While the progressive candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (supporters
call him by his initials, AMLO) of the Party of the Democratic Revolution [PRD]
officially lost the preliminary tally for president of Mexico to the
conservative candidate Filipe Calderón of current President Vincente Fox’s
party National Action Party [PAN], AMLO has shown that he will not simply roll
over and accept the probable electoral fraud, as Al Gore and John Kerry did in
the most recent presidential elections in the US.
Instead, after the election, to press his case, López Obrador has called on
followers to come to protests in Mexico City to show the country and the TRIFE
(Mexico’s special electoral tribunal that has the final authority to declare
the results of an election) that a major segment of the Mexican population
does not believe the validity of the election results.
The most recent mass demonstration took place on Sunday, when over a
million supporters gathered in the streets of Mexico City. At AMLO’s bidding,
they have vowed to stay in the city and engage in civil disobedience until the
TRIFE orders a recount of every ballot box. (Murry, Kieran and Cyntia Barrera,
“Mexico leftists occupy capital in election protest,” July 30, 2006 Reuters
News Wire) An on-going protest in the streets of the capital city of Mexico
could be seen as just as significant as the protests in Tian’anmen Square in
Beijing in 1989. Perhaps, for progressives of the world, it is more
significant.
Background:
For more than 70 years of the 20th century Mexico was ruled by a single
party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party [PRI]. In election after election,
the PRI manipulated elections so that they would win. In the late 20th century,
the political landscape of Mexico began to change: a multi-party political
system began to take shape. Vincente Fox became Mexico’s first president
outside of the PRI in over 70 years.
Recent laws have instituted what on paper appears to be a well-regulated,
fair electoral system, designed to avoid the problems of the past. An
independent electoral commission called IFE for short, has been instituted to
hold the elections and to ensure that there are carried out fairly. All
ballots are caste on paper. Overseers of voting places are voters drafted into
service like in the American jury system. Once the votes have been counted
locally and submitted to the IFE, the IFE submits the results to a judicial
electoral tribunal, known as the TRIFE tribunal, certifies that the elections
are valid. The tribunal then declares who is the winner.
While the international press has already declared Calderón to be the
winner, the tribunal has not yet offered its judgment of whether the results
of the election are fair and accurate.
Evidence of possible electoral fraud:
The present author has not been a journalist on the ground in Mexico, is
not a specialist on Mexican politics, and does not possess any special
knowledge concerning the true events of the July 2nd election. Yet many events
reported by credible sources during the election make it clear that the
results of the election are deeply suspect. It is best to avoid conspiracy
theories, or claims to absolute knowledge of fact. Yet the following charges
are things that we can claim to know:
1) Mexican television news reporters hacked into the computers of the IFE
and found that the IFE and PAN had been sharing data on registered voters
before the election, in clear violation of the nation’s election laws.
2) Most exit polls showed AMLO ahead throughout the day of the election. In
the preliminary vote count on the evening of the election, July 2, Calderón
never trailed. (Ian Welsh,
http://agonist.org/ian_welsh/20060716/election_theft_in_mexico July 16, 2006)
3) The IFE preliminary results of the election showed Calderón ahead from
the beginning. At first the margin of lead was by 7 %. As the night wore on,
Calderón’s per cent lead declined to under 1 % but the actual number of votes
that he remained ahead remained constant. Political scientists and
statisticians have claimed that this irregularity is not really possible. Some
have suggested that a silent algorithm may have been added to the computerized
tallies. Others have suggested that the tally may have begun with Calderon
having a pre-existing bank James James K. Galbraith, “Doing Maths In Mexico:
While Mexicans take to the streets over the presidential vote, democracy's
fairweather friends are standing silent.” www.commondreams.org
4) There was a significant drop off of votes for López Obrador as the
actual ballot counting raced toward the finish line. “Vote drop offs” mean
that while a ballot was caste and tallies were recorded for local officials
and for legislators, no choice for presdent had been made. Thus, there were
many more ballots caste than there were votes for president. Election
specialists maintain that this kind of drop off never happens: voters are
motivated to vote by the person at the top of the ticket, not by those at the
bottom. . (Ian Welsh,
http://agonist.org/ian_welsh/20060716/election_theft_in_mexico July 16, 2006)
5) All reports of ballot boxes that have been opened and recounted show
