During a break from the World Cup, our neighbors are having an election!

Well, Brazil is out of the World Cup. The deserved to lose to the French. France just played better. Brazil looked tired and the coach took too long to make substitutions. Oh, well. At least Portugal is still in it. I own one of their jerserys, too, and their coach is Brazilian.

In the meantime, we don't have any games until the 4th, but tomorrow, Sunday, the 2nd, we have another real contest going on south of the border--the Mexican Presidential Election. So what? Well, with all the immigration talk here in el Norte, we really should be paying attention. Not because I think the new president-elect is going to be a big player in forming our immigration legislation, but because the major reason why
so many Mexicans come north is because their own economy is not performing well enough to provide for population. If you follow the logic so far, then it should matter to us what goes on within in the borders of our neighbor, Mexico.

Here's a quick primer. There are three main candidates, but one, Roberto Madrazo of the PRI (the Party that ruled Mexico in a near dictatorship for most of the 20th century) has been
running a pretty distant third for quite some time. He is playing himself up as the "moderate choice". The two principal contenders are Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador, of a center-left party, the PRD, and Felipe Calderon, of the PAN, a center-right party, of which the current Mexican President, Vicente Fox, also
belongs.

As you can imagine, Calderon's message is one of consistency. Don't change horses mid-stream. He is the choice of most of the upper-middle class and wealthier Mexicans. Meanwhile, Obrador is running on a message of more assistance to the
poor and increased job opportunities. Many of the same Mexicans who support Calderon, are afraid that Obrador will borrow a page from Chavez's (Venezuela) or Morales' (Bolivia) playbooks and assume a dictator-like approach to redistributing wealth in the country. Most political scientists I have read
don't seem to think that Obrador is that radical, but some worry his economic plans don't add up--nothing new in the realm of political promises and economic plans. Obrador himself has listed Franklin Roosevelt as one of his influences--remember the New Deal?

Whatever happens tomorrow, at least ALL the major candidates share one thing in common. They think it is a shame that they are losing so many of their hard-working, entrepreneurial citizens to the United States. So, hopefully, whoever wins, the
new President of Mexico will try to implement an economic policy that will better provide for its growing population.

Of course, there are lots of underlying secondary story lines. This has been a particularly "dirty" campaign with ugly political ads running back and forth. Plus, political analysts are
watching to see if Mexico ends up in the growing column of the new Latin American Left--and if that happens will it go the way of Venezuela or of Chile.

Stay tuned and stay tuned in--we're neighbors afterall.