And then came the election. Final pre-election polls showed my coalition in the lead or tied with Mr. Calderón’s National Action Party. I believe that on election day there was direct manipulation of votes and tally sheets. Irregularities were apparent in tens of thousands of tally sheets. Without a crystal-clear recount, Mexico will have a president who lacks the moral authority to govern.

Public opinion backs this diagnosis. Polls show that at least a third of Mexican voters believe the election was fraudulent and nearly half support a full recount. ~Manuel Lopez Obrador, The New York Times

Now, think back a couple years to a scene of massed protesters demanding a recount in an allegedly fraudulent election in which the poor, longsuffering forces of Yushchenko were disenfranchised and denied victory.  The West was outraged.  Fraud in a democratic election!  We must support democracy in Ukraine against an oppressive and corrupt oligarchy! 

Of course, when it comes to taking seriously complaints of fraud in Mexico, which is ruled by none other than a corrupt and some might say rather oppressive oligarchy, the same governments who made the cause of the ridiculous, criminal Yushchenko their own have nothing much to say.  It probably doesn’t hurt that PAN rule suits Western interests perfectly or that Obrador’s left-wing populism horrifies members of the “McCain-Lieberman Party” up here; it probably doesn’t hurt that the concern for the integrity of Ukrainian democracy was a sham or that Yushchenko’s “revolution” was a none too subtle U.S.-backed effort to topple a pro-Russian government in ex-Soviet space.  However, if a large part of the Mexican population believes the election to be illegitimate, that creates a real danger of political instability on our southern border that is a lot more important than whether a criminal lush gets to be president in Kiev.  If Obrador has genuinely lost, as most outside observers have already assumed (indeed, who has been paying any attention to Mexico in the last month?)and as I would be happy to see, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have that verified beyond any reasonable doubt to prevent Mexico from descending into political unrest that will only aggravate the already significant flow of immigrants into the United States while also worsening conditions in Mexico.