Mexico's
Surreal Elections
By John Ross
09 July, 2006
Counterpunch
Mexico City.
Mexican elections are stolen
before, during, and after Election Day. Just look at what happened in
the days leading up to the tightest presidential election in the nation's
history this past July 2nd.
By law, the parties and their
candidates close down their campaigns three days before Election Day.
On Wednesday night June 28th as the legal limit hove into sight, a team
of crack investigators from the Attorney General's organized crime unit
descended on the maximum security lock-up at La Palma in Mexico state
where former Mexico City Finance Secretary Guillermo Ponce awaits trial
on charges of misuse of public funds much of which he appears
to have left on Las Vegas crap tables.
During his nearly six years
in office, outgoing president Vicente Fox has often used his attorney
general's office against leftist front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
to counter his growing popularity, including a failed effort to bar
the former Mexico City mayor from the ballot and even imprison him.
Now. in a desperate last
minute electoral ploy by Fox's right-wing National Action or PAN party
to boost the fortunes of its lagging candidate Felipe Calderon, the
agents tried to pressure Ponce into testifying that AMLO and his PRD
party had used city revenues to finance his presidential campaign but
Ponce proved a stand-up guy and ultimately rebuffed the government men.
The imprisoned finance secretary's
refusal to talk greatly disappointed both Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico's
two-headed television monopoly that together have waged an unrelenting
dirty war against Lopez Obrador for months and even years. Indeed, TV
crews were stationed out in the La Palma parking lot to record Ponce's
thwarted confession for primetime news and both networks had reserved
time blocks on their evening broadcasting, forcing the anchors to scramble
to fill in the gap.
That was Wednesday night.
On Thursday June 29th, Lopez Obrador's people awoke to discover that
the candidate's electronic page had been hacked and a phony message
purportedly signed by AMLO posted there calling upon his supporters
to hit the streets "if the results do not favor us." Although
officials of Lopez Obrador's party, the PRD, immediately proved the
letter to be a hoax, the pro-Calderon media broadcast the story for
hours as if it were the gospel truth, eventually forcing the PRD and
its allies to reaffirm that AMLO would abide by results released by
the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the nation's maximum electoral
authority, even if the IFE's numbers did not favor the candidate.
The PRD pledge was a reiteration
of a "pact of civility" that Televisa had browbeat PRD president
Lionel Cota into signing in early June. "Hackergate", as the
scandal quickly became known, was designed to prevent Lopez Obrador's
supporters from protesting the fraud that the electoral authorities
were already preparing.
That was Thursday. On Friday,
June 30th, after more than five years of false starts, Fox's special
prosecutor for political crimes placed former president Luis Echeverria
under house arrest for his role in student massacres in 1968 and 1971.
Not only was the long overdue arrest portrayed by big media as a feather
in Fox's and therefore, Calderon's cap but it also put the
much-hated Echeverria, a pseudo-leftist with whom Calderon has often
compared Lopez Obrador, back on the front pages. Since Echeverria is
an emeritus member of the PRI, the bust killed two birds with one very
opportunist stone.
That was Friday. On Saturday
June 1st, two PRD poll watchers in conflictive Guerrero state were gunned
down by unknowns, invoking the memory of hundreds of party supporters
who were slaughtered in political violence after the 1988 presidential
election was stolen from party founder Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, up until
now Mexico's most conspicuous electoral fraud.
That was Saturday. On Sunday,
July 2nd, Felipe Calderon and the PAN, aided and abetted by the connivance
of the Federal Electoral Institute, Mexico's maximum electoral authority,
stole the presidential election before the nation's eyes.
As mentioned above, Mexican
elections are stolen before, during, and after the votes are cast. During
the run-up to July 2nd, the IFE, under the direction of Calderon partisan
Luis Carlos Ugalde systematically tried to cripple Lopez Obrador's campaign.
Venomous television spots that labeled AMLO "a danger" to
Mexico were allowed to run sometimes four to a single commercial
break for months on Televisa and TV Azteca despite an indignant
outcry from Lopez Obrador's supporters. The IFE only pulled the plug
on the hit pieces under court order.
