Of course. What choice does he have? (sorry, not going to follow along the tin foil crowd and see assassination or coups or what have you).
Yes…I certainly don’t see the US interfering. If they DID it would be sort of like the French endorsing Kerry, yes? Trust me…it would be a bad thing unless you actually wanted Obrador to win.
Depends on how you mean this. If you mean ‘allowed’ as in will the US ‘allow’ him to take office, then thats kind of offensive to be honest. If ‘allowed’ is how long the Mexican people will ‘allow’ him to stay…depends on the level of corruption (well, the speed that corruption becomes pervasive…there WILL be corruption, its Mexico after all)…and it depends on which families benifit from the new administration and which don’t. Its all about who gets perks from the new administration and who doesn’t…more so than how corrupt the administration is.
I disagree. Its more along the lines of ‘same old shit, different day’. It will be the same story as every other administration in Mexico…great promiss of helping the people to start, then fading expectation…then same ole same ole. To my few relatives still in Mexico it won’t mean a god damned thing one way or the other…my family isn’t one of THE families who this kind of thing makes a difference too. Thats kind of why most of us don’t live in Mexico anymore.
Yeah, like the crew that are in charge right now are wonderful. A recent Pew survey showed that roughly HALF of all adult Mexicans would like to move to the US. HALF! Time to throw the trash out, I say. I don’t know much about Obrador, but the present government isn’t getting the job done.
But would a change of government be enough to change that? Those people don’t want to leave their country because they hate their government, they want to leave because they’re poor, with no perceptible hope of climbing out of poverty so long as they remain south of the Rio Grande. But I think that under an Obrador-PRD government, even under a best-case scenario, with vigorous measures being taken both to grow the economy and to redress wealth inequality, and those measures actually working out as intended, most Mexicans would still remain desperately poor for years to come.
Given that America is notorious for that sort of thing, I fail to see why it qualifies as “tin foil hattery”. Frankly, when someone starts using the “tin foil hat” phrase, I tend to see that as a means of dodging the issue.
The fact that’s it’s counterproductive has never stopped Bush before. He certainly seems to have helped the conservatives in Iran, for example.
My opionion : Bush is probably too focused on Iraq to do anything drastic,but if he decides it would profit him I doubt there is any limit to what he would do. If we had the troops free, I find it perfectly imaginable that he would invade Mexico to “liberate” it; since he doesn’t have the troops, a sponsored coup or assassination would be more likely.
I don’t think it would be all that smart from a strategic standpoint to declare war on a country that has something like 10 million of its citizens already inside your borders. Who wants insurgents in Southern California?
Better still you should ask, who would be really excited at a chance to deport all those (non-naturalized) Mexicans as enemy aliens?
Not Bush, I admit. He’s the one who instituted a “guest-worker” program. Too many of Bush’s friends employ people who employ people who employ Mexicans, and get them cheap precisely because they’re not U.S. citizens. (Plus they’re willing to take jobs not even blacks will do :rolleyes: , but I digress.) But Bush also has a broad mass of supporters who feel very, very differently about the whole matter, and he has to throw them a bone occasionally.
Actually, I imagine the LAPD would probably do pretty well at quelling an insurgency. If they’re given free reign, that is.
BrainGlutton:
Bush, and the Republican Party in general, have been courting the Hispanic vote for years. It has hardly anything to do with the cheap labor, it’s more an attempt to pander to the Latinos themselves.
Dodging WHAT issue exactly? The wild speculation that the US is going to cause a coup, assassination or perhaps invade Mexico?? Yeah, you are right…I’m just dodging the issue here. :dubious:
The fact that the US is notorious for doing such things in the past doesn’t wash too well either…they were kind of in the past. Sorry, I don’t think Iraq constitutes good evidence that the US is still the same as it was in the 60’s…YMMV on that. France and Britain (among a host of other nations) are notorious for doing some rather foul things as well but I don’t expect either to do such things irrationally today either…and either a coup attempt, assassination or direct military intervention in Mexico would be completely pointless and irrational today. It really doesn’t matter WHO is president in Mexico…nothing substantial will change. Only folks who don’t have a clue how Mexican politics REALLY work and who have a leftist bent are getting a hard on that Obrador is going to be the next president (yeah, I’m pretty sure he will be too)…everyone else is yawning and shrugging.
Iran is not as black and white as you are simplistically making it out to be. Being ‘counterproductive’ about Iran is a matter of opinion on what the best course is in other words…and being productive doesn’t seem to be getting the vaunted Europeans anywhere either btw.
In Mexico however there are no such issues. What exactly would be gained and what is being risked exactly by having Obrador…or Mickey Mouse for that matter…as president? Where is the threat? What are the dire ramifications? Sorry, I think that this whole excursive is one of left wing hysteria over the perceived evils of Bush, along with residual paranoia over the supposed viciousness of the US.
