You don't know who Carlos Slim is, yet you definitively speak about Mexican politics? Give me a break. Obviously you're pretty ignorant about what's going on south of our border.
Mexico's Dramatic Vote Count Lacks Credibility Laura Carlsen, IRC | July 6, 2006 Mexico's official vote count unfolded more like a suspense novel than an electoral process yesterday. Commentators and common citizens sat poised at television or computer screens as Andrés Manuel López Obrador's two-and-a-half point lead gradually dwindled until—at four in the morning—the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón, pulled ahead. The final tally showed an unbelievably thin margin of just over half a percentage point. The operative word here is “unbelievable.” López Obrador´s Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and large parts of the population have publicly questioned the results. In a morning press conference, López Obrador announced he will challenge the vote count in the Electoral Tribunal. “We cannot accept these results,” he stated, citing “numerous irregularities—to put it mildly.” The center-left candidate placed blame directly: “Both the government and the rightwing candidate lacked democratic will and there are many doubts about the role of the Electoral Institute.” López Obrador criticized the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) for refusing to open electoral packets and count the ballots individually. Although some electoral packages were opened for a vote-by-vote count, most of the tally was done based on the official tally sheets drawn up at the polling places. His party is demanding a ballot-by-ballot count. This is the scenario that everyone hoped to avoid. A close race opens up doubts about the legitimacy of the winner and leads to protests that the public will has been violated. Under optimal circumstances, where the rule of law reigns and public confidence is high, a single vote lead should be sufficient to declare a winner in a one-round, majority vote like Mexico's. But neither of those conditions characterizes Mexico today. The problem is not just the extremely narrow base of the Calderón victory. It's that many Mexicans feel they have seen this scenario played out before. In 1988, the center-left opposition that eventually gave birth to the PRD apparently won the presidential elections. Its candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, showed a lead when the computer system “crashed”—according to official explanations. When it came back up, it was to pronounce Carlos Salinas of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) the winner. Following protests, repression and demands for a real count, the PAN and PRI voted together to destroy the ballots in 1991. The historic memory of that election, along with numerous cases of electoral fraud before and after, has created an understandable scepticism. Scepticism is greatest among the left, which has suffered the brunt of electoral trickery and post-electoral repression. Low Public Confidence in Election Results Even as the votes were still being counted, the PRD and reporters began presenting evidence of instances of alleged errors and manipulation in Sunday's election. López Obrador mentioned two examples to the press: manipulation of preliminary results that showed a consistent but narrowing Calderón lead, and the omission of thousands of polling place results until after the opposition protested. He did not go into detail but promised a full explanation on Saturday at an “informative assembly” called to be held in Mexico City's central plaza. Although Sunday's voting was peaceful and turnout high, reporters in the streets and letters to the press testify to the thousands of voters who waited in line for hours, only to be told that their polling place had run out of ballots. Thousands more were informed that their names had disappeared from the rolls. These people now complain that they were frustrated in the exercise of their civic duty by a system they suspect of bias. They are joined by millions more who are convinced that the whole process—from the campaigns to the count—was riddled with inequities. Many factors feed into this lack of public confidence. The first is the blatant partisan involvement of the president and federal government. President Fox consistently violated a Mexican law that calls for the neutrality of government officials in carrying out their public duties, despite weak admonitions from the elections authorities. The campaigns were not what Mexico's citizenry deserved. Calderón's campaign slogan “López Obrador is a danger to México” was low-level politicking and worked not to inform voters but to create a climate of fear until it was finally declared illegal by elections authorities. The veiled threats of the Business Council and dire warnings of economic collapse from Calderón were neither grounded in fact nor ethical as a campaign tactic. When fear—of loss of jobs, houses, or national stability—trumps reasoned choice, it's the nation as a whole that has lost the elections. The PAN also made full use of the tactics of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Part of the political culture entails delivering votes to the highest bidder—the party that brings in building materials, a new basketball court, or cash payments. It is a civic vice that the Mexican political system as a whole has not yet overcome. After years of one-party rule, many citizens still view their vote as a commodity to be bartered and not a principled statement to chart a course for the nation. On the local level where vote-buying is most prominent, none of the major parties has done much to change this view. The flip side of vote-buying is vote coercion, or threatening to cut off goods or services for voting the wrong way. Vote buying and vote coercion are tools primarily used by the government. Fox's “government of change,” rather than eliminating this vestige of authoritarian rule, has refined it to a science. The first sign that this would be a major part of the PAN campaign came when Josefina Vázquez Mota, Secretary of Social Development was made campaign manager for Felipe Calderón. As secretary, she had access to detailed information on recipients of government assistance programs. An independent report commissioned by the government found that over four million people were susceptible to vote-buying or coercion due to the way government programs were used. During the campaigns, reporters gathered numerous testimonies of these practices in action. The Authorities' Slipping Moral Authority The Federal Electoral Institute has had credibility problems among PRD supporters from the outset. Formed in 1990 in response to the instability and inconformity that were the legacy of the ‘88 elections, the institute has slowly but surely built up a more transparent and rules-based electoral system. However, the current