Because you asked for it, herewith is presented a guide to Mexico's simple, straightforward presidential election, a noble exercise in citizen participation, the democratic process at its purest.

The Mexican presidential campaign may seem confusing, but it’s really quite simple. 

Except when it’s not. 

Basically, the ruling PRI will try to hold onto the presidency against several challengers. To do so, it has chosen from its ranks a low key technocrat who has filled a number of cabinet posts under President Enrique Peña Nieto. 

Except that José Antonio Meade is not from the ranks. He’s not a member of the PRI. He just works for them. So has half his potential rivals, including AMLO, Armando Ríos Piter and El Bronco.  

Meade’s outsiderdom is supposedly a plus, since voters seem set to boot out the PRI, this time after only six years instead of the seven decades it took the first time. That  2000 opposition victory is seen as the model for Regime Change 2.0.

Except that the dragon-slayer of that year, Vicente Fox, has turned coat to cheerlead for the PRI, and seems especially taken with its incumbent president. What’s more, the party he won with, the PAN, is hemorrhaging militants, including two high-rankers who in just the last few weeks defected to work with Meade’s campaign — Julio di Bella Roldán and Javier Lozano. 

From the PRI point of view, Meade’s attraction is as a distraction; his under-the-radar service theoretically inoculates him from the accumulated scandals and tragedies of Peña Nieto’s presidency. He didn’t do personal deals with government contractors. He didn’t botch the investigation of a student massacre. He never got flustered trying to name a book he’s read. His slate must be as clean as a PRI candidate’s can be. 

Except it’s not. Meade was the  architect — or at least the public face — of the single most unpopular act of the Peña Nieto sexenio. It was just about a year ago when the PRI administration ended fuel subsidies, sending gasoline prices up drastically. Whether Meade was at fault is irrelevant; he signed the document.

There’s actually not much daylight at the right side of the political spectrum between the PAN and the PRI, but the latter is usually seen as battling the PAN to its right and the PRD to its left. 

Except that the PRD has no dog in the presidential hunt this year, having entered into an odd-couple alliance with the PAN. The idea is that a united front with a mutually acceptable coalition candidate stands the best chance of removing the corrupt PRI — a worthier goal than fighting stale left-right battles.

Except there is no mutually acceptable candidate. Ricardo Anaya had a lock on the nomination from the get-go, just as he would have had a lock on the nomination of an unattached PAN, which until recently he ran as party president. 

The true result of the merger was to subsume the PRD under Anaya and the PAN.

Which may not have been wise. Mexico City's PRD Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera would probably have had more support among panistas than Anaya with the perredistas.

Except that Mancera is not really a member of the PRD. That didn’t stop him from winning and carrying out the mayor job under that party’s auspices. It would probably have been to his advantage in a presidential race.  Instead, Mancera missed his chance at using the CDMX leadership — the No. 2 elected post in the nation — as a jumping off point for a presidential run.

Except no Mexico City head of government has jumped off into the presidency, though many have tried — Manuel Camacho, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Marcelo Ebrard among them. 

Anaya is presumably in a strong  position to duke it out with Meade for conservative, anti-AMLO support. The idea is to build up enough of a lead over Meade in the polls to convince would-be PRI voters to unite behind the PAN (excuse me, behind the Front) to keep AMLO out of Los Pinos. It’s the voto util strategy, and it worked marvelously in 2000 when Cardenás supporters flocked to Fox to defeat the PRI candidate, and in 2006 when the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo became a non-factor to help the PAN's Felipe Calderón beat AMLO. 

Except Meade’s not his only rival on the right. Margarita Zavala, another PAN heavyweight, is in the picture after she bolted the party to run as an independent. She’s already taking poll points away from Anaya, a case in point of the difference the advent of independent candidates is making.

Except the independents are not all that independent. Zavala, who served in the Senate for the PAN and was first lady during the Calderón administration (2006-2012), is as panista as they come. Her independence has more to do with Anaya’s grip on the nomination than any change of heart. Same is true for Armando Ríos Piter (who left the PRD) and El Bronco (PRI), though this last declared his independence earlier than the others.

All this leaves AMLO and Morena alone on the left, with a claim to a political purity untainted by the self-serving machinations cited above.

Except the AMLO campaign may be the most ideologically muddled of them all. 

Besides freeing himself from challenges to his leadership from petty pretenders, AMLO created Morena to clear the way for a 2018 run unassociated with the PRD’s increasingly sleazy reputation, personified, fairly or not, by images of party stalwart René Bejarano stuffing stacks of bills into a suitcase, or peering from behind bars.

