Well, after all this fighting over who won the election, it looks like Mexicans may end up with two so-called presidents, neither of whom will have legitimacy in the eyes of more than a third or so of the public. Calderon managed to sneak past protesters and through the back door of the federal electoral tribunal on Wednesday to receive his official status as president-elect. (Photos in the paper show him receiving a big framed certificate, like its graduation or something...maybe he'll hang it next to his Harvard degree.) And on Sept. 16, Lopez Obrador will preside over his own Democratic National Convention which will likely name him "President in Resistance" or something equally bizarre. (I picture indigenous blankets being bestowed rather than official certificates.)
Perhaps its the only fitting outcome. The divisions in the country are real. The parellel worlds of rich and powerful vs. poor and marginalized do exist in Mexico, and its hard to see how either Calderon or AMLO could adequately represent more than one of those worlds. So, they'll both just ignore the reality that neither of them was given a clear mandate to lead the country and take what they can get - a weak state-endorsed presidency for one, and a popular civil resistance movement for the other. And they'll continue to see their world as the right one and block out the doubts and deeper questions that might be raised by opening their eyes to the other.
If, like me, you're still trying to understand why a third of the Mexican population is so convinced there was fraud in the elections despite the long electoral and judicial review of the results, check out this recent article in the New York Times.
Long History of Vote Fraud Lingers in the Mexican Psyche
Fraud may, after all, be in the eyes of the beholder.
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