president and general council were selected in 2003 in a show of force by the PAN and PRI, over the protests of the PRD. In recent weeks the media has been digging up the many personal contacts and political contacts between the PAN candidate and the president of the electoral authority. The electoral institutions created over the past decade are still weak. They were unable or unwilling to stop the PAN from violating electoral laws that forbid smear campaigns and the intromission of government officials in campaigns. Suspicions of collusion between authorities and the PAN were reinforced just days before the elections when Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui demonstrated on national television that the PAN had developed a secret access code to the national registry of voters. Voter registration data is restricted by law to electoral authorities. The preliminary vote count presented by the Elections Institute only increased distrust. Over 2.5 million votes—the majority in favor of López Obrador—were not counted in the preliminary results and were only tabulated following public complaints from the PRD. That the official tally came up with different figures and showed a totally different behavior from the preliminary results further deepened suspicions that the system was rigged in favor of the conservative candidate. The strange results taint both the preliminary and official tallies. The upshot is that millions of Mexicans do not fully believe electoral authorities when they cite a final count that continues to favor Calderón. The refusal to open up for a ballot count only detracts more from the credibility of the elections. Those who remain unconvinced of the official results—mostly, but not all, López Obrador supporters—form a critical mass in a potentially explosive chain of political events. Gap between the Rich and Poor Another link in the chain is the polarization of Mexican politics that has taken place in recent years. The deep divisions did not begin with this year's presidential campaign. The issue at the center of Mexico's 2006 elections has always been the economy, and economic conditions are at the heart of the emotions unleashed during the elections. The enormous gap between the rich and poor that has grown over the past decade has not surprisingly spilled over into politics. While there is some crossover between classes and a divided middle class in between, the poor overwhelmingly support López Obrador and the rich overwhelmingly support Calderón. The political platforms of the two candidates cater to their respective bases. López Obrador's “First the poor” program falls short of changing the economic model that his party's founding father called a “factory that produces poor people.” But he has outlined a series of social programs that seek to cover the most pressing needs of vulnerable sectors of the population and he defends the right of the government to redistribute wealth. Calderón has called to continue with the free market policies that widened the income gap and to keep government's role to a minimum. Although he rhetorically recognized the need to address inequality and poverty in his pre-dawn statements, he roots his economic policy in Mexico's ability to compete on the international market and increase macroeconomic growth rates. A full state-by-state breakdown of the vote is still not available, but the reason the Calderón vote rose in the last hours of counting is because the last states to be counted were located in the north and center of the country—PAN strongholds. As the gap between rich and poor has grown, so has the regional gap in Mexico. The north has generally benefited, while the poor and largely indigenous south has suffered. Much of López Obrador's support comes from the south. The exception is Mexico City, which has voted heavily for the PRD in local elections since 1998. In a victory speech before dawn Thursday, Calderón offered reconciliation. “I will respond to the yearnings and aspirations of those who didn't vote for me as well as those who did,” he stated in speech of premature largesse given to supporters before officially pronounced the victor. But his claim is both unlikely and politically impossible. The political lines drawn correspond to deep fault lines in the social and economic terrain of the country. A new president will have to govern by negotiating these interests but will never be able to fully reconcile them. The King is Dead, Long Live the King! Since Monday's preliminary results gave him the edge, Calderón has been attempting to stitch his threadbare lead into a presidential mantle. He has had considerable help in his efforts, even before the official vote count proclaimed him the winner, from both the PRI and the media. The PRI candidate, Roberto Madrazo, conceded defeat to Calderón before the official results came in. His party was left in ruins after Sunday's vote, decimated by an historic defeat that not only relegated it to a distant third in presidential elections but also eroded its legislative base. Madrazo's premature concession raised suspicions that the PRI is offering its support for the PAN candidate in his difficult task of consolidating legitimacy in return for power within the new government and a chance to recompose itself. Within the PRI, a humiliated Madrazo will be forced to hand off power to his archenemy, Elba Esther Gordillo, leader of the powerful teachers union. Despite its electoral defeat, the party that single-handedly ran Mexican politics for over 70 years still holds many of the practical strings of power in the nation. Much of the mainstream media has also been portraying a Calderón victory as a fait accompli, as part of a communications strategy which posits that repeating a supposition often enough will make it a fact. Their power has been somewhat curtailed by openly biased coverage of the campaigns and access to independent media and Internet as alternative sources of information. Efforts to simply pass the sceptre, as planned by the PAN government, have become enormously complicated. Regardless of intentions, at this point it's difficult to imagine reconciling political divisions that are based on differing economic interests and played out in a context of distrust in the political system itself. A full vote count is a minimum requirement for restored faith in the system. Investigations into what happened must also take place. What has changed much more than the electoral rules since 1988 is the attitude of the citizenry. The citizenry is mobilized and unlikely to desist in its demands for fair elections. http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3344
We didn't have a guy in this one, there was no Chavez- like nutcase. But what the loser is doing strikes me as really irresponsible. He is starting up street protest and demonstrators to pressure the courts and saying that he won't accept defeat.