Except that Bejarano and his legislator wife Dolores Padierna are visible and welcome AMLO supporters this year.

Accepting them into the new fold might be explained by their past support in 2006 and 2012 when López Obrador ran with the PRD. 

Except that AMLO has also accepted as a campaign aide the right-winger Gabriela Cuevas, a former Mexico City borough chief and federal legislator who was one of the loudest voices in favor of barring him from running for president in 2006 on legal grounds. 

By some coincidence, the PAN leadership had denied Cuevas a congressional candidacy a few days before she bolted to Morena. AMLO, who has never been a social liberal, defends the counterintuitive rapprochement on big tent grounds. After all, she’s just one person.

Except it’s not just one person. It’s an entire political party. Morena and its partner the Labor Party (PT) have welcomed into their coalition the Social Encounter Party. That may sound like a speed dating event, but it’s actually a far-right political organization run by religious extremists who have already helped pass anti-gay and anti-abortion legislation at the state level. What kind of tent is Morena using that has room for such a thing?

So it’s all quite simple, right?

Except for one more complication:

María de Jesús Patricio Martínez is another independent candidate who’s not so independent, and proudly so in her case. “I’m not an independent,” the Jalisco-born indigenous activist has said. “I’m running as the spokesperson of the Indigenous Governing Council.” Her candidacy is not so much about winning the presidency as organizing the indigenous, the working population, the marginalized and the anti-capitalist left into a movement that matters. This year, that might be a more worthwhile outcome than any one candidate’s victory. She probably won’t get the signatures to make the ballot, but if she did, I’d vote for her. 

Except as a non-citizen, I don’t have the franchise. 

A 'Danger to Mexico' is so 2006. Now it's 'Amlovsky, Putin's Puppet.' And it's only January.

It didn’t take long for the Russki scare to settle into the 2018 Mexican elections. Maybe Chelsea Manning got hit faster, but that’s about it.

It started a month or so ago when H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, dropped as an aside during a speech on another topic that Russia is interfering in the Mexican electoral campaign. 

Or might be interfering. Or is planning to interfere. Or might be planning to. There was (and is) no evidence shared. There were (and are) no details offered. 

The Mexican press will jump all over any morsel coming out of the U.S. about their country. But the story, such as it is, got its boost from Frida Ghitis, a CNN and World Politics Review contributor who wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece dated Jan. 11 that Mexico’s presidential race is threatened by the “digital proximity of the Russian cyber brigade.”

Let’s save space by overlooking for now how rich it is for the U.S. press and security establishment to go after another country for trying to influence Mexican politics. 

Instead, I’ll insert here my suspicion that there’s an element of red scare redux attached to this obsession with Russian election meddling. I’ll take that a step further and suggest that the resistance is making a mistake by over-emphasizing the collusion part of the Mueller inquiry into what’s a drop in the sea of Trump’s sins. 

Now, if the all-in-on-collusion strategy serves to get him out of there, I’ll retroactively support it. But what if it comes up short? At the very least, he’ll have bought himself some time that he shouldn’t be allowed. 

Which is not to say the meddling itself is a non-issue. Hey, we — Mexico and the U.S. — should let some thug from across the ocean send in his trolls to mess with voters’ minds? By all means, investigate. Find out what they’re doing, who’s doing it, and how to stop them. 

But that’s not how the quasi-revelation of Russian meddling is playing out here in Mexico. It began life not as a national concern but as the newest weapon for bringing down the frontrunner via fear and character assassination. 

If there were other viable candidates with something worthwhile to offer, said frontrunner could be defeated on merit. Since there’s not, we’ll be hearing more about him being a Russian agent.

We’re talking, of course, about Andrés Manuel López Obrador, formerly AMLO, now Amlovsky. If it seems absurd that a man who’s historically shown close to zero interest in anything beyond Mexico’s borders would seek or accept covert support from Russia, that’s because it is. 

So why López Obrador? How does a politician criticized (with reason) for being overly nationalist get associated with international intrigue?

Ghitis lays out her case for Putin’s motives for supporting AMLO. It’s ridiculous — either on her part or Putin’s, depending on how right she (actually McMaster) is about the meddling. 

