¿Consummatum est? is penned by Octavio Rodriguez Araujo, about whom highwayscribery confesses to know little other than that his commentary on Mexican society and politics get a fair degree of play.

Published in Mexico City’s lefty organ, “La Jornada,” the piece is conveyed here in an effort to understand the mind of those in the camp of Andrès Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), whose candidacy was snuffed out by a special court ruling that confirmed the presidency for Felipe Calderon.

AMLO has said that this would not end here, threatened to construct a parallel government, and make life generally miserable for the winners of an election he says was stolen.

Here is something like what those who have camped out in the streets for AMLO in the lead-up to the court ruling feel:

¿Consummatum est? In the Spanish world is simply, “all is lost,” he notes, “the employment of these words has always been to express disaster and great pain...

“And while the pain and disaster are present, as pictures of those who believed in the institutions crying will attest, but I think all is not over. I think that everything begins here with the clumsy resolution by the court in favor of Calderon.

“I say clumsy because its very explanations carried the contradiction of its conclusions...After saying that President Fox had placed the election’s legitimacy in peril, that business groups had influenced the electoral process, that there were irregularities in voting, that the election commission acted incorrectly, after recognizing all of this, they concluded that maybe there were illegalities, but just a few.

“In a mature democracy,” he rants, “and I don’t grow tired of repeating it, the votes would have been counted in their totality, because it is the only way to make transparent the election.”

highwayscribery would like to point out that in the United States, a fairly mature democracy, the winning side sued to stop votes from being recounted, but this is his space so:

“They didn’t count them, and the tribunal didn’t want to, and now we know why, although we’ve always had our suspicions.”

The result was the court’s collusion, "in a coup d état, from the apparatus of the state itself.”

Which is to say they chose not to give up power and use it instead to stay there.

“The mess the owners of national institutions have created is no small thing. They’ve reduced them to nothing and placed them beyond constitutionality. With this action alone, not to mention still others, they’ve invited the people of Mexico to demand that the institutions serve them. The state, not just the government, has turned its back on the people of Mexico; and it would be just should they, in kind, raise the banner of dignity and reject the institutions, with a constitution in their hand.

“The imposition of an illegitimate president, supported only by legality used in a fascist manner by the collusion of institutional leaders leaves us but one way out, still legal, and rooted in the constitution: civil resistance and popular organization in a national democratic convention that will force a new country in which, for the first time in many years, the power would be of the people for the people.”

Of course, as the glib narrator of “The Sidewalk Smokers Club,” notes: “It is easier for a city attorney to promise such things than it is for a city attorney to deliver on them.”