The pot simmers south of the border

From The Washington Post:

MEXICO CITY, Aug. 6 -- Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the runner-up in Mexico's presidential election whose supporters have erected tent cities to protest the results of the July 2 vote, said Sunday that the political crisis would not be resolved by the partial recount ordered by the country's highest electoral court.

Speaking inside the 18-by-9-foot tent where he has lived for the past week, López Obrador was utterly defiant. He will not accept results of the partial recount, he declared during his first interview since a special election court on Saturday rejected his request for a full recount. And he said he would not ask his supporters to disperse even though they have brought gridlock to Mexico City's downtown.

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During the interview, López Obrador -- a former Mexico City mayor -- described Mexico as a "racist" and "classist" country dominated by men who "are not businessmen, but are traffickers in influence." Opinion polling conducted since the election suggests that darker-skinned indigenous peoples supported him and his Democratic Revolutionary Party while lighter-skinned Mexicans supported Calderón, advisers said.

Mexico has a huge gap between the rich and poor -- nowhere more noticeable than in Mexico City, where a large elite class shops at Christofle and Cartier while millions live in grinding poverty. The poor are López Obrador's most ardent followers, but he said he is not a populist. "I am a leftist," he said.

"A leftist". That is why he is not the answer to Mexico's suffering. Make no mistake; most of Obrador's complaints are well founded. Mexico is ruled by a small number of wealthy families who are descended from the Spanish Conquistadores who have, for the most part, not intermarried with the native Mexican Indians.

The government of Mexico has made some legitimate progress, but it is still massively corrupt and incompetent. The fanatic tenacity with which Mexican leaders promote illegal immigration of poor Mexicans into the United States is an indication of how bad things are in Mexico. Money the illegals send back to Mexico helps keep the Mexican economy afloat and the US represents a "safety valve" bleeding off the most discontented and ambitious young men (the men most likely to join a domestic revolution). Imagine what would happen back home if the rage and hatred the Mexican illegals direct at the undeserving United States was to be focused on the Mexican government, which richly deserves it.

However the ability to define the problem does automatically make you qualified to develop the solution. Obrador's prescription for Mexico is a kind of xenophobic socialism. What Mexico needs is not more government control it is free market reform and the opening of Mexico to foreign investment.

Right now it is difficult to immigrate to Mexico and even harder to for a foreigner to start a business in Mexico. This needs to change. Large numbers of American baby-boomers are reaching retirement age and would love to move to Mexico which has much natural beauty and low land and labor costs. Mexican property values could be increased and millions of Mexicans could be employed in Mexico seeing to the various needs of these American retirees for everything from domestic staff to building construction to health care. Then all of the businesses that cater to the newly employed Mexicans will prosper and so on as the effect ripples through the economy.

Also, there are a substantial number of American businesses that would benefit greatly from relocation to Mexico. I have heard more than one dairy farmer say that his land would make more money as a golf course or housing development, but that he stays with farming because he loves it and feels that the nation needs his produce. The same thing is true for many other kinds of farmer in America.

If Mexican laws were changed to make it easier for them to relocate to Mexico many US farmers could sell their land in America for enough money to set up larger operations in Mexico where costs are so much less that they could have profitable businesses without government price supports. But Mexican laws would need to change.

American retirees will not jump through the hoops to move to a nation which will then treat them like third-class non-citizens and American businessmen will not stake their economic futures on a corrupt socialist economy which could wipe out their investment overnight through some lame-brained central planning experiment or steal it outright through nationalization.

And none of this even touches on the problems of Mexico's oil industry. Mexico's proven reserves of crude are dwindling rapidly. Oil geologists believe that Mexico has more, perhaps much more, oil but the Mexican state oil bureaucracy is not competent to find it and develop it in any kind of timely and efficient manner. US oil companies, which are very good at finding and developing oil could be the key to saving the Mexican economy from total collapse.

But Obrador doesn't understand any of this. Like the poor and ignorant peasants who form the core of his support he believes the socialist myth that tearing down the rich will automatically uplift the poor. As a hater of capitalism he will not open Mexico to foreign investment other than "partnerships" with Cuba, Red China and Venezuela.

Obrador's opponant Felipe Calderón is neither Thomas Jefferson nor Adam Smith, but at least he does not have a program designed to make things worse.