Black Thursday '05: A Coup Begins Today in Mexico

In the hills outside of Mexico City, the temperature rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, heating the political pressure-cooker that, today, Thursday, April 7, may boil over beyond the city limits of the capital and even the national borders.

The world may learn today that the work of the Mexican revolution is unfinished. Eighty-six years ago this week Mexican revolutionary General Emiliano Zapata was assassinated in a State-plotted ambush, on April 10, 1919. Eleven years ago, also at this springtime of year, leading presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated on the campaign trail, in Tijuana: on March 23, 1994. What President Vicente Fox, together with his former adversaries of the once-monolithic PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for seven decades prior to Fox’s 2000 electoral victory), are attempting today is nothing less than a pre-emptive coup d’etat: a political assassination, dressed up in legal technicalities no more serious than a parking ticket, to remove Mexico’s leading presidential candidate from the 2006 contest.

At 9:30 a.m. (Central Time Zone) Mexico City Governor Andrés Manuel López Obrador will address a multitude in the Zocalo, the village square of this country of 100 million Mexicans, a crowd that as of 7:30 this morning included at least a million of them. From there he will go to the hall of the national Congress, in the neighborhood known as San Lázaro, and address the legislators, who will then debate and vote on whether to strip him of his political rights to run for president based on the thinnest of technicalities.

The rest of the country, awakening under this punishing heat wave, will watch the speech on television. Mexico’s mass media, which for a week has been a gaggle of “all Pope all the time” networks, last night pushed the death of Pope John Paul II – a pope that visibly loved Mexico and came here repeatedly - aside: John Paul is big news but today it is Andrés Manuel and his crucifixion at the hands of Pontius Fox and and the high priests of the PRI that spike the ratings, like the thermometer, into the red zone.

Read about the uncanny parallels between Martin Luther King's 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and today's earthshaking events emanating from Mexico City, via The Narcosphere...

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/4/7/93753/46058

(Surprisingly, for only the second time in this newspaper's five year history - the first being its rejection of the 2002 coup in Venezuela - Civil Society in the United States has adopted our own editorial position, reflected as editorials in yesterday's Washington Post, today's New York Times, and today's report from the Los Angeles Times, among others, quoted on our pages this morning.)

Keep checking The Narcosphere all day for updates:

http://narcosphere.narconews.com

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano Founder, Narco News

http://www.narconews.com

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