Philip L. Russell : Mexican Elections Widen Political Chasm

Members of #yosoy132 protest alleged election fraud in Mexico. Image from Center for International Policy.
The Mexican elections:
Decision and division

The court decision once again showed how divided Mexico is and how inured to election violations its population is.

By Philip L. Russell / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2012

MEXICO CITY -- The 2012 Mexican presidential elections widened the political chasm between the political mainstream (aka. neoliberal) and the Mexican left. A poll taken after the July 1 presidential elections showed that 60% of Mexicans felt that the elections were clean, while 40% declared they were not clean.

Ricardo Monreal, the campaign coordinator for leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) summarized the position of the 40%: “Torrents of money, from unknown sources, which moved outside normal financial channels, formed the basis of the electoral fraud. We estimate the PRI candidate spent 4.6 billion pesos [$353 million] while the legal campaign limit is 336 million pesos.”

Rather than accepting what they considered to be election fraud, AMLO’s coalition of political parties, the Progressive Movement, filed a 624-page challenge to the election. While acknowledging that the apparent winner, Enrique Peña Nieto of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), received more votes than AMLO, the challengers declared that the elections should be annulled due to their having failed to meet the constitutional standard of fairness.

The principle challenge to fairness was spending in excess of the legal limit. The $353 million of estimated spending included the cost of an “imperial” fleet of private airplanes and helicopters, massive campaign publicity, and the distribution of millions of items including home appliances, T-shirts, farm animals, and prepaid gift cards.

The challengers also alleged that there was outright vote buying using cash, prepaid phone cards, and other items. Other charges leveled by the Progressive Movement included the use of pre-election polls, not to measure public opinion, but to create the image of an inevitable Peña Nieto victory.

Mexico’s special election court rendered an unappealable decision affirming Peña Nieto’s victory. It ruled that excessive spending had only been suggested but not proved -- proof which would not be available until final campaign accounting was due in January.

Similarly it rejected the many items, such as prepaid phone cards, used to show vote buying by declaring that the challengers only showed that the cards existed, not that they were used to buy votes. The other challenges were also dismissed. Flawed polling, the court ruled, was simply an exercise of free speech, not a cause for invalidating the election.

The court decision once again showed how divided Mexico is and how inured to election violations its population is. A poll after the ruling showed that 55% of Mexicans thought the election court made the correct decision, while 71% felt that vote buying had occurred.

The now officially victorious PRI candidate welcomed the decision and set about arranging the political transition. The PAN, the party of incumbent president Felipe Calderón, also accepted the decision but did suggest an obvious change to electoral procedure -- requiring parties to submit their records of campaign spending before the election court rules on the validity of an election.

Not surprisingly, the ruling dismayed the progressive intelligentsia. Criticism centered on the court’s failure to use its investigatory power to determine the quantity and origin of the massive campaign spending obvious to everyday Mexicans. This, critics allege, would have likely uncovered money coming from illegal sources (such as drug traffickers), money channeled through illegal channels (by law money must be channeled through political parties), and money being spent in excess of the 336-million-peso limit.

Critics noted requiring those challenging elections to document cash flow constitutes a virtual invitation to illegal spending. Political parties lack the power to subpoena bank records to document cash flow, while the court has full subpoena power. Similarly pundits noted the court set an almost impossibly high bar for proving vote buying since both material objects (as phone cards) and sworn testimony were deemed insufficient evidence to prove vote buying.

Response to the court ruling went beyond the written word. The day after the August 30 court ruling, #yosoy132, the student movement which sprang up to protest the “imposition” of Peña Nieto as president, staged a demonstration. Some 4,000 marched in a Mexico City “funeral procession” for democracy. A sign at the protest summed up the tenor of the march “Those on top say we should give up and accept Peña Nieto as president, those on the bottom say ‘surrender prohibited.’”

The following day another 2,500 turned out to protest as the new members of the Chamber of Deputies were sworn in. In other cities, such as Guadalajara, some 4,000 marched. A sign there read, “We block streets, we unblock minds.”

