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The Fraud in Mexico

Today, the political situation in the country pivots around the question of whether or not there fraud was committed in the electoral process. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is convinced that fraud which impeded his being the legitimate president of this country was committed. Of course, those who back the PAN candidate deny this, and seek every means of assuring that the civil resistance movement will wear itself out and be discredited. The arguments they like best are that there exist no proofs of fraud and that Lopez Obrador has become crazed, because he doesn’t know how to lose, not to mention other “arguments” which in fact are insults. We all know that if arguments are riddled with insults it is because they lack arguments.

The problem before us, and which the electoral court ought to take into account is how fraud is to be defined. the dictionary has two definitions of fraud, one which is: “crime commited by the person in charge of overseeing the carrying out of something,” and the second, which says: “deception undertaken in order to obtain an advantage.”

Those who argue that there was no fraud want a fotograph of the moment or the act in which the crime was commited by the person in charge of overseeing (in this case, the IFE). If this conclusive proof does not exist, then for them there has been no fraud and, therefore, the election was fair, even though there may have been “some irregularities.” What they will never admit, of course, is the deceit of the entire State apparatus which allowed them to obtain an obvious advantage. Then fraud, then, lies in the electoral process. The dictionary points out that the word process signifies “a method followed in order to reach an end.” In this case, the method followed in order to impose the PAN candidate was lengthy (it lasted more than two years) and not only had the backing of Los Pinos and its budget, but also that of the communications media and, in the final analysis, of the IFE itself, which did not do what it was supposed to do by law, when it failed to annul the campaigns of hatred and disqualification which appeared over the length and breadth of the land. Fraud, therefore, was in the method utilized in order to accomplish the end of preventing Lopez Obrador from reaching the presidency. Of this there exist innumerable evidences.

In general, any illegal or inadequate act has generally negative consequences for those who commit them, and it then affects others. Fraud, to be sure, has consequences, and now whe are living them. The first and most serious one is that Mexican society is now more divided than ever. Secondly, a social crisis of enormous dimensions is being created, and along with this a political crisis the scope of which we are as yet unaware. All this came about thanks to the enormous and lacerating incompetence of Vicente Fox and his cabinet. Not content with having increased the indices of poverty, of having affected public education, science, technology, and culture to a worrisome degree, of having caused Mexico to descend to its lowest historical levels, of competitivity, and of having caused the Mexican economy to depend increasingly on the inflows of money from workers who immigrated owing to lack of work, of having promoted the worst foreign policies in memory, always bowed before the United States, he utilized the State apparatus in order to embroil himself in the electoral process, the outcome of which is that one of the gravest political crises in the recent history of this country will be generated. Of course fraud took place, even if there is no photograph of the precise instant in which it occured.

This process, this method that was used to reach the goal of no allowing Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador reach the presidency, is the cause of the civil resistance. The insults, the demonstrations, and the media manipulation which have been unchained against the coalition candidate andof those who day by day are in the resistance, do no more than aggravate the conflict among Mexicans. The most sensible thing would be to reason, to try to understand the causes generating the civil resistance, instead of pointing out that the movement “doesn’t affect me,” or that “I don’t like it,” or that it “doesn’t look good,” and worse yet, using derogatory adjectives against those who defend a cause. The question to be asked is: “What is worse, a few weeks of discomforts or six years of an illegitimate government?” A government which, if it comes to be, will be the legacy given us by the most incompetent President in Mexico’s history.

This article originally appeared in La Journada.

Translated by Jorge Dominguez.