Having worked in the Mexican presidential election of 2000, I find many amateur politicos here in LA coming up to me and telling me with total conviction who is going to win this weekend. My wife’s and my friend, Ana Maria Salazar, blogs on that phenomenon from her point of view as an analyst, talk […]

Michael Shifter opines in the LA Times about the ridiculousness of using just a two-color palette (left and right) to paint a portrait of the new leadership in Latin America:
Despite these labels, viewing Latin America through a strictly “left-right” lens doesn’t make sense today. It is too simplistic, and it obscures the region’s highly differentiated […]

El Universal reports that Republican PR consultant Rob Allyn has been retained by President Vicente Fox to do something about the Republican immigrant-bashing taking place north of the border:
Fox cannot seek re-election next year, and his legacy may rest in part on his pledges to secure an agreement with the United States to grant legal […]

No, Madrazo isn’t making a sudden move to the PAN or the New Alliance. But he has gone from Democrat to Republican in his choice of American political consultants.
In 1999, I was working for Stan Greenberg and James Carville as we helped Francisco Labastida beat Madrazo, an old PRIsta of the worst kind, in […]

Catherine Bremer of Reuters reports on the new Mexican expatriate voting plan:
A drive to get millions of Mexican immigrants in the United States to vote in the 2006 presidential election has fallen flat so far, with just 2,213 registered to vote, electoral officials said on Thursday.
…
Mexico’s electoral watchdog, IFE, says it hopes to see more […]

Putting AMLO in the same boat as Chavez strikes me as a bit of a stretch…AMLO may be counting on the votes of the very poor to get him the presidency, but he’s not being much more of a firebrand populist in the Mexican context than John Edwards is is in the American context.