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, former presidential candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), gives a thumbs up to his supporters at Mexico City's Zocalo Plaza, Sept. 9, 2012. Photo by Christian Palma / AP.
Although members of the PRD, the main party of the coalition nominating AMLO, did not welcome the court ruling, the party not only failed to endorse protest demonstrations, but declared it would work within the system. PRD president Jesús Zambrano stated that since it was their duty to serve their citizens, state governors belonging to the PRD would recognize Peña Nieto as president and work with him. Similarly Miguel Barbosa, the PRD Senate leader, declared that the PRD congressional delegation would engage in dialogue with Peña Nieto.

The PRD is pinning its hopes on creating a responsible image and thus building on the 15.9 million votes its candidate received in the 2012 presidential elections. This could position the party to challenge the PRI in the next presidential election in 2018. The best-known potential PRD candidate for 2018 is Marcelo Ebrard, current mayor of Mexico City. He is popular at the end of his six-year term and has already declared that when his term ends in December he will begin campaigning for the presidency.

Another potential PRD candidate for 2018, Miguel Mancera, elected on July 1 to succeed Ebrard. Mancera, who outpolled the PRI mayoral candidate by 44%, faces the immense challenge of enhancing his image while administering the huge city characterized by the late writer John Ross as El Monstruo. While Mancera has to struggle with administering the monster, Ebrard, who will have no official position after December, must keep himself in voters’ minds.

While the PRD vows to work within the system, its 2012 (and 2006) candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador took the opposite course. At a massive September 9 rally in Mexico City’s main plaza he declared, “I am not going to recognize Peña Nieto as president.” He also announced he was resigning from the PRD -- a party he had been a member of for 23 years and which he had served as president of.

In the future his political vehicle will be Morena (Movement for National Regeneration) -- the grassroots movement he built up to support his 2012 candidacy. He laid out plans to convert Morena into a recognized political party. Rather than retiring from politics, as he had previously announced he would do if he lost the election, he declared, “We will continue to struggle our whole lives until we reach our goal -- the transformation of Mexico.”

The rally very much personalized AMLO’s leadership. Speakers warming up the crowd referred to him simply as “the Leader” -- as if it were foreordained that he would lead Morena into the future. Similarly, during the rally the crowd repeatedly chanted, “Es un honor luchar con Obrador (It’s an honor to struggle with Obrador).”

The meaning of AMLO’s leaving the PRD is still unclear. It will blur the image of the left. The PRD will attempt to serve as a responsible legislative force worthy of the presidency, while AMLO and Morena have specifically rejected such a course, saying he and his followers would not be errand boys for the Peña Nieto administration.

Looking ahead to 2018, it is hard to see AMLO declining Morena’s presidential nomination. (It should be noted that George Grayson’s biography of AMLO is entitled The Mexican Messiah.) Similarly it seems unlikely that Ebrard would step aside in 2018 for AMLO (as he did in 2012). As columnist Sergio Sarmiento observed, as a result of AMLO’s leaving the PRD, “The left’s possibility of winning the presidency in 2018 was significantly reduced.”

[Austin-based writer Philip L. Russell has written six books on Latin America. His latest is The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present (Routledge). Read more articles by Philip L. Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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Philip L. Russell : Who Won the Mexican Election?

Protesters from Yosoy132 hold a mock funeral for "domocracia" during march in Mexico City, Saturday, July 14. Photo by Bernardo Montoya / Reuters.
An observers' manual:
Who won the Mexican election?

Charges of vote-buying and exceeding campaign spending limits notwithstanding, there are positive signs for Mexico’s nascent democracy.

By Philip L. Russell / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2012

Anyone who hasn’t been deliberately ignoring the news knows by now that PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto “won” the July 1 Mexican presidential election with 19.2 million votes compared to 15.8 million for the runner-up.

That however isn’t the case, since legally speaking there is a victor in Mexican elections only when a special electoral court issues an unappealable ruling that a candidate a) received more votes than any other and b) the complaints filed against the apparent winner are without merit. The court is legally required to issue its ruling by September 6.

Just as occurred in the 2006 presidential election, the candidate who was declared to have received the second highest number of votes has challenged the victory of the candidate with the most votes. In both 2006 and 2012, the candidate with the second highest vote total was Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

On July 12 AMLO challenged Peña Nieto’s electoral victory, filing a 638-page document alleging that the election failed to meet the standards set by the Mexican constitution. Article 41 stipulates that elections be “free and fair (libres y auténticas).” López Obrador based his challenge on the following:

Charge #1: The Peña Nieto campaign spent far in excess of the established legal limit. Financial accounting for the sprawling, decentralized PRI campaign isn’t even due until after the electoral court issues its final unappealable ruling. The charge is very likely true, given the massive spending which was evident during the campaign.