You see, Putin’s goal of weakening the west in general, the United States in particular, and democracy in theory would be boosted should an “anti-American” who has been “lambasting the United States” and “who would dramatically alter the tenor and content of the [U.S.-Mexico] relationship” win the Mexican presidency.

“If López Obrador wins, Putin will have one more reason to flash a self-satisfied smile,” Ghitis writes. “That’s because López Obrador would not be good news for the United States.”

I promised myself after the last post that I would give up refuting this tired nonsense. The only evidence for it is that it gets repeated endlessly, so what can one say other than it ain’t so? 

I will mention, however, that I covered AMLO’s 2006 campaign and its aftermath and I don’t remember much ranting against the United States, then or since. His ire was and is aimed at the PRI and PAN, the two parties that have controlled Mexico for close to a century. Might as well say he’s been lambasting Mexico.

Ghitis never says that López Obrador is complicit in the ostensible meddling in his favor. She does, however, cite the case for his agency promoted within Mexico. It centers around a U.S.-born UNAM law professor and political activist named John Ackerman.

Ackerman is of that breed of leftist who sees little wrong with Mexico that isn’t the fault of the United States. He even accused Barack Obama of being “directly responsible” for the tragedy of the 43 Ayotzinapa students in 2014. (Seriously. Read it here.)

But when he stays under the top, Professor Ackerman is a sharp observer of Mexican society, a witty pundit, and a dedicated advocate for anti-corruption causes. He’s also an outspoken supporter (though, he insists, not a surrogate, as the Amlovsky crowd contends) of AMLO. 

What’s brought out the pitchforks is that he produces some commentary via RT, the Russian-based media outlet financed by the government (i.e. Putin). This is hardly uncharted territory for western journalists and commentators; Larry King has been there. But after the McMaster accusation, it caught the attention of the Mexican-born, U.S.-based journalist León Krauze, who wrote:

“The problem in the current context is that Ackerman’s work in Russia Today dangerously reduces the degrees of separation between Putin’s regime and Andrés Manuel López Obrador.”

“Russia Today” is no longer the name for RT, but the latter would not have served Krauze’s purpose as effectively as the former. 

It’s interesting that it was Krauze who stepped up quickly to address the supposed AMLO-Putin connection. It was his father Enrique Krauze, an admired historian, who in 2006 energetically promoted the AMLO-as-Messiah theory, which along with “A Danger to Mexico” helped defeat the then-PRD candidate, who lost by less than a percentage point.

Note that neither Krauze père or Krauze fils, both left-leaning but anti-AMLO, accuse López Obrador of consciously participating — “colluding,” if you will — in Putin’s alleged hijinks. But that’s hardly the point. The idea is out there now, and as a tool in the anti-AMLO political kit it’s as good as a fact.

“Russian Intervention” is the new “A Danger to Mexico,” as one internet wag put it.

Here’s what it’s come to already:

Juan Ignacio Zavala, brother-in-law of Felipe Calderón, the panista who edged out López Obrador in the 2006 presidential election, has circulated a petition to have Ackerman expelled from the country for “representing the interests of the Russian government.” After 24 hours it had 4,565 endorsers.

But the internet moves fast. A counter-petition went online asking for Zavala himself to be expelled from the country “for being an asshole.” That got 2,284 signatures in five hours. 

The U.S. press sees a different Mexican election campaign than the one that's actually happening. They can't help it.

There are two, not one, Mexican political campaigns starting up.

One takes place in Mexico, where an impatient populace battered by corruption, inequality and crime will once more see if a presidential election will do them any good.

The other is in the U.S. press, where the only issue on July 1 will be whether an anti-American populist will take over and make life miserable for the United States.

With apologies to Professor Lakoff, this is such a widely accepted frame that it’s hard to find an article in the mainstream U.S. press that doesn’t use it — even if the premise is overturned in that same article.  

We can choose almost at random a recent effort from Politico, which leads by calling Andrés Manuel López Obrador “a Mexican Donald Trump.” 

I’m personally embarrassed that another journalist is not embarrassed to write such a thing. But, alas, it’s in keeping with a tradition dating back at least to the turn of the century: When it comes to writing about AMLO, anything goes. 

The problem now, we’re told, is that an AMLO win would create “an even more charged relationship between the two countries that could reduce cooperation on border security, trade and immigration.”

That’s the author herself speaking, but she gives us back-up from Mike McCaul, the wealthy Trump-enabling Texas congressman, who says flatly, “I do not want to see President Obrador [he means López Obrador] take office next year.”

