Your reprint June 19 of The Washington Post’s editorial criticizing Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador was incredibly irresponsible and ahistorical.

There is not much debate anymore that the 2012 Mexican presidential election was marred by massive irregularities, and the evidence is reasonable that the election was, in fact, stolen from López Obrador. So to write that “He disparages the country’s democratic institutions, saying ‘we live in a fake republic’ and alleging, without evidence, a plot to rig the election” is a juvenile attempt to make him look like Donald Trump.

The Post also writes, “If Mexicans choose López Obrador, they will be, like the voters who backed Trump, blowing up the status quo without a reliable sense of what will replace it. The result is likely to be more trouble on both sides of the border.”

This is also an absurd comparison. Not only did López Obrador already run in (and possibly win) the last election, he was mayor of Mexico City, where 16 percent of the country’s population lives. He left office with incredibly high poll numbers (84 percent, according to at least one source).

What kind of president he would make remains to be seen. But this editorial uses the typical language of U.S. powers looking to de-legitimize Latin American governments, while assuming that the voters of those countries don’t know as much about their own welfare as the editorial board of The Washington Post does.

Dan Kolbert

Portland

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