The only PRI campaign for which accurate spending figures are available is the 1994 gubernatorial campaign in Tabasco. In that case, the PRI spent $72 million to get its candidate elected, more than 60 times the legal limit. The exact spending total is known, not due to close auditing, but because someone leaked detailed accounts of PRI expenses. Photos of the 1,600 buses parked at a soccer stadium for Peña Nieto’s closing rally have become a symbol of the PRI’s extralegal extravagance.

Charge #2: The PRI won by buying votes. This is clearly illegal and if shown to have swung the election, would be grounds for annullment. At a press conference, AMLO exhibited 3,500 pre-paid gift cards redeemable at a big box retail store in a slum on the east edge of Mexico City. He charged the cards had been supplied by PRI operatives in exchange for PRI votes.

In other areas AMLO charged that the PRI bought votes by passing out debit cards, food baskets, construction materials, and fertilizer. Vote buying is a firmly entrenched practice in Mexico. However, providing legal proof that sufficient votes were bought to swing the election is a daunting challenge.

Charge #3: Peña Nieto’s campaign received money through illegal channels. By law, all campaign spending must be channeled through recognized political parties. AMLO charged the Peña Nieto campaign used funds outside the party structure to make massive buys of pre-paid gift cards and debit cards which were distributed to sway votes. Other funds illegally used by the campaign came from PRI-controlled state governments and from abroad.

Charge #4: Polls indicating that Peña Nieto had an overwhelming lead over AMLO served to create the impression that a Peña Nieto victory was inevitable. While the polls were portrayed as impartial, they were paid for by the PRI to bolster Peña Nieto's candidacy.

Charge #5: The broadcast media -- radio and television -- illegally provided de facto support for Peña Nieto by casting as news stories programming produced to further the Peña Nieto campaign.

Charge #6: During the course of the campaign the PRD pointed out the violations of election law noted above. Both the government agency charged with organizing the election and the agency charged with prosecuting electoral crime ignored PRD complaints during the election when action could have been taken to ensure electoral fairness.

The Mexican electoral court has two possible courses of action. After examining complaints it can rule that regardless of what irregularities were proven, the election still met the “free and fair” standard. It can also rule, based on Article 41, that the election should be nullified.

The court is not legally empowered to disqualify an individual candidate, as Tour de France officials can when an individual rider is found to have used illegal drugs.

Peña Nieto will almost certainly be declared the winner. If the election were overturned it would be a much greater decision than Bush v. Gore. In the U.S. case, there were two candidates, each ready and willing to move into the White House. In the Mexican case, overturning the election would mean starting the whole complex election process over again.

Since this process cannot be completed before the end of incumbent President Calderón’s term on November 30, the incoming congress would have to select an interim president until the new election selected someone to serve as president until 2018.

Even though it appears AMLO won’t gain the presidency, he did surprisingly well. He shook off the negative image created by his massive 2006 post-electoral protests and received more votes in 2012 than he did in 2006. Also, he was the only major candidate who gained ground during the course of the campaign, at the expense of both Peña Nieto and Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of the incumbent PAN.

The left in general also made important gains. The PRD candidate for Mexico City mayor, a position generally regarded as the second most important in the country, received a whopping 44% more votes than the PRI candidate. The left also emerged as the second largest force in the Chamber of Deputies.

Charges of vote-buying and exceeding campaign spending limits notwithstanding, there are positive signs for Mexico’s nascent democracy. For the third presidential election in a row, citizen-volunteers manned polling places and counted votes with minimal controversy. Voters frequently voted for one presidential candidate and for a congressional candidate from a different party. Finally the election gave birth to the #yosoy132 student movement.

Just as the Occupy Movement in the U.S. highlighted wealth inequality and the recent Chilean student movement highlighted the inequality in educational opportunity, Mexican students focused unprecedented public scrutiny on the de facto political power of Mexico’s television duopoly.

