Lopez Obrador victory would alter relations with States

by Jack Epstein
Candidate says he'd focus on the poor, revise NAFTA

Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says his hero is Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal reformed the American economy and pulled millions out of poverty. His critics say his real inspiration is Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela who is leading an anti-U.S., anti-free-trade movement throughout the hemisphere.

But one thing is sure: If Lopez Obrador wins Mexico's presidency in elections Sunday, relations with the United States will change dramatically.

"U.S.-Mexico relations won't go down the same path," said Laurie Freeman, a Mexico specialist at the think tank Washington Office on Latin America. "There will be rocky points."

Critical of NAFTA

It is no secret that Lopez Obrador will not carry the banner of U.S. free trade policies of outgoing President Vicente Fox, who is barred by law from re-election. The former Mexico City mayor has called for a revision of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. He aims to protect subsistence farmers by not opening bean and corn markets in 2008 to U.S. producers as required by the trade pact.

Polls show that Lopez Obrador, of the left-center Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), is in a dead heat with Fox's standard-bearer, Felipe Calderon of the pro-business National Action Party (PAN).

The PRD candidate rejects any similarity with Chavez but concedes that he is more interested in domestic policies than international relations. His platform to eliminate extreme poverty and reduce migration to the United States includes a $20 billion FDR-style public works program, free medicine and a pension for all elderly Mexicans. This has made him widely popular among Mexico's poor, who comprise nearly half of the nation's 107 million people. "First Mexicans, later foreigners," he has said on the campaign trail.

"Clearly, he would be different than Fox and he will put a distinct stamp on Mexican politics," said Harley Shaiken, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley. "But in the long-term interest of the United States, the question is: Will there be a stable government in Mexico that can promote growth? If he can do that, there will be good relations."

Last year, President Bush said he could work with any successor to Fox.

But Freeman says Washington obviously prefers Calderon, because he represents "more continuity, more pro-business, more pro-free trade and less confrontation."

Analysts say both U.S. and Mexican critics fear Lopez Obrador will bankrupt the state with his welfare programs, causing foreign investment to drop and inflation to rise. Some predict his populist policies will spark a massive exodus for El Norte.

"If they revert to the populist habits of yore, no American wall will be high enough to keep the flood of desperate workers out," said an editorial in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

But Dwight Dwyer, a research fellow at the Center for Latino Policy Research at UC Berkeley who specializes in party politics in Latin America, says that argument is fallacious.

"If you look at the rate of Mexicans coming into the United States illegally, more than half came in the past five years under Fox," he said. "What is driving migration patterns is a lack of jobs created by the trade policies of the last three administrations."

Just this week, prominent Mexican historian Enrique Krauze caused a stir by calling Lopez Obrador a "messianic populist" who could "undermine Mexican democracy" by "altering the law of the land and being re-elected indefinitely. ... His most insistent proposal is to amend the Constitution to allow for referendums and plebiscites."

Presidential power

But Dwyer and other experts say Mexican presidents stopped being the ultimate authority after the Institutional Revolutionary Party lost its 71-year hold on power in 2000, when Fox beat its candidate. "If Lopez Obrador wins, there would be a lot of opposition for any substantial change by Congress," Dwyer said.

Lopez Obrador says he has long fought for democracy and notes that he left Mexico City after five years in office with a balanced budget. To pay for his anti-poverty programs, he says he will crack down on tax evasion -- wealthy Mexicans pay few taxes -- and pork-barrel projects. "Macroeconomic stability is simply common sense," he said last year.

Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington research group that monitors U.S.-Latin American relations, says the Bush administration would be likely to place Lopez Obrador in the "soft left" column, alongside Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, rather than the "hard left" governments of Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales.

"Lopez Obrador will act like a man who doesn't want to be thrown out of his house in the rain," Birns said. "He may want to spin his umbrella with NAFTA, immigration ... but there are too many connections with the United States. He is extremely anxious to maintain a civilized status with the United States."