Latin America's leftist losers

When conservative candidate Felipe Calderon was certified as Mexico's president-elect on Thursday, it marked the fourth straight setback for leftist, anti-American politicians in Latin America. And of course that's good news for the United States, unless you're an America-hater (of whom there are a few in our country).

Leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his highly vocal supporters were still screaming "Fraud!" as Calderon was declared the winner of last Sunday's hotly contested presidential election by a paper-thin margin of less than 1 percent. Even as Lopez Obrador vowed to appeal the official results, Calderon promised to initiate "a new era of peace and reconciliation" when he takes over from fellow conservative Vicente Fox on Dec. 2. Personally, I hope that Calderon will be a more effective president than Fox, who has advocated "open borders" during his six-year term of office while doing virtually nothing to strengthen the Mexican economy in order to keep his citizens at home on their side of the border.

The only positive aspect of a Lopez Obrador victory might have been a possible decrease in illegal migration to the U.S. because, as Tim Padgett of Time magazine noted, Lopez promised to create millions of new jobs by steering government resources to small businesses and ending tax breaks for large corporations. His campaign opened a debate (at long last) in that country over how to keep Mexican workers from fleeing to the U.S.

But the self-righteous Lopez was his own worst enemy during a spirited election campaign. After beginning his campaign as the clear front-runner, the former Mexico City mayor alienated many voters by refusing to participate in the first nationally televised presidential debate. Meanwhile, the Harvard-educated Calderon ran negative TV ads that tied Lopez to Venezuela's fiercely anti-American dictator wannabe, Hugo Chavez, because Lopez has never visited the U.S. and didn't hide his disdain for the "Colossus of the North" during the campaign.

The Mexican election was the fourth straight political setback for Chavez and his anti-American allies, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Bolivia's Evo Morales, who was financed and tutored by Chavez. First, Colombia's conservative president, Alvaro Uribe, was handily reelected over a leftist opponent and then Peru chose former centrist President Alan Garcia over a Chavez clone who sounded a lot like the Venezuelan and his mentor, Castro. The Peruvian result was something of a surprise because when I knew Garcia in the mid-1980s, we regarded him as a leftist, anti-American politician. But my goodness, how times have changed south of the border.

Bolivian voters rebuked Morales last Sunday by rejecting his socialist agenda of radical economic and social reforms in an election to choose delegates to a new constitutional assembly. According to Patrick McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times, "A chief executive who has reveled in confrontation will now be obliged to seek reconciliation." One astute observer of the Bolivian political scene said the election results make it clear "that there will not be a constitution 'a la Chavez.'"

In all of these recent Latin American elections, the U.S. did the right thing by shutting up and allowing voters to make their own choices at the polls. I liked it when the Washington Post congratulated the Bush administration for staying out of the Peruvian election, calling it "just the right response" to clumsy attempts by Castro and Chavez to create an anti-American bloc of nations in our hemisphere. "The sight of Latin Americans rising up in defense of democratic values ... is inspiring," the Post commented, "and it requires nothing from Washington save discreet silence." Amen!

That's good advice (which I'm ignoring, by the way) and I hope we'll remain silent while Mexicans comment on their own elections. That's what the L.A. Times did last Tuesday by publishing a rather surprising op-ed piece by former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, a left-leaning politician who now teaches at New York University. "Calderon means continuity," he wrote. "That's probably why he won, and that is what Mexico needs." Castaneda endorsed Calderon's moderate economic policies, which are designed to control inflation, to reduce poverty and to make much-needed credit available to the lower middle classes while fighting endemic corruption without violating human rights.

Castaneda also noted that Lopez had surrounded himself with former government officials who had created Mexico's severe economic problems. "Voters decided that the last people they wanted to fix the mess were those who created it in the first place," he concluded, adding that Mexico must create new institutions to replace those that were in place when the country was a so-called one party "democracy."

By the way, the candidate of the former ruling party, the PRI, finished a distant third in last Sunday's presidential election.

All of this provides us with a glimmer of hope as we prepare to discuss illegal immigration and other serious economic and political issues with Mexico's new president later this year.

• Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat who served in Mexico, resides in Carson City.