[Austin-based writer Philip L. Russell has written six books on Latin America. His latest is The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present (Routledge). ]

Also read Philip Russell's earlier Rag Blog reports on the Mexican elections.

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Philip L. Russell : The PRI and the Mexican Spring

Frontrunner Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico's PRI on the campaign trail. Image from The Washington Post.
The Return of the PRI
and the Mexican Spring

The big surprise of the first debate was how well Peña Nieto was able to respond to attacks, thus destroying a widespread notion that he couldn’t speak coherently without a teleprompter.

By Philip L. Russell / The Rag Blog / June 28, 2012

In Mexico’s 2000 and 2006 presidential elections, the early frontrunner fell by the wayside as illegal funding and effective campaigning propelled challengers into the presidency. Unless the pollsters are very, very wrong, this year Enrique Peña Nieto, the early frontrunner, will coast to an easy victory.

Peña Nieto, the candidate of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, is a made-for-TV candidate -- handsome and married to a beautiful soap opera star. Comparisons have already been made with JFK and Jackie. Appearances can’t be overestimated in a nation where the vast majority of voters rely on television for their news. Powerful business and media interests strive to keep Peña Nieto’s image favorable and before voters.

He draws the support of those dissatisfied with 12 years of slow economic growth and failed security policy under the incumbent National Action Party (PAN) party. Since they have no memory of PRI authoritarianism and the 20th century’s repeated economic crises, young people are the strongest supporters of Peña Nieto.

The formidable PRI political machine is solidly behind Peña Nieto. This machine, built up during the party’s 71 years in power, currently draws support from 20 PRI state governors who funnel human and financial recourses to the campaign. A Peña Nieto rally in Campeche illustrated the machine’s ability to mobilize people. There the pro-PRI oil workers union packed members into 21 busses sent to the rally, thus maintaining the image of broad support for their candidate. More than 1,600 buses brought supporters to the PRI candidate’s closing rally in Mexico City.

Josefina Vázquez Mota won a primary election to become the candidate of the incumbent PAN, which ousted the PRI from the presidency in 2000. Vázquez Mota chose a single word as her campaign slogan, “different.” Except for her being the first female major-party nominee for president, her campaign has never successfully explained just how she is different.

Unlike the solid support the PRI has generated for Peña Nieto, the PAN is rife with splits which undermine her candidacy. Vicente Fox, the first PAN president, endorsed Peña Nieto. Manuel Clouthier, son of a charismatic PAN presidential nominee with the same name, left the party declaring it had been “totally corrupted by power.”

Not only has her campaign lacked dramatic new proposals, but Vázquez Mota is saddled with the slow growth and the out-of-control drug war which have plagued the presidency of term-limited PAN incumbent Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). Poet and human rights activist Javier Sicilia told her, “For many you represent the continuation of policies which have plunged us into horror, misery, and plunder.”

In 2006, the supreme electoral court declared that Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) had lost the presidential election by less than a percentage point. His refusal to accept the loss and the massive protests he organized enhanced his confrontational reputation.

This year AMLO, once again candidate of the center-left Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), has spent the campaign season trying to shed his confrontational reputation. He no longer refers to the business community as a “mafia” and stresses that he is the only candidate who will introduce “true change.” He seeks to replace the current neoliberal economic model, which he has labeled “broken.” 

AMLO has promised to make public investment the motor of growth. This would include five new oil refineries and a high-speed rail network. He claims that without increasing the deficit or raising taxes, he can finance such spending by ending corruption, effective collection of existing taxes, and imposing government austerity (including lowering exorbitant salaries of top officials).

As a final boost to the economy, AMLO proposes reducing the prices of gasoline and electricity, both of which are supplied by government monopolies. Critics note that such a policy would subsidize wealthy auto owners and increase both the government deficit and the production of greenhouse gases.

Mexican musician Julieta Venegas performs in support of the student movement #YoSoy132, or "I am 132" in Mexico City, Saturday, June 16, 2012. Photo by Marco Ugarte / AP.
The campaign, which officially began on March 30, has been a blur of rallies and meetings with various consistencies, the main purpose of which is to get print, TV, and increasingly, social media to spread the day’s message throughout the country. A mind-numbing avalanche of 30-second TV and radio spots touting the candidates forms the background to these daily events. The federal government provides parties with free airtime for the spots. Few viewers however feel these spots improve the quality of Mexican democracy.

