Lopez Obrador in “bar fight”
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Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, the candidate of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) in the controversial July 2006 presidential election, has gotten into a verbal spat with his party’s most prominent woman. And he’s come out of it looking quite bad.
Lopez Obrador, you may remember, proclaimed himself Mexico’s ‘legitimate president’ after claiming conservative Felipe Calderon stole the election from him (a charge believed by not a few members of Mexico’s intellectual elite). Ever since, Lopez Obrador has urged his followers not to cooperate with Calderon’s government. Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, for example, has refused to meet Calderon publicly, though in practice the city and federal governments cooperate daily.
PRD legislator Ruth Zavaleta was elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, last year. Like Nancy Pelosi in the U.S., the congressional leader routinely meets representatives of the executive branch. On Monday, she talked with Calderon’s new interior minister, Juan Camilo Mouriño, the subject of a recent profile in The Times.
Lopez Obrador’s reaction to Zavaleta’s meeting with the ‘enemy’ was, depending on your point of view, colorful or crude. Interior Minister Mouriño, Lopez Obrador said, ‘likes to grab the leg of anyone who will let him, politically speaking.’
Zavaleta took umbrage at Lopez Obrador’s thinly veiled machista remarks: ‘I’m perplexed by these comments from a politician who I thought could one day make the leap to become a statesman: He’s lowering himself to the level of a man looking for a fight in a bar.’
-- Hector Tobar in Mexico City