Tell you what…revive this thread in a few years if the US does anything at all and I will gladly eat my words on this.
It’s not that wild, but mostly I was just making a general comment; I’ve seen that phrase ( “tin foil hat” ) used too often to shut down a debate without actually argueing one side.
I was thinking more of the alleged Bush/CIA involvement with the attempted coup in Venezuela, not to mention Iran/Contra and our involvment in El Salvador. I see no evidence America has changed it’s stripes.
There was no threat from Iraq; that didn’t stop Bush. I long ago stopped expecting rational behavior from him. America has often regarded left wing governments as a “risk” worth invading or starting a coup over.
Fair enough…I’ve seen this before too. Personally I DO think this is pretty wild speculation where an attempt is made to conflate Bush’s behavior (through simplification of the issues) along with past US activity (same) and then extrapolate that to get the answer that was desired in the first place…that the US would prevent Obrador from being president by hook or by crook. As I said, YMMV…I’m not seeing it.
Alleged…I’ve seen no hard evidence that this is fact. Even if it is, Venezuela’s relationship with the US is pretty different than Mexico’s.
As to the other, that was still during the cold war, and Reagan was a cold warrior through and through. I see no indication that Bush is a cold warrior or that he still thinks the cold war is going on. I don’t even see Bush as a rabid anti-communist. I think Bush is focused on other fish and could give a shit about communism (or socialism in this case) or its spread. Most of the cold warrior types who persist that communism is still a threat instead of the vast failure it is sound like loons today.
Again, you are painting with a simplistic brush. No, Iraq wasn’t a direct threat to the US…but there were a lot of other factors that went into that invasion…factors that don’t exist in Mexico. I also disagree that the administration isn’t rational…they might not be doing what YOU (or even I sometimes) think is rational, but that doesn’t mean that THEY don’t think its rational. Iraq is a good case in point. Mexico though is another kettle of fish…and I don’t see how it would be rational even to Bush et al’s mind set to dick with them. Perhaps if someone could come up with a plausable reasons that doesn’t smack of cold war thinking as to why Bush would care enough to stick in the US’s oar we could debate that.
Sure it was…during the cold war. But you know, times have kind of moved on since then. The neo-cons, who are supposedly pulling Bush’s puppet strings, don’t give a shit about communism or the old cold war attituded. They KNOW they won that fight and have moved on to other things. I’d say most of them would be grimly ammused that Mexico might go further socialist or even communist in the smug expectation that it, too, would eventually fall apart and come back to the true faith.
I shouldn’t have said ‘60’s’ (especially since it started before then anyway)…I should have said ‘cold war’. All of those things happened during the cold war when communism was definitely considered a threat, and when the old cold warrior types like Reagan were focused on combatting it wherever they could, directly or by proxy. As I said above…times have changed since then, and whatever else the neo-cons might be, they are certainly not cold warriors.
The mere fact that likely, or unlikely, interferance by the US in the internal affairs of another nation, a major trading partner, is being discussed at all or as having even a remote possibility of happening shows just how the US is regarded both in the US itself and overseas.
It isn’t surprising, given the number of South American nations that have been subject to US ‘assistance’ in their internal affairs.
No. That recent poll showed that the “I want to be in America” sentiment cuts across all bounderis of race/ethnicity/socioeconomic class. It’s not just the poor who want to come here, but the rich, too.
With its oil wealth and productive farmland in the South, there’s no reason Mexico couldn’t be a prosperous Second World country. I suspect the problem is rooted in the agrarian tradition of having lots of kids as your social safety net, not helped at all by the Catholic teachings wrt to birth control. I suspect Mexico’s problems are cultural as well as governmental, and the desire of so many Mexicans of all classes means they’ve heard from people working here that our culture works a lot better than their does. The optimal solution would be for American culture to be exported to Mexico by all our “guest workers.”
Capitalism in S. & C. America is more often than not Crony Capitalism. That’s a sure recipe for 3rd world status-- a few really, really, rich people and lots of poor, without a significant middle class. Chile, which has embraced “regular ol’ Capitalsm” more than any S.A. country has done quite well.
Although Chileans currently have a “Socialist” president, I don’t see that he is actually persuing socialist policies. Rather, he seems more like a European Social Democrat who wants to add more regualtion and a better safety net. Still, the economy is undeniably strongly free market, and remains one of the bright spots in Latin America.
Nonsense. Panama had not the least thing to do with fighting Communism. Neither did Haiti, the latest occurence of which occurred on this president’s watch. This president also fiddled in Venezuela. They may not be cold warriors, but neither are they averse to overthrowing other country’s governments. See also Afghanistan and Iraq. Times have changed; the willingness of the United States to involve itself in the business of regime change in other countries has not.
There seems to be an unstated assumption that the U.S. should not meddle in Mexican politics - I wonder if anyone would care to justify this assumption.
Only if Obrador is as bad as his critics claim. The Second World is the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.