"We lick no one's boots' says Andres Lopez Obrador,Mayor of Mexico City

[billbuckhead]

We lick no one’s boots’ says
Andres Manuel López Obrador
Mayor of Mexico City
By Nick Swift, Deputy Editor


Like the sauce by the name of which most North Americans, at least, will know the part of Mexico that is his home (Tabasco), there is one thing no one could ever say about Andres Manual Lopez Obrador, Mayor of Mexico City: and that, of course, is that he is insipid.

Mayor Obrador was runner up in the 2004 World Mayor contest

Showing himself more committed to his citizens’ biological clocks than to the mechanical ones, he stood against the imposition of Daylight Savings Time, declaring that the ability to change the hour was beyond the power of President Vicente Fox; he instituted a free circus with exotic animals in front of the city’s main cathedral; when a suspected thief was killed by a raging mob just outside the city, he reflected that their action was the real Mexico expressing itself, and that village traditions should not be interfered with; when the city was plagued by bank robberies, he criticized the banks for having inadequate security. Most recently, he has found the honesty that has always been his watchword assailed, and isolation seems to have begun to be added to his portrait like a new colour.

University educated in political science, Mr. Obrador – or AMLO, as he is sometimes called – supported native Tabascans through the work of an institute he oversaw, and ?The good of all, but most of all, of the poor?, has been his credo ever since. It was he who, even before becoming the third elected Mayor of Mexico, transformed the lot of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which was created in 1989 after the expulsion from the ranks of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had held power for seven decades and under which the office of mayor of the capital had always been an appointment, of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. (Cárdenas had attempted to further democratic trends, and the presidential election he lost in 1988 was rigged. He became the first elected Mayor of Mexico in 1997.) During the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Mr. Obrador exercised what has been widely acknowledged as his stellar organizing abilities, and nurtured and consolidated strong support for the PRD in Tabasco, and garnered 40 per cent of the votes in the 1994 race for governor, even when (it has since been revealed) his opponent spent some 60 times the total allowed by law on his campaign.

He created the ‘Brigades of the Sun’, after the PRD party’s symbol of the Aztec sun, to knock on doors and offset the PRI’s teams, which offered gratuities in exchange for votes, with the thought that it is more important for the future to eliminate corruption. One result was that AMLO was elected PRD president by an overwhelming majority in 1996.

<http://www.citymayors.com/mayors/mexico_mayor.html>

They're trying to put this guy in jail now, so he can't upset Vincente Fox's Coca-Cola cart.