Exciting story. Vincente Fox and company have jailed the shoo-in leftist candidate Manuel Obrador for a trivial matter (building an access road to a hospital despite a court order not to) — a transparently political move to knock him out of impending elections.
That’s basic slimeball politics, not news. However, the cool part is that Obrador seems to be preparing to lead a campaign of Martin Luther King Jr-style nonviolent civil disobedience in response.
That’s exciting. This could be a big deal. It also guarantees that this will be almost completely off the U.S. media’s radar, unfortunately. (Michael Nagler‘s The Search for a Non-Violent Future gives many examples of significant and effective nonviolent action which made no impression on the consciousness of America, including the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, which was almost entirely the result of coordinated, well-planned nonviolent protests.)
Nonviolence has never been tried in Mexico before. I’ll be interested to see how it goes.
Via Puddingbowl blogmarks.
This is the first good political news in about five years…