Fox May Offer a Pardon in Mayor’s Case

An aide to President Vicente Fox indicated Thursday that Fox might be willing to pardon Mexico City’s popular mayor for an infraction that could keep him from running for president next year, but the mayor said he would not accept such a pardon.

Political observers said a move by Fox to pardon Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador could provide a way out of a political firestorm that is likely to hurt the mayor’s opponents more than the mayor.

A Fox spokesman said Thursday that the president would consider pardoning Lopez Obrador if he was convicted of ignoring a 2001 court order, a relatively innocuous charge.

The mayor leads in presidential polls, but a conviction would eliminate him from the 2006 race.

On April 7, Congress’ Chamber of Deputies voted to strip Lopez Obrador, of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, of his immunity from prosecution, a process called desafuero.

Members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN, said their vote was to uphold Mexican rule of law, but polls show that a majority of Mexicans viewed it as an old-style political move to eliminate a rival.

The move has improved Lopez Obrador’s standing with voters. “No publicity campaign could have rendered better results to the mayor than the desafuero,” columnist Jorge Fernandez Menendez wrote.

What is certain, said Pamela Starr, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute here, is that the entire nation seems focused on the mayor’s legal status.

“No one is doing anything in the country other than battling over Lopez Obrador. Everyone is completely focused on this issue,” she said.

“At this point everyone is looking for a way out,” said Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, Mexico Project director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It’s gotten out of hand.”

The international reaction to the vote has also been substantially negative, with Fox, a strong proponent of the measure, getting the brunt of the criticism for backing what many saw as an antidemocratic maneuver. The Fox spokesman, Agustin Gutierrez Canet, said the president was aware of the adverse perceptions.

The federal attorney general is expected to bring the case of felony abuse of authority against Lopez Obrador before a federal judge by Wednesday, and the jurist has 10 days to decide if there is basis for a trial. The mayor is accused of ignoring a court order to halt a road project over disputed land.

Lopez Obrador, who officially announced his presidential bid last week, has promised to wage his campaign from behind bars if he is arrested.

Word of a possible presidential pardon, first reported in the Washington Post, fueled an intense spate of rumors that some sort of resolution was imminent. But legal scholars and even Lopez Obrador moved to downplay such a pardon.

In remarks Thursday to reporters, Lopez Obrador said he would refuse to accept a pardon if convicted because it would mean accepting guilt in the case, something he has promised never to do. “I committed no crime, I’m not guilty,” he said.

Even if he did accept it, a pardon could come too late for the mayor to enter the presidential race, said Lorenzo Cordova, a constitutional law expert at National Autonomous University. The pardon would come at the end of the judicial process, which lasts a year on average. That would be long after the Jan. 15 deadline for candidates to file for the election. Mexican law states that no candidate with an unresolved penal charge can run for office.

The situation was further confused Thursday by conflicting messages from Fox’s office. Hours after spokesman Gutierrez said Fox would consider a pardon and other options, Gutierrez’s boss, Ruben Aguilar, issued a news release saying the spokesman “was not authorized to emit information about the official position” of the president.

At the same time, Aguilar told Associated Press that he did not deny Gutierrez’s statement and that Fox had no intention of being “an obstacle” to Lopez Obrador.

PAN members Thursday defended their support of the desafuero. Juan Molinar Horcasitas, a PAN deputy, said Lopez Obrador brought the case on himself by ignoring four warnings from a judge not to continue with the road project.

He said he voted knowing that there could be an adverse public reaction.

“People say we should have considered the political consequences of the vote. The Mexican Constitution says nothing about political consequences. It says the chamber should vote according to the legal basis,” Molinar Horcasitas said. “And it can’t be good for a public officer to be exempted from rule of law for political reasons.”

But Starr and others said the vote had all the appearances of a political maneuver. Adding to such suspicions was the fact that many PRI members who had been leaning against the measure changed their minds in the weeks before the vote.

Rumors circulated, Starr said, that business organizations that feared Lopez Obrador’s populist politics leaned heavily on PRI party President Roberto Madrazo to urge his delegation to approve the desafuero.

Madrazo, the likely PRI candidate for president next year, has maintained that his deputies voted their consciences.

In any case, the vote has worked against the two parties who promoted it, said Peschard-Sverdrup, adding that the mayor seemed to have succeeded in framing the controversy as a debate over “political persecution versus legality, and so far Lopez Obrador seems to be winning.”

“Very few people understand and appreciate the legal aspects of the case, especially when average Mexicans’ experience of the legal system is so negative,” Peschard-Sverdrup said.