But, he fears, “if NAFTA is not done correctly . . . we’ll be handing a candidate, a socialist candidate like that, the presidency of Mexico.” 

McCaul chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, so there’s an implied national security threat if the wrong candidate wins in Mexico. Also notice who, in his opinion, gets to decide who gets handed the Mexican presidency.

An ingrained concern stateside is that an AMLO presidency will sour, perhaps end, economic cooperation. Politico tells us that “the next Mexican president will set the tone for the next several years of U.S.-Mexico relations,” and suggests what kind of tone would be set by AMLO, given that he “has made his biggest headlines in the U.S. by being a fiery opponent of Trump’s critical rhetoric about Mexico.”

Of course, it’s the U.S. press that decides what the biggest headlines are. And does it need to be said that everybody in Mexico — and every decent person in the United States — is an “opponent of Trump’s critical rhetoric about Mexico”? Maybe the others aren’t fiery enough to get the headlines.

More to the point, the premise is backwards. Who slammed Mexico-U.S. trade relations? Who said “Mexico is killing us on trade”? Who threatened a trade war against Mexico? 

There’s a confusion here between action and reaction. It’s ridiculous to say that the binational tone will be set by the next Mexican president, whatever his or her fieriness level. It’s been set.

When we finally hear from someone outside the frame, the Politico article wises up.

“I say it’s more in Trump’s hands as to what happens with the relationship than it is in Mexican hands,” former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico James Jones is quoted as saying. “Because I think there’s a predisposition to want to strengthen and improve the relationship with the United States.”

That predisposition is shared by AMLO, who is not (as people are led to believe) anti-NAFTA. Nor would his election mean a break with the U.S. — at least not one precipitated by Mexico

“[López Obrador] has got to create wealth,” Jones, about as unfiery as they come, tells Politico. "And to create wealth, he’s got to attract business. Truly, he has to try to maintain cordial relations with the United States.”

The intent here is not to single out one news outlet or one journalist. This article is typical. And, as noted, it does add a better perspective, for those who read far enough down. 

But framing the campaign as primarily a duel between anti-American extremism and pro-American free-traders gives the wrong idea about what’s going on. The Mexican election is about Mexico. 

Should the U.S. government decide after all these years to finally take my advice, it will approach the Mexican election by just sitting back to watch the show, keeping its hands off, and, when it’s over, negotiating bilateral issues with whatever new administration comes in, one sovereign nation to another. 

Really? These are the candidates for president?

Peña Nieto tells us that the July 1 national election will be the biggest in our lifetime. Give him credit for avoiding the cliché that it will be the most important. And going by the numbers, he’s got a point.

There will likely be more than the usual three viable presidential candidates on the ballot, more state and local posts than in the past will be decided along with the presidency and Congress, and more Mexicans than ever are expected to vote. 

All that may count for bigger. But better? Not so much. 

Somehow, even with a new major party added to the mix, along with at least two independents poised to make the ballot and the creation of a baffling left-right coalition, we seem to have ended up with four ho-hummers huddled on the right side of the spectrum opposite the usual change agent. 

For an electorate so hungry for a thorough political cleansing, the candidate line-up is unpromising, to say the least — a technocrat, a party hack, a calderonista throwback, and a guy whose political persona depends on a nickname.

Plus, as always, AMLO. 

None are what they seem to be. José Antonio Meade, the candidate for the incumbent PRI, is not a member of that party and has served in the past under the PAN, the PRI’s friendly rival. Maybe that’s why he got the party nod — a little bit of distance could help these days, when everybody hates the PRI again. 

Not coincidentally, Meade’s people are playing him up as the clean guy, an academic unsullied by scandal. The foreign press has bought that line, but Mexicans don’t vote for a PRI-backed candidate because they think he’s clean.

At any rate, foreign press aside, Meade’s candidacy has been greeted with deafening silence. Some are wondering when he will come down with an unfortunate illness and have to be replaced.

Ricardo Anaya is making the jump from president of the conservative PAN to candidate for the coalition with the left-of-center PRD.  But that’s misleading. Joining forces may help the two parties at the state and local level, but in the presidential race, the Frente mostly serves to make the PRD go away (a disappearing act the PRD itself has been carrying out quite effectively for several years now).  As far as the electorate is concerned, Anaya is going to be the PAN candidate, period.

Or at least one of them. Margarita Zavala is running as an independent, but her newfound independence has more to do with Anaya’s lock on the PAN nomination than any change of course. If the former first lady qualifies for the ballot, she’ll be seen as a second PAN candidate. Because that's what she is.

