post contributor.