So the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico as a de facto dictatorship for 71 years, wins back power south of the border after a twelve-year absence. The Mexican business elite win. Foreign investment giants win. NAFTA wins. Washington, for its myriad interests in the country, wins. The Mexican population – or 99% of it – loses. As much of Latin America swings to the Left and looks for alternatives to the neoliberal model, Mexico (“so close to the United States, so far from God”) will surely be the last “domino” to fall.

The country’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) promised a “quick count” – based on a sample of 7,500 polling stations – to be released at 11:15pm Sunday. No sooner had IFE president Leonardo Valdes Zurita announced a seven-point lead by the PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto with 38% of the vote in his favor than President Felipe Calderon appeared on national TV to congratulate the president-elect. Calderon, who faced accusations of fraud after his own election in 2006, insisted that “Today, Mexico voted like a free country.”

As of Monday evening, preliminary results from 98% of stations show Peña Nieto leading leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) of the Progressive Movement coalition by a 6.5% margin. This is nowhere near as close as the 0.56% margin by which AMLO lost to Calderon in 2006. Tellingly, AMLO has not claimed victory as he did that July, simply saying he would wait until all votes were counted before accepting the result.

The rush to recognize Peña Nieto’s victory by both the PRI and incumbent PAN was surely an attempt to dampen the likelihood of protest by AMLO’s supporters and groups such as the student-led #YoSoy132 movement in the coming days. Good luck with that. The so-called “Mexican Spring” looks set to turn into a long, heady summer.

So who really won the Mexican election? Notoriously crooked former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who will act as the power behind the throne of Peña Nieto, deserves a nod. These next six years will look a lot like the Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo administrations of the 1990s with a scoop of the militarization of the Calderon era for good measure.

The world’s oil giants win. Peña Nieto will back the privatization of Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX). Mexico’s oil industry, which accounts for some 40% of the federal budget, has been in state hands since 1938. The privatization of PEMEX has always been a sensitive issue owing to Mexican nationalism, but Peña – like Calderon before him – will fight on behalf of the world’s super-majors against the public interest.

US defense contractors reaping the blood money of Mexico’s “Drug War” also win. AMLO had vowed to halt the flow of gringo “security aid” that sent the Calderon administration on a killing spree. Peña Nieto has said he will continue “the struggle” against a drug-trafficking mafia that is nevertheless knee-deep in the country’s politics. We already know he will hire former Colombian National Police commander General Oscar Naranjo as chief security adviser; an extremely sketchy figure known for both his narco links and long working relationship with Washington.

If this is starting to sound a lot like the Felipe Calderon administration of the last six years, that’s because it will be. Ignore the hype that this is some kind of return to the dark days of authoritarianism for Mexico. The dark days never actually went away.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: What Now for the Mexican Left? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.