Ask anybody outside Nuevo León who Jaime Rodríguez is and you’ll get a lot of blank stares. But what about “El Bronco”? Ah, he’s the longtime PRI loyalist who went independent, won the governorship and is now running for president. 

My hunch is that providing career politicians with a way to circumvent unsupportive party leaders is not the best use of independent candidacies.

It can be debated whether Andrés Manuel López Obrador is truly a candidate of the “left” — and it often is. But he’s clearly the only change agent among the viable candidates. That’s why he’s ahead in the polls. It’s also why half the electorate is afraid of him.

With his opposition split into four, he’s got a good thing going. Which could mean that he —not the economy, not crime, not Trump — will be the issue. That’s what happened in 2006, when supporters of the status quo abandoned the PRI candidate (the unlikeable Roberto Madrazo), went all in on Felipe Calderón, and made the election about nothing else but AMLO’s unfitness for office. 

The gambit worked, though not by much. We could be in for a re-run.

Got any new ideas for reducing crime in Mexico? Keep them to yourself.

National dilemmas stay unsolved because people prefer moral posturing to resolution. 

“What part of illegal don’t you understand?” signals righteousness; the flexibility needed for actually fixing the undocumented immigrant  situation in the United States doesn’t. 

Pro-war patriots wanted U.S. troops to stay in Vietnam so that tens of thousands of Americans would not have died in vain — thereby assuring that tens of thousands more would die in vain.

A more recent instance is Mexico’s intractable crime and violence, fed by the drug-trafficking organizations that co-govern the nation. Since Felipe Calderón pulled on his oversized army fatigues in 2006 and sent the military out against the narcos, the death toll has reached the hundreds of thousands. (I’ve given up trying to get consistent numbers, let alone clarification on who’s killing whom.) 

All we have to show for it is a lot of corpses, an intimidated populace, depleted state government coffers, and an unhelpful attitude from across the northern border that sees average Mexicans not as victims of, but accomplices in, the crime wave.

A dozen years on, the drug war is an abject failure and everybody knows it. So one might think that a proposed new approach would at least be mulled over, if not embraced. 

Fat chance. 

A proposal in December by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the frontrunner in this year’s presidential election, calling for a national dialogue to “explore all possibilities, including decreeing an amnesty, while listening to the victims . . .,” succeeded mainly in unleashing the bluenoses with responses as predictable as they were disappointing.

The hysteria blew in from all directions. AMLO, his election opponents tell us, cares more about the perpetrators than the victims. His amnesty subverts the legal process, said José Antonio Meade. It’s “true insanity,” said Ricardo Anaya. “He’s proposing a country of impunity,” said Margarita Zavala.

To state the obvious, Meade (PRI) and Anaya (PAN) represent the parties that got us into this mess. Zavala (ex-PAN) is married to the man who started it (Calderón). “A country of impunity” is what we have now. As for “true insanity,” it’s been famously defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Two of the men leading the drug war, Navy Secretary Francisco Soberón and Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos, dropped their apolitical masks to jump all over the amnesty idea. “There’s no way it can happen,” Soberón said, probably accurately. “It’s to be taken as an electoral ploy more than a real goal.”

That last jab is interesting, because the opposite is more likely true. One of the reasons the amnesty proposal isn’t gaining traction is because it comes from AMLO. The 40 percent or more of the electorate that despises the ground he stands on won’t support anything that comes out of his mouth.

A more legitimate problem is that the proposal was unveiled casually, and either floated in an intentionally vague guise or left simply half-baked. An idea as counterintuitive as pardoning some of the nastiest people on the planet needs explanation and context, not to mention some reassuring scenarios.

Without those things, you’re asking for negative emotional responses, such as the following from Javier Sicilia, the poet/activist who lost a son to the drug war:

“Tell us, Andrés Manuel, can you in good conscience ask us to forget the victims?”

He’s asking nothing of the kind, of course, and Sicilia surely knows that. What is being asked is to shift the primary goal from justice to peace. I have no idea whether amnesty will help achieve that. But I do know that it needs to be explored.

Just not with an election looming. The electorate will respond as Javier Sicilia has, not as a think tank would. That’s why Admiral Soberón's election ploy theory is wrong. The idea, worthwhile or not, will probably end up costing AMLO votes. 

Hypocrisy is rewarded at the polls. Innovation is punished.