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Mexican Election

phildwyer said:
The US state would have to be mad *not* to get involved in a Mexican election that seemed likely to result in victory for a Socialist, especially under present conditions in Latin America. Regarding the expat vote, it went solidly for Calderon. Its pretty obvious that the scenario of '88 is being repeated. Although Obrador was clearly robbed, it seems that he was not *demonstrably* robbed, and so will not call his supporters onto the streets. Some of them will take to the streets anyway, but not enough to force a change in the result. A shame, again.
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I think you need to address this to slaar, not me.
 
Fair enough.

This election does smell dodgy, but as somebody else has said, not dodgy enough so it'll probably stand.
 
both sides have got under 40% not exactly a ringing endorsment of there policys even without fraud not that it will stop either if they do win pushing through "radical policys" :(
 
chilango said:
Overseas Vote:

PAN: 19,016
PRI: 1,360
PRD: 11,090
Click to expand...

Yes, solidly for the Right. But the interesting thing about this statistic is that only about 30,000 of the 13 million Mexican expats voted. Why was that? The figure also doesn't count illegal expats who returned home to vote or (more likely) voted when they happened to be on a visit home. One imagines they would have been overwhelmingly Leftist. Anyway, it seems that Obrador will contest the result in court and also hold a big rally. The elite must be shaking in their boots.
 
There is a call to mobilise here in the Zocalo on Saturday evening. Toying with the idea of going along...though probably watching from the safety of a hotel bar!
 
The authorities have announced that they are "closing" the historic centre of Mexico City on Saturday

:eek:


Marcos has said that he thinks there was fraud, that Obrador won and the the electoral process has lost all credibility. The "other campaign" will continue.
 
chilango said:
The authorities have announced that they are "closing" the historic centre of Mexico City on Saturday

:eek:
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That's not exactly unusual though, is it? I've seen it closed for demonstrations against kidnapping. Is the PRD actually planning to do anything concrete? Strikes, boycotts, anything?
 
Radio Insurgente Marcos transcript

Subcomandante Marcos, radio broadcast on July 3rd, 2006. Taped and
translated by independent filmmaker Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: In this national broadcast exclusive, this is
Subcomandante Marcos. He’s speaking in Mexico City on Monday,
translated by Rick Rowley.

SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS: [translated] Good evening. You are listening to
Radio Insurgente, the Voice of the Voiceless. We are here invading
Radio 620, the music that came to stay. We want to pass on to you some
information that the Sexta Commission has received. According to this
information, there has been fraud in the presidential elections.

The Federal Election Institute, in complicity with the President, held
a reserve of between one and 1.5 million votes to be administered in
the benefit of the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderon. According to this
information, in the afternoon between 5:30 and 6:00, there was a call
from President Vicente Fox to Ugalde, the president of the Election
Institute, asking him to change the information from the preliminary
vote count, so that voting stations that benefited Calderon were
entered first, and then the other votes were divided up. According to
this information, the PRD candidate would have gone ahead of the PAN
candidate by between one million and 1.5 million votes, but thanks to
this trick, they have changed the results.

We have yet to hear what PRD and its candidate have to say. We are
eager to find out what they have to say.

If you had any doubts and you watched television last night, you saw
the president of the Election Institute, Mr. Ugalde's message, and
immediately afterwards, within fractions of a second, Vicente Fox
responding with his message. It is clear that he knew in advance what
the Elections Institute was going to say before it was made public by
the Institute’s president. And according to our information, they
agreed to commit this fraud and impose Felipe Calderon on us.
Click to expand...

More: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/06/1349226
 
This is all very reminicent of the Bush-Gore electoral battle of 2000. The lesson from that conflict I reckon is that the disinfrancised have to take matters into their own hands and not just accept the decisions of organs of the state that are held by supporters of the "victor".

Apparently Obrador and his supporters have called for mass demonstrations. Have any of the contributors from Mexico City witnessed such demos? There's virtually nothing in the media in the UK about these elections.
 
Looks like the right-wing US media can't stop themselves from interfering in other countries' elections.

Later, CBS Radio called to set up an interview to discuss the "Calderon victory and Lopez Obrador's street protests."

Whoa. Time out! Before we allow Rupert Murdoch to call the Mexican election, let's cover the basics here:

Mexico's election is indeed a cliff-hanger, but there are no official results. Mexico's Federal Election Institute (IFE) has indicated that its preliminary computer tallies, which gave Calderon a 1 percent lead, were insufficient. On Tuesday, it admitted that 2.58 million additional ballots still need to be counted. So let's repeat: There are no official results or official count estimates.

The Federal Election Institute (IFE) had hoped to announce the winner on Sunday night using a sophisticated system of sampling from around the country, known in Mexico as "PREP." This system of compiling and releasing preliminary, unofficial election results has come under fire for causing confusion and potential unrest.
Click to expand...

http://www.alternet.org/story/38559/
 
Greg Palast - Mexico and Florida have more in common than heat

There's something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico's first "clean" election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist.

Jeb's winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business - in Mexico - at the direction of the Bush government. Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked "secret", regarding a contract for "intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations".

Given that the memo was dated September 17 2001, a week after the attack on the World Trade Centre, hunting for terrorists seemed like a heck of a good idea. But oddly, while all 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the contract was for obtaining the voter files of Venezuela, Brazil ... and Mexico.
Click to expand...

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1815750,00.html
 
They election may well be dodgy but there is enough dodginess from all sides, so any of the parties casting a stone would be a huge hypocrite.