The steady stream of campaign events was twice punctuated by government-organized TV debates. The big surprise of the first debate was how well Peña Nieto was able to respond to attacks by both Vázquez Mota and AMLO, thus destroying a widespread notion that he couldn’t speak coherently without a teleprompter.

In the first debate Vázquez Mota attacked Peña Nieto’s record as governor of the state of Mexico. In the second debate AMLO laid out his development plans, which others declared financially unworkable. Neither debate introduced anything startlingly new or markedly shifted polling numbers.

As the graph below indicates, Peña Nieto has retained his commanding lead, and AMLO has slowly risen as negative perceptions of him have faded. Finally, Vázquez Mota’s lackluster campaign slipped her into third place.

Graph from Reforma, June 22, 2012, p. 4.
During the campaign there was substantial discussion of the economy, which all the candidates agreed was not growing fast enough. Peña Nieto and Vázquez Mota advocated bringing private capital into Pemex, the national oil company. AMLO opposed that, declaring it to be “privatization.”

All three advocated increased funding for rural development, thus lowering poverty and increasing agricultural production. Peña Nieto called for fiscal, energy and labor reform. AMLO in effect called for rolling economic policy back half a century by once again using the state as an engine of economic development.

Another major issue, public security, has produced virtually identical responses. Rather than claiming that the current strategy, which has produced 60,000 deaths under Calderón, was a failure, the candidates vowed to continue waging the drug war. AMLO represented the consensus in promising a “federal police force, trained and honest, which will guarantee security and which will slowly replace military forces in the streets.”

The campaigning has been notable for what it has not considered. None of the candidates has proposed anything as radical as the new tax on the rich proposed by victorious French presidential candidate François Hollande. Nor was their substantial debate on global climate change even as shorelines move inland along the Gulf Coast and northern Mexico withers as the result of a devastating drought.

The issue of NAFTA has been laid to rest. The treaty has been accepted as reality, and none of the candidates dwelt on changing or abolishing it. Finally, none of the candidates has followed Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina’s proposal to decriminalize drugs.

The one major surprise of the campaign came, not from the candidates, but from the students at Mexico City’s elite private Universidad Iberoamericana. On May 11, Peña Nieto appeared at a campus rally, assuming it would be the usual photo op with a chance for Q and A.

Much to his surprise, students had organized and vociferously confronted him on a variety of issues, such as how as governor he had directed police to break up protests in the town of Atenco. Police there not only abused residents, but sexually assaulted women they had arrested.

Rather than face down protesters, Peña Nieto retreated out the back door of the auditorium. He later declared the students had been manipulated by outside interests opposed to his candidacy.

In response 131 Iberoamericana students produced a video in which each held up a university ID and declared they had not been manipulated. This video was posted on line and soon went viral. Within days this posting gave birth to a national student movement known as #yosoy132 (I am 132), referring to additional students who joined the initial 131 protestors.

Members lambasted Peña Nieto’s candidacy and attacked the two dominant TV networks for dominating political discourse. Activists even organized their own candidate forum which both Vázquez Mota and AMLO attended. Peña Nieto declined to appear, declaring the forum would be stacked against him. The movement staged various protests, including one at the studios of the dominant Televisa network. Some of the signs carried by protesters declared:

• Peña: television is yours, the streets are ours.
• If your daughter had been raped in Atenco you wouldn’t think he was so cute.
• Neither right nor left, we are the 99% and we’re going after the 1% (in Spanish: Ni de la izquierda ni de la derecha, somos los de abajo y vamos por los de arriba).

Despite generating widespread publicity, #yosoy132 did little to change poling numbers. Those involved in the movement were urban students with internet connections. By the movement’s own estimate, only 112,000, or 0.1% of the population, viewed the #yosoy132-organized debate. Also, the movement failed to explicitly endorse either Vázquez Mota or AMLO.

As the July 1 one-round, winner-take-all election approaches, the question has become, not will Peña Nieto win, but who will be in second place. Late in June Vázquez Mota gained some ground emphasizing that, thanks to sound economic policy, the last 12 years of PAN administration have avoided the economic crises of the past. The roughly even split between Vázquez Mota and AMLO works to Peña Nieto’s advantage, since it prevents either of his challengers from rallying the “anybody-but-Peña Nieto” vote.