that the recounts differ significantly from the official tally sheets (called
acta-s) recorded on election day. The difference has been that López Obrador
received more votes than officially noted and Calderón received fewer than
recorded. Even New York Times, through its reporters Ginger Thompson and James
C. McKinley Jr has noted this trend. (Ian Welsh,
http://agonist.org/ian_welsh/20060716/election_theft_in_mexico July 16, 2006)
6) Current President Vincente Fox of the PAN consulted on the telephone
with the head of the electoral commission (IFE) on the night of the elections,
in apparent violation of Mexico’s electoral laws
(http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article1961.html
7) López Obrador has turned over a 900 page document to the TRIFE of
evidence of fraudulent practices close to half of Mexico’s 133,000 polling
places. Aside from the evidence of massive vote drop off, ballots have been
found in the trash on the side of roads videos made of workers stuffing ballet
boxes and changing tallies sheets, recordings were made of telephone
conversations between PRI and PAN workers to challenge PRD in some voting
places, and the intervention of current President Vincente Fox. (Radio
interview with Matt Pascarella podcast on KPFT
http://www.gregpalast.com/podcast-kpft-interviews-matt-pascarella-on-mexican-election)
8) In a potential conflict of interest, one of Calderón’s brother-in-laws
co-founded a computer company named Hildebrando hired to do voter registration
databases for the country showing manipulation of electoral system.
(Pascarella)
9) Independent journalist Greg Pallast reports IFE hired the same computer
company in the US that Jeb Bush used to remove 90,000 voters from Florida’s
voter registration lists, in the name of removing felons.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1815750,00.html
10) While was not widespread, systematic, conspiratorial fraud, Josh
Holland of Alternet writes, the clean election mechanisms that are new in
Mexico were trumped by the old habits. The PRD is an outsider party. (Joshua
Holland, “Mexico: Calderon Hasn’t Won” July 10th, 2006. www.alternet.com)
Perhaps the PRD’s status as an outsider party allowed insiders to manipulate
tallies in individual polling places.
The evidence provided above is not conclusive. Yet it is known that the PRD
presidential candidate was denied a fraudulent election victory in 1988. It is
known that Lopez Obrador was denied the post of governor of the state of
Tobasco in a fraudulent election. We also know that earlier this year,
Vincente Fox tried without success to keep AMLO off the presidential ballot
completely.
Furthermore, we know that millions of voters did not vote out of
disillusionment with the process. Others did not vote because the policies of
NAFTA have led them into a life of undocumented work in the United States.
And further still, we know that, though Mexico’s new electoral system is
advanced and fair, there are significant problems with the actual election.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.
This election, my friends, is probably a duck.
Significance of Mexico’s election for progressives:
The import of the Mexican election is still unfolding. Right now, AMLO is
focusing on getting the TRIFE to undertake a recount that counts every vote.
If he succeeds in getting the TRIFE to do so, progressives around the world
will have a model of how to act in situations of electoral fraud.
Conventional wisdom in Mexico, however, is that the TRIFE will certify
Calderon as the winner of a “fair election.” If this is the case, progressives
can draw a different conclusion. That is, that vote tallies do not matter in a
world of what human rights activist Arundhati Roy calls “imperial democracy.”
What matters is control of the electoral apparatus, and control of the
narrative of the election maintained by the official institutions of the
government and their allies in the corporate press.
The present writer’s hunch is that if the TRIFE endorses Calderón, AMLO
still won't give up, leading a campaign of mass civil disobedience. The lesson
in this scenerio is that in a world of imperial democracy, which is in fact no
democracy at all, it will take a democratic revolution to install democracy
even in countries that appear to have the infrastructure of democracy.
The social movement that is currently behind the PRD and AMLO, it seems to
me reading from afar, built of hundreds of loosely federated progressive
organizations with deep roots among Mexican workers and peasants and
intellectuals is exactly the kind of social movement progressives are trying
to build, built as it is on social networks among hundreds of grassroots
organizations.
If the PRD and López Obrador loose their appeal to the TRIFE, the movement
will cease being an electoral movement, but will be one that challenges the
rulers outside of the electoral process. Such a movement could, if wildly
successful, stake a claim to being the legitimate government of the nation.
While such a scenario is unlikely, Mr. López Obrador has been, so far, leading
the way with surprisingly surefooted direct action. Let us wish him and his
followers well.
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