In a similar display of crystal clear bias, Ugalde and the IFE winked
at Vicente Fox's shameless, unprecedented, and unconstitutional campaigning
for Calderon, and refused to intervene despite AMLO's pleas for the
president to remove himself from the election.
One of the IFE's more notorious
accomplishments in this year's presidential elections was to engineer
the non-vote of Mexicans in the United States, an effort that resulted
in the disenfranchisement of millions of "paisanos" living
north of the Rio Bravo. Undocumented workers were denied absentee ballot
applications at consulates and embassies and more than a million eligible
voters were barred from casting a ballot because their voter registration
cards were not up to date and the IFE refused to update them outside
of Mexico. Untold numbers of undocumented workers who could not risk
returning to Mexico for a minimum 25 days to renew their credential
were denied the franchise the IFE was sworn to defend. The PRD insists
that the majority of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. would have cast
a ballot for Lopez Obrador.
The left-center party has
considerable strength in Los Angeles and Chicago, the two most important
concentrations of Mexicans in the U.S. When thousands of legal Mexican
residents from Los Angeles caravanned to Tijuana to cast a ballot for
Lopez Obrador, they found the special polling places for citizens in
transit had no ballots. The 750 ballots allocated to the special "casillas"
had already been taken by members of the Mexican police and military.
In Mexico City, when voters
in transit lined up at one special polling place according to noted
writer Elena Poniatowska, hundreds of nuns presumably voting for the
rightwing Calderon displaced them and were given the last of the ballots.
Back in the bad old days
when the long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
stole elections with impunity, most of the larceny took place in the
polling stations stolen or stuffed ballot boxes, multiple voting,
altered vote counts but since national and international observers
like the San Francisco-based Global Exchange became a regular feature
of the electoral landscape here, such overt fraud has diminished and
the cumulative number of anomalies recorded in 130,000 casillas July
2nd seemed insignificant when compared to the size of the victory Calderon
was already claiming the morning after i.e. the John Kerry Syndrome,
named in memory of the Democratic Party candidate's sudden capitulation
in Ohio in 2004 for much the same reason.
Nonetheless, this "fraude
de hormiga" (fraud of the ants) which steals five to 10 votes a
ballot box, when combined with the disappearance of voters from precinct
lists ("razarados" or the razored ones) can fabricate an electoral
majority the long-ruling PRI (which failed to win a single state
July 2nd) was a master of this sort of "alquemia" (alchemy)
during seven decades of defrauding Mexican voters.
During the build-up to July
2nd, independent reporters here uncovered what appeared to be IFE preparations
for cybernetic fraud. One columnist at the left national daily La Jornada
discovered parallel lists of "razarados" on the IFE electronic
page one of the lists contained multiples of the other. While
Julio Hernandez made a phone call to the IFE to question this phenomenon,
the list containing the multiples vanished from his computer screen.
Similarly, radio reporter
Carmen Aristegui was able to access the list of all registered voters
through one of Felipe Calderon's web pages the list had been crossed
with one containing the personal data of all recipients of government
social development program benefits former social development
secretary (SEDESO) Josefina Vazquez Mota, is Calderon's right hand woman
and the PAN candidate's brother-in-law Diego Zavala, a data processing
tycoon, designed programs for both the IFE and the SEDESO. Utilizing
voter registration rolls and lists of beneficiaries of government programs
is considered an electoral crime here.
AMLO's people went into July
2nd fearing a repeat of 1988 when the "system" purportedly
"collapsed" on election night and did not come back up for
ten days. When results were finally announced, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas has
been despoiled of victory and the PRI's Carlos Salinas was declared
the winner.
Lopez Obrador's fears were
not unwarranted.
