George Bush, The Worst Mexican President Ever

George Bush, The Worst Mexican President Ever: This comes to us from Rafael Barajas (El Fisgón), the prizewinning political cartoonist for La Jornada, Mexico's premier intellectual newspaper.

Mexican political culture has very defined features and the President of the United States has absorbed them all: The classical Mexican political boss usually inherits his power from his father. The typical Mexican cacique has a love for guns as well as an inclination toward violence and cruelty; he despises legality and intellectual activity, has a personal history of alcoholism and dissipation, lies systematically, and declares himself a faithful servant of God. (Did we miss anything?)

According to Mexican tradition, politicians always reach their positions thanks to a fraudulent electoral process and then surround themselves with a clique which uses its power to conduct 'business' on a staggering scale while in office. The Florida electoral thievery and Halliburton's Iraq contract are classic examples of Mexican corruption.

Based on a complex pyramid of political bosses, a totalitarian presidential regime flourished in Mexico. It was organized around a political party whose name remains a monument to paradox: the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). Names aside, the PRI model was so efficient (for the PRI, of course) that the party was able to hold power for more than seventy years. The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa called it 'the perfect dictatorship.'

This dictatorship was a mark of shame for all Mexicans. Only Mexico's political cartoonists were able to benefit from it. The profuse manifestations of cynicism and obsequiousness it produced were a delight for us.

Barajas continues on an even darker note:

The only visible advantage Mexican politicians ever offered the rest of us was their limited ability to damage the world. George Bush has overcome this obstacle. After all, he has access to the sort of technology and to an arsenal that Mexico's local tyrants could only dream of. When he says he's blessed, it's because we're damned.

Under the nuclear umbrella of his free-trade empire and incipient world government, his clique of petty political bosses can dictate the economic agendas of dozens of third-world countries. In recent years, the priorities of the Mexican economy have been defined by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Wall Street, and Washington; they establish our oil quota, the levels of our external debt payments, and the minimum wages we can offer. Vincente Fox acts as what he's always been: a Coca Cola CEO, a multinational middleman, while the true president of Mexico is George Bush, that cacique of caciques.

According to Mexican tradition, politicians are judged depending on how they take care of their people and how they make them prosper… and by such standards, George Bush is the worst Mexican President ever.