Despite the allegations about fraud: "Election monitors from the European Union said they found no irregularities in the count. Calderon says the vote was clean and has taken congratulatory phone calls from President Bush and the leaders of Canada, Spain and Colombia, among others, despite Lopez Obrador’s plea for foreign governments to hold off on recognizing the result." from MSNBC.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1815601,00.html Mexico and Florida have more in common than heat There is evidence that left-leaning voters have been scrubbed from key electoral lists in Latin America Greg Palast Saturday July 8, 2006 The Guardian There's something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico's first "clean" election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist. Just before the 2000 balloting in Florida, I reported in the Guardian that its governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered the removal of tens of thousands of black citizens from the state's voter rolls. He called them "felons", but our investigation discovered their only crime was Voting While Black. And that little scrub of the voter rolls gave the White House to his brother George. Jeb's winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business - in Mexico - at the direction of the Bush government. Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked "secret", regarding a contract for "intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations". Given that the memo was dated September 17 2001, a week after the attack on the World Trade Centre, hunting for terrorists seemed like a heck of a good idea. But oddly, while all 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the contract was for obtaining the voter files of Venezuela, Brazil ... and Mexico. What those Latin American countries have in common, besides a lack of terrorists, is either a left-leaning president or a left candidate for president ahead in the opinion polls, leaders of the floodtide of Bush-hostile Latin leaders. It seems that the Bush government feared the leftist surge was up against the US's southern border. As we found in Florida in 2000, my investigations team on the ground in Mexico City this week found voters in poor neighbourhoods, the left's turf, complaining that their names were "disappeared" from the voter rolls. ChoicePoint can't know what use the Bush crew makes of its lists. But erased registrations require us to ask, before this vote is certified, was there a purge as there was in Florida? Notably, ruling party operatives carried registration lists normally in the hands of elections officials only. (In Venezuela in 2004, during the special election to recall President Hugo Chavez, I saw his opponents consulting laptops with voter lists. Were these the purloined FBI files? The Chavez government suspects so but, victorious, won't press the case.) There's more that the Mexico vote has in common with Florida besides the heat. The ruling party's hand-picked electoral commission counted a mere 402,000 votes more for their candidate, Felipe Calderón, over challenger Andrés Manuel López Obrador. That's noteworthy in light of the surprise showing of candidate Señor Blank-o (the 827,000 ballots supposedly left "blank"). We've seen Mr Blank-o do well before - in Florida in 2000 when Florida's secretary of state (who was also co-chair of the Bush campaign) announced that 179,000 ballots showed no vote for the president. The machines couldn't read these ballots with "hanging chads" and other technical problems. Humans can read these ballots with ease, but the hand-count was blocked by Bush's conflicted official. And so it is in Mexico. The Calderón "victory" is based on a gross addition of tabulation sheets. His party, the Pan, and its election officials are refusing López Obrador's call for a hand recount of each ballot which would be sure to fill in those blanks. Blank ballots are rarely random. In Florida in 2000, 88% of the supposedly blank ballots came from African-American voting districts - that is, they were cast by Democratic voters. In Mexico, the supposed empty or unreadable ballots come from the poorer districts where the challenger's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR) is strongest. There's an echo of the US non-count in the south-of-the-border tally. It's called "negative drop-off". In a surprising number of districts in Mexico, the federal electoral commission logged lots of negative drop-off: more votes for lower offices than for president. Did López Obrador supporters, en masse, forget to punch in their choice? There are signs of Washington's meddling in its neighbour's election. The International Republican Institute, an arm of Bush's party apparatus funded by the US government, admits to providing tactical training for Pan. Did Pan also make use of the purloined citizen files? (US contractor ChoicePoint, its Mexican agents facing arrest for taking the data, denied wrongdoing and vowed to destroy its copies of the lists. But what of Mr Bush's copy?) Mexico's Bush-backed ruling party claims it has conducted Mexico's first truly honest election, though it refuses to re-count the ballots or explain the purge of voters. Has the Pan and its ally in Washington served democracy in this election, or merely Florida con salsa?
^^ Uh, yeah. Guardian is a joke. Bush would work with either the PAN or PRD. Neither were going to be Chavez- like governments. Sure the PAN leans to the right, but that doesn't mean the PRD would be a pariah.
