Monday

The next page in the ongoing and escalating saga of the Mexican Federal Election will be turned tomorrow: the supposedly neutral federal judiciary in charge of the official decision-making will probably announce its will tomorrow.* They legally have until Wednesday, but this will be their last session to decide what to do about whatever protests have been formally brought forth, and since they have rejected outright most complaints so far, it is generally assumed that they will announce Felipe Calderón as the president-elect one day early. This will probably just raise the pitch of protests on the streets in México City, and fuel the fires of opposition candidate AMLO's contention that México should have an alternate government that he, of course, should run. This can in no way end well at this point. Eventually, federal troops will have to put this movement down in the name of common interest and justifiable peacekeeping, and that will hearken back to many unhealed instances of totalitarian rebuke that have played out in this city throughout México's sordid political history. But in México City, business leaders are struggling under the strangling effect of this protest, holding a complicit city government and AMLO's party, the PRD, responsible for 369 million US dollars in revenue loss over the last two months. If this was 1850, we'd have a scary revolution on our hands, even if the military was backing the protest now; but as it is, in this modern world, this working man's movement has no hope against the tanks and armored legions of any real pressure from the Fed to remove them. And yet they are not responding to any saber-rattling, either. I am afraid that it will get pretty ugly from here till the swearing-in on December first. [Cavin]