A Mexican Take on the Primary Race

[AlphaCentauri]

Voters receive instructions at a polling station set for the Democrats primary in Ajijic, northwestern Mexico, Tuesday, February 5, 2008.


"Leave Obama alone!" grunts the suited man, as Hillary Clinton is shown mocking her rival on the TV in this smoky bar. "Let her talk, she's telling the truth," his companion retorts through a bottle of beer. "Obama doesn't know what he is doing. Hillary's got the experience for the top job."

Such a conversation might be commonplace in bars from Houston to Cleveland as the U.S. warms up for decisive Democratic primaries in Ohio and Texas. But this one is being conducted in Spanish, hundreds of miles south of the Rio Grande. U.S. elections grab attention around the world in ways that no other foreign election does, because the outcome of the race to lead the last economic and military superpower could have consequences everywhere.

The connection is even more pronounced in Mexico, where the government estimates that fully half of the population has family in the United States. And many of the issues being debated by the candidates — immigration, the North American Free Trade Agreement and a war in Iraq that Mexico was asked to support — have long been concerns of the Mexican public.

In 1996, a Mexican activist-wrestler who calls himself Superbarrio Gomez even declared himself a "candidate" for U.S. president, and held mock campaign rallies on both sides of the border. Wearing a superhero cape and wrestler outfit, Superbarrio promised to abolish the Border Patrol and Drug Enforcement Agency, "to deal a blow to international drug trafficking."

But this year, Mexicans are more interested in what the American candidates are saying. The war of words between Obama and Clinton has been plastered across the front pages of Mexican newspapers and aired in prime time TV news shows. Many Mexicans are impressed that a woman or a black man could lead their powerful northern neighbor, a possibility that makes them reflect on the social hierarchies in their own country. Mexico has never had a woman president and no Mexican of pure Indian roots has headed the nation in more than a century. "When a black man arrives to be President of the United States, and even more when the child of black and white — a mulatto — it will be like the first Christian emperor of the pagan Roman Empire," wrote columnist Paz Flores in the Mexican newspaper El Norte. "It will be the beginning of the end and the start of something new."

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1718520,00.html