My aunt lives in the Distrito Federal and herself and several neighbors were offered 300 pesos if they voted for the PRD. For every demo the PRD have organised they always offer free lunches, raffles and presents, they threaten to cut folks' social assistance if they don't show up too; so don't think that those million people are there out of their own free will, i bet some people there don't even know what the demo is about.

Oh by the way, people who have Calderon stickers in their cars or who display some kind of support for PAN have been assaulted recently by PRD sympathisers.
 
works both ways sadly. stories of fucking assaulkt and bribery floating around th enet,
 
The BBC is reporting that 100,000 people gathered in MC to demonstrate last night. Obrador told the mass rally that the election results would be challanged in the courts and on the streets. Mexican law forbids the manual recount of ballets, which is what the protesters are demanding, but Obrador is bringing a fraud challange to the Mexican Election Tribunal.

Now I don't know much about the MET but I wouldn't be at all suprised, given that it was established only about 10 years ago, if it's stuffed with PAN cronies, the decisive factor on who wins this election could well boil down to who wins on the streets.

Calderon has tried to co-opt Obrador by offering him a place in the cabinet if he backs off his electoral challange but he has refused. To be honest I reckon the less "consenus politics" in Mexico the better, what is needed is a government that is responsive to the needs of the masses not to the oligarchs.

Fox - Callate, chachalaca!
 
JoePolitix said:
Now I don't know much about the MET but I wouldn't be at all suprised, given that it was established only about 10 years ago, if it's stuffed with PAN cronies, the decisive factor on who wins this election could well boil down to who wins on the streets.
Click to expand...

Mexicans won't fight in the streets over this. Funnily enough for a people that go on about their revolution so much, they're a pretty unradical nation, generally speaking like. Not unlike their neighbours to the north, in fact.
 
Democracy, Mexican Style

It was learned that Felipe Calderon's brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala wrote the vote-counting software, and it's already been hacked. This new discovery is especially disturbing as whoever controls the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) computer systems can manipulate the vote process, control which votes get counted, which ones don't, and what the final vote tally will be.
Click to expand...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13941.htm[
 
I wouldn't be so sure...

phildwyer said:
Mexicans won't fight in the streets over this. Funnily enough for a people that go on about their revolution so much, they're a pretty unradical nation, generally speaking like. Not unlike their neighbours to the north, in fact.
Click to expand...

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/07/08/mexico.elex.ap/index.html

100,000 protest Mexican election results

MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) -- Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called on a huge crowd of supporters to keep protesting while he pursues a legal challenge of Mexico's disputed presidential vote count, and to help him prevent "a backward step for democracy."

…He also called for marches nationwide, beginning Wednesday and converging on Mexico City for another rally on Sunday July 16.

…And he provoked groans of disappointment from the packed crowd in Mexico City's central plaza when he told them not to block highways.

…The likelihood of continuing demonstrations suggests just how difficult it will be for the ruling party's Felipe Calderon to unify Mexicans, many of whom believe the nation has yet to overcome the decades of institutional corruption and fraud that kept its leaders in power.

…Lopez Obrador remains convinced he won the elections. He has millions of extremely devoted followers who believe only he can help Mexico's poor and downtrodden, and he views street protests as an effective means of pressuring the government and the courts.

…The crowd in the Zocalo Saturday night would accept nothing less than victory for the silver-haired former Mexico City mayor.

"We are never going to recognize this man (Calderon)," said Apolinario Fernandez, 37, a teacher from Lopez Obrador's home state of Tabasco in the southeast. "If he wants, let him govern in the north for the rich, but not in the south."

Calderon's strength is in Mexico's industrialized north while most of Lopez Obrador's supporters come from Mexico City and poor southern states. Many traveled all night to arrive at the demonstration, joining a sea of yellow, the color of Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party.

"We are ready to do whatever is necessary," said Belasario Cruz, 32, a farmer from Tabasco. "We are tired of the rich having everything and the poor having nothing."
 
Apparently the left-wing party leader says he has video proof of vote tampering. Something in today's Independent about it.
 
I keep on misreading this forum as " Mexican radio" .

have been humming the old wall of voodoo track all day now:(
 
Migraine814 said:
They election may well be dodgy but there is enough dodginess from all sides, so any of the parties casting a stone would be a huge hypocrite.

My aunt lives in the Distrito Federal and herself and several neighbors were offered 300 pesos if they voted for the PRD. For every demo the PRD have organised they always offer free lunches, raffles and presents, they threaten to cut folks' social assistance if they don't show up too; so don't think that those million people are there out of their own free will, i bet some people there don't even know what the demo is about.

Oh by the way, people who have Calderon stickers in their cars or who display some kind of support for PAN have been assaulted recently by PRD sympathisers.
Click to expand...


I´m no fan of the PRD...but DF is solidly PRD. They could easily pull a million out without even trying. I live in one the few PAN districts and i have seen 4 year old kids bullied by their classmates bullied because their parents are PRD voters. Out in the sticks the PRDistas just get shot. Don´t know the figures for this election but in the past decade over 1000 PRD actvists have been assasinated.

AMLO has now called for civil disobedience btw.
 
it doesn't seem to be going anywhere apart from him being the anti-gore, one of the videos they showed was actually a legitmate transfer of votes from president to senate boxes. (which I don't think palast or mayn have retracted that.)

don't understand how the full recount of votes is termed illegal...

the thing palast is saying is that the key is selecting votes not to count rather then defrauding them

they seeply havnt' even counted the votes in the first place
 
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