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Mexico
Splits in Half: the Election Hits the Streets
By JOHN ROSS
A full week after the most viciously
contested presidential election in its modern history, a Florida-sized
fraud looms over the Mexican landscape and the nation has been
divided almost exactly in half along political, economic, geographical
and racial lines.
Mexico has always been two
lands "Illusionary Mexico" and "Profound
Mexico" is how sociologist Guillermo Bonfils described the
great divide between rich and poor. But now, should it be allowed
to stand, right-winger Felipe Calderon's severely questioned
243.000 vote victory over left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador (AMLO) will split the country exactly in half between
the industrial north and the impoverished, highly indigenous
south with each winning 16 states although the southern
states won by Lopez Obrador, who also won Mexico City by a million
votes, constitute 54% of the population.
Moreover, the disputed election
pits an indignant Indian and mestizo underclass that believes
AMLO was swindled out of the presidency by electoral fraud against
a wealthy white conservative minority that controls the nation's
media, its banks, and apparently, the Federal Electoral Institute
(IFE), Mexico's maximum electoral authorities. Lopez Obrador
charges the IFE and its president Luis Carlos Ugalde with orchestrating
Calderon's uncertain triumph.
At a raucous July 8th rally
that put a half million supporters in Mexico City's vast Zocalo
plaza, the political heart of the nation, Lopez Obrador called
upon his people to demand a complete vote by vote recount of
the results. Speaking from a flatbed truck set up in front of
the National Palace, the official seat of the Mexican government,
the fiery, former Mexico City mayor characterized President Vicente
Fox as "a traitor to democracy" and for the first time
at a public meeting uttered the word "fraud", accusing
the IFE of rigging the election to favor his opponent.
Indeed, fraud was the central
motif of the mammoth meeting. Large photos of IFE president Luis
Carlos Ugalde slugged "Wanted for Electoral Fraud"
were slapped up on central city walls and tens of thousands of
protestors waved home-made signs dissing the IFE official with
such colorful epithets as "No To Your Fucking Fraud!"
Throughout the rally, (which was billed as a "first informative
assembly"), the huge throng repeatedly drowned out Lopez
Obrador's pronouncements with thunderous chants of "Fraude
Electoral!" At times, AMLO seemed on the verge of tears
at the outpouring of support from the sea of brown faces that
pressed in around the speakers' platform.
The gathering in the Zocalo
signaled the kick-off to what is sometimes called "the second
election in the street"; a mass effort to pressure electoral
officials into a ballot-by-ballot recount that Lopez Obrador
is convinced will show that he was the winner July 2nd. The
IFE has resolutely resisted such a recount.
AMLO, a gifted leader of street
protest, is always at the top of his game when he is seen as
an underdog battling the rich and powerful and the next days
will be heady ones here. This Wednesday (June 12th), the left
leader is calling upon supporters in all 300 electoral districts
across Mexico to initiate a national "exodus" for democracy
that will converge upon the capital on Sunday, July 16th for
a mega-march that may well turn out to be the largest political
demonstration in the nation's history. Indeed, AMLO already
set that mark in April 2005 when 1.2 million citizens surged
through Mexico City to protest Fox's efforts to bar the leftist
from the ballot the president dropped his vendetta three
days after the march.
But Lopez Obrador and his Party
of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) will not just do battle in
the streets. Evidence of wide-spread ballot box manipulation
in a third of the 130,000 polling places (including ballot-stuffing
and duplicate numbers in thousands of them), malfeasance in the
reporting of district totals to the IFE, inexplicable cybernetic
confabulations in both the preliminary count or PREP (`3,000,000
mostly AMLO votes were removed) and the final tabulation in the
districts, are being presented to the nation's top electoral
tribunal (code-named the TRIFE) by Lopez Obrador's battery of
attorneys in an effort to persuade the seven justices that a
hand recount is the only way to determine who will be the next
president of Mexico. Such recounts have recently been conducted
in close elections in Germany, Italy, and Costa Rica as well
as in Florida 2000 until ordered shut down by the U.S. Suprime
Court.
Felipe Calderon and the PAN
and Ugalde's IFE consider AMLO's demands to open the ballot boxes
an "insult" to the "hundreds of thousands of citizens"
who were responsible for carrying out the election. "The
votes have already been counted - on Election Day" Ugalde
upbraids Lopez Obrador.
The TRIFE is an autonomous
judicial body with powers to annul the presidential election
it has annulled gubernatorial elections in Tabasco (AMLO's
home state) and Colima and invalidated results in entire districts
because of electoral flimflam in recent years. Lopez Obrador
and the PRD have also petitioned Mexico's Supreme Court to invalidate
the election because of Vicente Fox's apparently unconstitutional
meddling on behalf of Calderon, and this reporter has learned
that AMLO is considering calling upon all PRD elected officials
not to take office December 1st if the ballots are not recounted,
a strategy that could trigger constitutional crisis.
Despite the uncertainty about
who won the July 2nd election, the White House and Ambassador
Tony Garza, a Bush crony, have been quick to congratulate Felipe
Calderon for whom they exhibited an undisguised predilection
during the campaigns President Bush actually called the
right-winger from Air Force One and Garza has been lavish in
his praise of the much-questioned performance of the IFE as proof
of "a maturing Mexican democracy."
The U.S. embassy has a track
record of intervening in Mexico's presidential selection
Ronald Reagan recognized Carlos Salinas as the winner of the
stolen 1988 election within 96 hours of the larceny. In 1911,
U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson signed off on the assassination
of Mexico's first democratically elected president Francisco
Madero, to whom Lopez Obrador has often compared himself.
Most of the U.S. Big Press
has followed in lockstep with the White House the Los Angeles
Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post all expressed editorial
satisfaction at Calderon's coronation based on the results of
the admittedly manipulated preliminary count. The New York Times,
however, which 18 years ago, after free-marketeer Carlos Salinas
stole the presidency from leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, called
that tormented proceedings "the cleanest election in Mexican
history", this time around was more cautious, voting for
a ballot by ballot recount before extending its benediction to
the winner.
As tens of thousands of AMLO's
supporters, "the people the color of the earth" Subcomandante
Marcos names them, march across the Mexican landscape on their
way up to the capital to demand electoral justice, invoking scenes
of the great movement of "los de abajo" (those from
down below) during Mexico's monumental 1910-1919 revolution,
the country holds it breath.
In Mexico, the past has equal
value with the present and the memory of what came before can
sometimes be what comes next. These are history-making moments
south of the Rio Bravo. North Americans need to pay attention.
A shortened version of this piece appeared on the Nation.com.
John Ross is in Mexico City waiting to see How
It All Turns Out so that he can write the epilogue to his latest
opus "Making Another World Possible--Zapatista Chronicles
2000-2006" to be published in October by Nation Books.
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