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Debate Slow to Begin in Mexican Congress

Submitted April 7, 2005 - 2:24 pm by Al Giordano
For three hours - since 10:15 a.m. - the Mexican House of Representatives has been slouching toward debate on the proposed "desafuero" against Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his right to run for president in 2006.

The day has so far been occupied by the reading of more than 150 pages of legaloide "case summaries" surrounding the dispute over a 20-meter-wide tract of land in Mexico City upon which a hospital access road was constructed - this, the pretext for the political assassination that everybody believes is already a done deal before today ends.

Rep. Antonio Morales de la Peña (of Vicente Fox's PAN party) spent more than 50 minutes going on and on and on reading from the case file with all level of minutia about topography, property borders, court motions, city proceedings, full of legalistic terms not used by most humans. His eyes cast down, the 30-something milk-fed veal calf of the PAN political machine projected that look of a man that knows, deep inside, that he is doing something dirty, something very, very wrong. It is the price he pays for his political ambitions: to carry the water of dictatorship: to be a political hit man... a hangman... a wound-up mechanical clone... in a blue suit.

No wonder a recent poll cited by Televisa showed that 96 percent of the Mexican people do not believe that Congress is a "legitimate" body to decide who can run for president. (The Mexican courts did not fare much better: 72 percent of the public thinks they, too, are illegitimate.)

He was followed by equally tepid readings from Rep. Marcos Morales Torres, of López Obrador's PRD party, offering the minority report against the desafuero (one of four legislators on the committee that sent the motion to the full house - Rep. Horacio Duarte Olivares - dissented from the two PRI members and one PAN member who voted in favor of the proposal).

Now the PAN's Rep. Graciela Larias Rivas is reading aloud still more pages in bureaucratspeak.

Meanwhile, a nation, and your correspondent, await for the real debate to begin at some point this afternoon.

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