[Austin-based writer Philip L. Russell has written six books on Latin America. His latest is The History of Mexico: From Pre-Conquest to Present (Routledge). Frequently updated information on the Mexican presidential campaign can be found in chapter 30 of www.mexicofrompreconquesttopresent.com.]

Also read Philip Russell's April 19, 2012, Rag Blog report: "Mexican Elections: A Veteran, a Smile, and an Image."

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John Ross : Oaxaca : Killer Governor Blown Away

Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (depicted above) was blown away in the recent Mexican elections by left-right candidate Gabino Cue. Cartoon from NNDB.
Victor Gabino Cue a question mark:
Killer Governor blown away in Oaxacan election

The unlikely new governor Gabino Cue, [was] the candidate of a much-questioned alliance between the left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and President Felipe Calderon's right-wing PAN...

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- As the preliminary election results began to flow this past July 4th, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), Oaxaca's outgoing governor whose police state tactics have been dissed at every strata of Mexican society from the nation's Supreme Court to the Zapotec market venders in his state capital, was not a happy camper.

Early returns overwhelmingly favored Gabino Cue, the candidate of a bizarre left-right alliance over URO's chosen successor Eviel Perez for governor of this impoverished southern state and Ulises began to drink heavily.

Soon, according to eye-witnesses as reported by Proceso magazine, Ruiz got on his cell phone to trash former aides, accusing them of betraying him and threatening great bodily harm. Indeed, his ex-Secretary of Government Jorge Franco took the threats to heart and reportedly fled Mexico.

As Cue's margin of victory mounted, URO became desperate and tried to shut down the preliminary vote count or PREP, ordering electricity cut off to the state electoral institute where the votes were being registered but the vote counters had backup generators and were prepared to ward off the sabotage.

Although URO's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has had a lock on Oaxaca for the past 81 years and controlled the state electoral apparatus, there seemed to be no way that Ruiz could dodge defeat. Even though URO's henchmen had set up duplicate Internet pages to communicate doctored results, URO's candidate was losing on both of them.

Ulises Ruiz's star rose precipitously in the PRI firmament when his political godfather Roberto Madrazo won the presidency of the party in 2004 -- URO had once been his chauffeur and Madrazo engineered Ruiz's successful candidacy for governor of Oaxaca.

Madrazo won the PRI presidential nomination in 2006 but ran an inept campaign and finished in third place, the worst showing ever for the party that had controlled the nation's destiny from 1928 through 2000, the longest-ruling political dynasty in the known universe.

Ruiz did not fare much better in Oaxaca. In June 2006, one month prior to the presidential election, it became evident that URO would lose the state for Madrazo to the leftist upstart Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and he went on the war path, ordering state police to break up a "planton" (encampment) of teachers from the maverick Education Workers Union's Section 22 in the Oaxaca city plaza -- but the maestros soon rallied and took the square back.

After three days of bruising confrontations with the police, hundreds of social struggle groups from all over this majority Indian state convened to form the Oaxaca Peoples' Popular Assembly or APPO, which became the linchpin of the landmark civic insurrection of 2006.

At the zenith of the uprising, the APPO and its allies took over the state television channel and set up a thousand barricades in and around the capitol, the self-declared "Commune of Oaxaca."

URO retaliated. Twenty six APPO supporters, including U.S. Indymedia reporter Brad Will, were executed by the governor's roving death squads between August and November. Will's murder October 27th during a last-ditch effort by the APPO to shut Oaxaca city down triggered federal intervention and thousands of military police were sent in to crush the rebellion. Hundreds were arrested and tortured and flown to out-of-state prisons where they were locked up for months on bogus charges.

The suppression of individual guarantees in Oaxaca during URO's reign of terror drew condemnation from the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) and even the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice. International human rights organizations issued highly critical reports. When Irene Khan, director of Amnesty International, tried to hand her organization's conclusions to URO, he defiantly refused to accept the document.

The international spotlight has continued to dog Ruiz since 2006. On April 27th of this year, goons thought to be on URO's payroll opened fire on a bus full of human rights workers seeking to deliver humanitarian aid to the autonomous Triqi Indian municipality of San Juan Copala, killing one international observer from Finland, Jyri Jaakola.

