[News] Mexico's Surreal Elections - Anatomy of a Fraud Foretold

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

July 6, 2006


Mexico's Surreal Elections


Anatomy of a Fraud Foretold

By JOHN ROSS

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.


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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