By the weekend Flores’s worst fears had been confirmed: final vote tallies showed Felipe Calderón of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) defeating López Obrador by about 244,000 votes in Mexico’s closest-ever presidential race. The ex-mayor vowed to challenge the result before a federal election tribunal; his infuriated supporters threatened to take to the streets. Their resistance could muddle the political picture for months, confusing not just Mexicans but outside observers who had looked to the ballot for a clear indication of which way Latin America was tilting–toward the leftist populism of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or the pro-market, pro-U.S. stance of Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe.
What Mexico’s electoral crisis makes clear is that the answer is neither. Instead many of the region’s key countries are splitting down the middle, as the gap between globalization’s winners and losers grows ever wider. In Mexico Calderón vowed to maintain the pro-business economic policies of outgoing incumbent Vicente Fox, and that message garnered overwhelming support among affluent voters and in the industrialized states of northern Mexico. “I want a job out of college, and Calderón’s the guy who’ll help make that happen,” says José Jesús Cervantes, an 18-year-old university student who cast his first ballot ever for the PAN nominee. López Obrador’s populist platform, by contrast, attracted the urban poor and helped him capture the country’s less-developed southern states. That neat geographical divide (see map) echoes the Red-Blue splits that have characterized Mexico’s neighbor to the north ever since its equally bitter 2000 election.
The echoes don’t stop there. In Bolivia, where Chávez acolyte Evo Morales won last December’s presidential vote by targeting slum dwellers and indigenous communities, four of the country’s more prosperous eastern provinces approved a ballot measure last week calling for greater political and economic autonomy from La Paz; five poorer provinces rejected the same measure. Peruvians divided sharply along class lines in last month’s runoff election, with the middle and upper classes boosting ex-president Alan García to victory over a former Army officer. A similar schism is apparent in Nicaragua’s presidential campaign, where Sandinista leader and former president Daniel Ortega is in a tight race against center-right candidate Eduardo Montealegre.
The divisions owe much to how unevenly the benefits of economic liberalization have been distributed. Even in a normally placid country like Costa Rica, the debate over the supposed benefits of free-trade agreements has polarized the electorate. Nobel Peace Prize winner and ex-president Oscar Arias nearly blew his shot at a second term last winter when a center-left rival repeatedly attacked a pending trade accord with the United States backed by Arias.
In Mexico, the benefits of NAFTA are indisputable, but mostly limited to certain classes and specific parts of the country. According to a 2004 United Nations study, literacy rates, life expectancy and educational opportunities in the town of Metlatónoc in the southern state of Guerrero are on a par with destitute villages in Sierra Leone. By contrast, the living standards of a ritzy Mexico City neighborhood like Polanco compare favorably with the poshest districts of Rome or Madrid. “There are the people without running water and basic services, and those who could afford flats in New York City,” notes Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. An estimated 90 percent of new foreign investment in the NAFTA era has been channeled to only four Mexican states.
The collapse of traditional political parties that once occupied the ideological center has deepened these divides. The rampant corruption of Venezuela’s two major parties set the stage for Hugo Chávez’s climb to power in the late 1990s, and as president he has charted the most left-wing course this side of Fidel Castro. In the process the country’s body politic has fractured along socioeconomic fault lines as shantytowns became Chavista bastions and Caracas suburbs morphed into antigovernment strongholds. The steady decline of Mexico’s long-ruling, centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has created a vacuum in the middle of the country’s political spectrum that has yet to be filled by either the PAN or López Obrador’s Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Part and parcel of this has been the rise of leaders who champion Latin America’s long-neglected indigenous peoples. The trailblazer was Morales, the onetime coca farmer who made history last year when he became the first Bolivian of predominantly Native American background to be elected president of the republic. In a society where citizens of Aymara and Quechua origin make up a majority, Morales has not been averse to playing the race card and railing against Bolivia’s largely white-skinned movers and shakers. Cashiered Army lieutenant colonel Ollanta Humala tried to duplicate the Bolivian’s feat in neighboring Peru, where his father and brother raised eyebrows with talk of an ethnically based nationalism that extolled the country’s bygone Indian civilizations.
Such talk has in turn stiffened opposition on the other side, among voters who may dislike the status quo but actively fear the alternative. “A lot of people who voted for García and Calderón didn’t do so because they are enthusiastic about continuity but because they were scared of [the alternative],” says Michael Shifter of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue policy-research group. Voters in El Salvador reached a similar conclusion two years ago when they rejected the anti-free trade platform of former Marxist guerrilla leader Schafik Handal and returned the right-wing National Republican Alliance Party to power.
To be sure, sustained and widespread economic growth papers over many of these problems. In countries that are doing relatively well–from Colombia to Chile, Argentina to Brazil–a political consensus has tended to emerge. In Brazil, whose presidential campaign officially kicked off last week, both President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the leading opposition candidate, former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, have promised to maintain fiscal discipline, keep inflation in check and reform the spendthrift Constitution. “What we see in Brazil and a lot of other Latin countries is a race to the political center,” says Alex Kazan, a Latin America expert at the New York-based investment bank Bear Stearns. “There [are] differences in style, nuance and rhetoric, but not in the realm of ideas or proposals.”
Even this hard-won consensus is not entirely secure. Latin America’s recent run of strong growth is expected to peter out next year as the U.S. economy heads south and sky-high commodity prices start to fall. “It’s not inconceivable that Argentina might begin to look a little differently within a year or so if the economy starts to suffer,” warns Shifter. Meanwhile, those leaders inheriting already bitterly divided nations face an uphill climb. Candidates like García and Calderón will take office without working majorities in their respective legislatures. If their economic programs fail to create jobs and spread wealth more evenly–or if they cannot even implement those programs–the red-hot anger of their countries’ have-nots could easily spill into the streets. When Calderón’s predecessor Vicente Fox leaves office later this year the fact that he completed his term–the first non-PRI presidency in 71 years–will rank as one of his signal achievements. Calderón had better hope that just getting into office is not one of his.
