Democracy,
Mexican Style - Part II
By Stephen Lendman
12 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Read
Par I
There's
much happening in Mexico in the aftermath of the nation's most contentious
election ever, but it began many months before the first vote was cast.
The popularity of leftist opposition candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) scared the ruling National
Action Party (PAN) enough to get them to try to deny him the right to
run for president in the election just concluded. In April, 2005, a
commission of four members of the Chamber of Deputies (Mexico's Congress)
held there was sufficient cause to suspect Obrador committed a crime
when he ordered the construction of a service road to a hospital ignoring
a judge's order against doing it. Obrador said he was just widening
the road and stopped when he learned of the court order. The full Chamber
ignored his explanation and then voted to strip him of his government
immunity from prosecution so he could be indicted, have to stand trial
and be constitutionally barred from holding or running for high office.
Thetransparent scheme didn't work because the people of Mexico wouldn't
tolerate it and turned out in mass street protests to support him.
That mass support succeeded
in getting the ruling PAN to back down from its attempt to keep Obrador
off the ballot but not in the shoddy campaign tactics they decided to
use against him. Because of his popularity, Obrador was a serious candidate
who would likely win easily in a fair election. But there's nothing
fair about Mexican politics where the notions of dirty tricks and hardball
tactics could have been invented. From early on in the campaign, the
Mexican corporate media and ruling business-friendly right wing parties
attacked Obrador viciously as an evil twin of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez,
falsely accusing him of receiving campaign funds from the Venezuelan
President and being guilty of corruption during his time as mayor of
Mexico City. The ads also accused him of being a "danger"
for Mexico. In addition, government instigated street violence in an
attempt to break a teachers strike in Oaxaca and to disrupt events in
San Salvador Atenco created tension, stoked fear and were effectively
used as poltical and PR tools to turn enough of the public against Lopez
Obrador to erase his once insurmountable lead in the polls to a slim
one on election day - an advantage easily overcome with the shenanigans
the ruling party had in mind to use to assure its candidate won.
But Lopez Obrador was lucky
PAN officials and their conspiratorial Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) allies didn't intend for him what state officials plotted and
pulled off against two other noted state adversaries in the past who
paid dearly. General Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican peasant rebel leader
who supported agrarian reform and land redistribution in the battles
of the Mexican Revolution (a Mexican Simon Bolivar), was assassinated
by government troops in 1919. Then in March, 1994, leading opposition
candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio met the same fate on the campaign trail
in Tijuana. Obrador survived the shabby scheme to keep him off the ballot,
was able to run as the opposition candidate, and only paid the price
of a defeat at the polls (so far) in an election clearly stolen from
him.
At this point Lopez Obrador
is not going gentley "into that good night." Given the clear
election irregularities, he's demanded the ballot boxes be opened and
all votes be recounted manually. He has every right to ask for that
and more with what already is known about the fraud committed against
him. The preliminary vote totals were manipulated to show PAN candidate
Felipe Calderon would be the winner, initially 3 million votes were
never counted and only in hindsight 2.5 million of them were added to
the totals, 900,000 supposedly void, blank and annulled ballots were
declared null, discarded and never included in the official totals,
700,000 additional votes disappeared from missing precincts, thousands
of voters were denied their franchise in strong Obrador precincts and
much more.
In addition, it was learned
that Felipe Calderon's brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala wrote
the vote-counting software, and it's already been hacked. This new discovery
is especially disturbing as whoever controls the Federal Electoral Institute
(IFE) computer systems can manipulate the vote process, control which
votes get counted, which ones don't, and what the final vote tally will
be. The opportunity and temptation for fraud was therefore in the hands
of the declared winner's close family member and ally with every reason
to believe he'd take full advantage. Why wouldn't he and the ruling
party as well given the history of Mexican elections and the underhanded
and hardball tactics the country's entrenched power interests are known
to use. They'd never be willing to give up what they've always had an
iron grip on and won't if they can get away with their scheme. But the
way to stop them is with a full, vote-by-vote independently supervised
manual recount and do it before any cast, counted or dicared votes are
manipulated or destroyed. That's the only antidote for computer fraud
as well as to be able to salvage and include in the total as many of
the known uncounted and valid discarded votes as possible. It all sounds
like Florida, 2000 deja vu all over again, but we know how that one
turned out.
Still, Lopez Obrador said
he'll contest the election and demand a full recount. If he follows
through on his challenge, he'll have to await a ruling by the Electoral
Tribunal, known as Trife, which has until September 6 to consider his
case. The new president takes office on December 1 so it's possible
the electoral challenge will succeed. In the past, Trife has reversed
some local elections including one in Obrador's home district of Tabasco
in 2000, but it's very unlikely to reverse this one given the overwhelming
pressure against it which in Mexico may include real and intimidating
physical threats officials take very seriously.
The people of Mexico may
have other ideas though. As many as 500,000 Obrador supporters (the
corporate media lied and reported 100,000) held a mass protest demonstration
against the announced election outcome in Mexico City's huge Zocalo
plaza on July 8 to demand a full recount. The huge crowd chanted "No
to fraud," and "You're not alone," as Lopez Obrador announced
plans for a "national march for democracy" to begin on July
12 in each of Mexico's 300 election districts, converging in Mexico
City on July 16, again in the Zocalo. He also accused President Fox
of violating Mexican law that stipulates a president can't endorse or
campaign for a candidate which the PAN did by running government sponsored
advertisements touting its achievements. He went on to call President
Fox a "traitor to democracy" and said the "stability
of the nation" is at risk if a full vote recount isn't taken. Mr.
Obrador also told an assembled news conference "I am going to defend
our victory. This isn't over." The people of Meico who support
him certainly hope so.
The July 2 elections were
also to elect members of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies. According to
the official IFE count on July 7, the PAN won 206 of the 500 seats,
followed by For the Good of All coalition consisting of the PRD and
smaller Workers Party (PT) and Convergence Party with 160 seats. The
Alliance for Mexico comprised of the PRI and small Green Ecological
Party of Mexico (PVEM) won 121 seats. An incomplete final count in the
Senate projected the PAN with 53 seats, 38 for the PRI coalition, 36
for the PRD coalition and 1 for PANAL.
Stephen Lendman
lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.