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August 09, 2006
Respeta nuestras leyes.
This past Saturday, the Instituto Federal Electoral, the electoral panel deciding whether or not to issue a full recount of the Mexican presidential election ballots, announced that only around 9% of the votes will be recounted. This is a serious setback for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate for the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, who hoped a full recount would show him to be the winner of the elections held 2 July.
Mexico has a long history of unfair elections under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI, which ruled the country for 71 straight years, but the elections of 2000 were almost universally considered to be clean. However, members of the PRD are calling the Partido Acción Nacional, the party whose candidate, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, was declared the victor, the PRI of the new millenium.
Of course, this is to imply that the PAN, now having gained a foothold in ruling La Republica will disregard the electoral process and the will of the people just as the PRI did for seven decades. Signs already indicate that even if they stole the election, they are much wiser in how they go about it.
Also on Saturday, we began to see public service announcements on Mexican television channels that showed relatively high-budget footage of various electoral accoutrement - ballot boxes, paper envelopes, election volunteers - with a voiceover talking about how all the election watchdogs declared the recent election to be fair and that none reported any evidence of tampering. At the end, text comes up on the screen while the words are spoken aloud: Respeta nuestras leyes. Respetamos nuestro voto. ("Respect our laws. We respect our vote.")
I have seen this spot three times in three days. I am unsure if Mexican law requires that the sponsor of a broadcast message be identified, and while in the back of my mind I think the spot is associated with the Instituto Federal Electoral, in all honesty, I cannot say that I am certain about this.
It could be argued that if it is sponsored on television by the IFE, it is really being brought to you by the PAN, since they are the current ruling party (since the IFE is a federal government office). That would mean that the PAN is putting out televised propaganda telling people to relax and not be troublesome, which is handy since they are the ones that were declared the winners in the presidential election.
Perhaps it's not surprisingly subtle if it is true. Perhaps the PAN did manage to steal the election as the PRD is claiming, but if they did, they managed to do it while getting the certification of various international observers as clean and fair. Some sources claim the United States could learn a thing or two from how well Mexico handles its elections nowadays.
If the PAN stole the election, they did it with much more subtlety and style than the PRI ever did. I am currently reading a book that shows a photograph of armed yet unmasked men working for the PRI, stealing a ballot box from a polling place. This was routine practice for the PRI, and they were hardly careful to do it without anyone noticing. They would drive in busloads of people to vote for their candidate at various polling locations, then they'd drive them to another one to vote again. They'd arrest competing candidates and hold them in jail indefinitely. During the 1988 election, the PRI announced the electoral computers had "gone silent," just as opposition leader Cuauhtémoc Cardenas of the Frente Democrático Nacional was leading the count. When they got the system working again, surprise! The PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gotari was declared the winner.
At this point, I believe that the vote was fair, and that the complaints from the PRD are unfounded paranoia. I admit, some notable celebrities have expressed their doubts about the fairness of the election, but without presenting some proof, I don't think they have much of an argument. If the slick, high-budget PSAs being run right now telling people to accept the decision of IFE are any indication of the manipulative skill the PAN has at its disposal, they'll have a hard time finding anything.
Posted by crispy at August 9, 2006 11:21 PM