When on July 2nd AMLO's voters
turned out in record-breaking numbers, Interior Secretary officials
urged major media not to release exit poll results that heralded a Lopez
Obrador victory. Ugalde himself took to national television to declare
the preliminary vote count too close to call and Mexicans went to bed
without knowing whom their next president might be. Preliminary results
culled from the casillas (PREP) that ran erratically all night and all
day Monday showed Calderon with a 200,000 to 400,000-vote lead activating
suspicions that cybernetic flimflam was in the works. When the PREP
was finally shut down Monday night, the right winger enjoyed a commanding
lead and Televisa and TV Azteca proclaimed him a virtual winner
U.S newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago
Tribune followed suit and the White House was poised to celebrate a
Calderon victory.
But there was one fly in
the IFE's ointment: 42 million Mexicans had voted July 2nd but only
the votes of 39 million appeared in the PREP and Lopez Obrador demanded
to know what had happened to the missing 3,000,000 voters. Then on a
Tuesday morning news interview with Televisa, Luis Carlos Ugalde admitted
that the missing votes had been abstracted from the PREP because of
"inconsistencies". Indeed, 13,000 casillas 10% of the
total had been removed from the preliminary count, apparently
to create the illusion that Calderon had won the presidency.
Meanwhile all day Monday
and into Tuesday, AMLO supporters throughout Mexico recorded thousands
of instances of manipulation of the vote count a ballot box in
Mexico state registered 188 votes for Lopez Obrador but only 88 were
recorded in the PREP. Another Mexico state ballot box was listed 20
times in the preliminary count. Whereas voters in states where the PAN
rules the roost, cast more ballots for president than for senators and
congressional representatives, voters in southern states where the PRD
carried the day cast more ballots for congress than for the presidential
candidates. Among the PRD states that purportedly followed this surreal
pattern was Tabasco, the home state of two out of the three major party
presidential candidates Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the PRI's
Roberto Madrazo.
On Wednesday morning, with
the tension mounting to the breaking point and demonstrators already
massing in the street, a final vote count began in Mexico's 300 electoral
districts. Although the tabulation of the votes was programmed to finish
Sunday, IFE officials pushed the recount ahead at breakneck speed. As
the day progressed, PAN and PRI electoral officials, charging Lopez
Obrador's people with trying to obstruct the process, repeatedly rejected
PRD demands to open the ballot boxes and recount the votes inside one
by one in instances where Lopez Obrador's tally sheets did not coincide
with numbers in the PREP or were different from the sheets attached
to the ballot box. When a recount was allowed such as in one Veracruz
district, Lopez Obrador sometimes recouped as many as a thousand votes.
Surprisingly, by early afternoon,
AMLO had accumulated a 2.6% lead over Calderon and his supporters
were dancing in the streets of Mexico City. And then, inexplicably,
for the next 24 hours, his numbers went into the tank never to rise
again at the same time that the right-winger's started to increase incrementally.
By late evening, AMLO was reduced to single digit advantage and a little
after 4 AM Thursday morning, Calderon inched ahead. It had taken 12
hours to count the last 10% of the votes and still there were districts
that had not reported.
When Lopez Obrador addressed
the press at 8:30, he condemned "the spectacle of the dance of
numbers" and announced that the PRD and its political allies would
impugn the election he had proof of anomalies in 40,000 polling
places (a third of the total) and would present them to the "TRIFE",
the supreme electoral tribunal with powers to annul whole districts
and states, within the 72 hours dictated by the law.
Then, in his typically hesitating,
Peter Falk-like way of saying things, AMLO called for the second election
the one that takes place in the street beginning at 5 PM
this Saturday in the great Zocalo plaza at the political heart of this
bruised nation.
Although Lopez Obrador's
words were perhaps the culminating moment of this long strange journey,
Mexico's two-headed TV monster chose to ignore them - Televisa was otherwise
occupied with "entertainment" news, and soon after the screens
filled up with game shows and telenovelas (soap operas.) Although it
had not yet concluded, the telenovela of the vote count disappeared
into the ether of morning television.
This chronicle of a fraud
foretold is an excerpt from John Ross's forthcoming "Making Another
World Possible Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006" to be published
this October by Nation Books.