Not The News: Counting crows

Andrés Manuel López Obrador attracted "hundreds of thousands" to the capital's Zócalo Sunday to mark the first anniversary of the disputed 2006 presidential election.

Or perhaps he only attracted "more than 100,000." Or maybe just "80,000." Or was it "tens of thousands"?

Depends on who's counting. The estimates above are from the Associated Press, La Jornada, New York Times and Reuters, respectively.

Which is right? I've covered dozens of these things, and my best conclusion is that nobody has ever had the slightest idea how many people are there.

I recognize three crowd sizes. A rally either a) fills the Zócalo, b) doesn't fill the Zócalo, or c) overfills the Zócalo, flooding the side streets.

Sometimes, though, the figures do tell you something. I'm thinking of the anti-desafuero event in 2005. Federal District (i.e. PRD) cops put the total at 1.3 million. The feds (i.e. PAN) officially said something like 130,000.

Other than the futility of counting, what did Sunday's event reveal?

It revealed that López Obrador wants to "make sure voters don't forget the election" (Chicago Tribune). It revealed that he is seeking to "reinvigorate his flagging anti-establishment movement" (New York Times). Or it revealed that he is trying "to light (a) fire under (his) movement" (AP).

Those could be three ways of saying the same thing. But Reuters, one of the more consistently AMLO-phobic foreign news services during the campaign, had a different take.

Under the headline "A year after defeat, Mexican leftist fades away," Reuters interprets the rally as indicating that AMLO was "reduced to political artifact Sunday." We know this, the Reuters writer tells us, because "ordinary Mexicans say the leftist former indigenous rights activist has dropped off the political map."

That would come as a surprise to the "one quarter of the population" from which "his movement draws support" (AP). But the press — including the Mexican press — pays attention to celebrity, not disaffected human beings, and especally not disaffected human beings who apparently are not "ordinary."

As news judgment has it, AMLO's no longer hot. President Calderón, on the other hand, has a 65 percent approval rating. Pretty much all the English-language papers pointed out that fab fact as part of their take on Sunday's story as an AMLO-vs-Calderón popularity contest.

None mentioned that a 65 percent approval rating for a Mexican president doesn't mean much. If memory serves, a typical approval rating used to be 100 percent.

Even Vicente Fox, a failed president if there ever was one, consistently polled 65 percent or higher — even during the last pathetic twitches of his sexenio last August.

And come to think of it, how many people came to Calderón's celebration Sunday of his big victory’s first birthday? Here all agree on the attendance figure — zero. Neither the president nor the PAN dared hold one.

But if the story from Sunday really is AMLO's reduction in rank to something less than a deuteragonist, as most of the press chose to play it, then it becomes interesting that in a non-national-election year a non-candidate who holds no office not of his own invention can fill the main square of the capital. Not bad for a has-been.

Could Al Gore have attracted tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) to any rally a year after his 2000 election defeat? He'd have been grateful if Tipper showed up, even though he had a stronger case than López Obrador — or at least a more widely accepted one — for having been robbed of the presidency.

AMLO isn't in the headlines because he isn't the president, no matter what he calls himself. He can't use the army to boost his ratings, or rush through pre-ordained pension legislation before the affected workers know what's going on.

You can call him an artifact. You can be turned off by his tactics. You can join a lot of PRD supporters who'd like to see the party take a different approach. But the part of Mexico that he represents — or used to represent, if you prefer — isn't going away.

The real story Sunday was about them, not him. Problem is, unless they block a street somewhere, they're under-covered news.