Democracy, Mexican Style - Part II

by Stephen Lendman

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. The transparent
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 political 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 discared 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 Mexico 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
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  Also visit his blog site at
sjlendman.blogspot.com