When deputies from the Green Party faction in the European parliament traveled to Oaxaca to interview Ulises this June about his role in the killing, the governor refused to meet with them and accused "foreigners" ("extranjeros") of intervening in the Oaxaca elections.

As news of the PRI's defeat spread this July 4th, Oaxacans took to the streets, giving voice to the belatedly fulfilled chant of 2006: "Ya Cayo! Ya Cayo! Ulises Ya Cayo!" ("He's Fallen! He's Fallen! Ulises Has Fallen!") The "voto de castigo" or punishment vote meted out to the now ex- governor "expressed the exasperation of the people with the repressive, authoritarian, and, yes, fascist rule of URO and the PRI," Azael Santiago, leader of Section 22, summed it up for the press.

Oaxaca's new governor Gabino Cue in Puerto Escondido, March 19, 2010. Photo from Cue's website.
The unlikely new governor Gabino Cue, the candidate of a much-questioned alliance between the left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and President Felipe Calderon's right-wing PAN plus two small left parties (Cue, a one-time PRIista is himself a member of record of Democratic Convergence, a shadow party of ex-PRIistas) handed the Institutional Revolutionary Party its most damaging setback in eight decades of iron-fisted, cradle-to-grave rule in Oaxaca -- even when the national PRI lost the presidency in 2000, the Institutionals retained control in this conflictive southern state.

Cue's awkwardly-named alliance "United for Peace and Progress in Oaxaca" (UPPO), topped the former ruling party by nine points July 4th, soundly whipping URO's hand-picked "gallo" Eviel Perez by 200,000 votes (700,000 to 500,000). For Ruiz, the vote represented a double TKO. Thought to be next in line to succeed Beatriz Paredes as president of the PRI (Paredes is an unannounced presidential candidate), the Oaxaca thrashing appears to have derailed URO's national political ambitions.

Nonetheless, results from the state congress races proved less gloomy for the PRI with the the Institutional Revolution taking 16 seats, the PAN 11, and the PRD 10. Although the two alliance partners hold a majority, whether they can work together for legislative change remains to be tested.

In the aftermath of the July 4th shakedown, a bitter Ruiz appointed Perez president of the state PRI to confirm the former governor's continuing domination of the party apparatus in Oaxaca, refused to negotiate with Cue on the details of transition, and lodged protests in a thousand polling places with the state electoral institute to overturn what appears to be an irreversible debacle.

One pivotal addition to the new state congress will be Flavio Sosa, a former spokesperson for the APPO during the 2006 Battle of Oaxaca. Sosa was once a PRD deputy in the federal congress but jumped briefly to the PAN before returning to Oaxaca to become a key voice in the APPO.

Lured up to Mexico City in August 2006 to negotiate with federal officials, Sosa was arrested after meeting with then-Secretary of Government Carlos Abascal and locked down in the nation's maximum-security penitentiary for 10 months, during which stretch Sosa was transformed into Mexico's most public political prisoner. Cue is thought to have nixed the flamboyant Sosa's candidacy for the state congress but relented when he realized his veto would cost the Alliance the votes of APPO supporters.

The PAN-PRD alliance was brokered by political fixer Manuel Camacho Solis, a former PRI mayor of Mexico City and now a PRD honcho who brought together Jesus Ortega, the leader of the "Chuchus" group (many members are named Jesus) that controls the left party apparatus and are arch-foes of the PRD's ex-presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), and Cesar Nava, installed by Calderon as president of the PAN. The goal of this coalition of strange bedfellows was to halt the PRI steamroller before it reaches critical mass and takes back the presidency in 2012.

Accompanied by Lopez Obrador, Gabino Cue, a former mayor of Oaxaca city who challenged URO in the 2004 gubernatorial race, visited all 572 municipalities or counties in the state last year, 402 of which are autonomous majority Indian entities, an expedition that established his creds with social struggle organizations. The tour with Lopez Obrador is thought to have been the building block that put Cue over the top July 4th.

Ironically, AMLO rejected the alliance between the PAN and the PRD and refused to take part in Cue's campaign for governor -- Lopez Obrador continues to maintain that he was stripped of presidential victory in 2006 by PAN flimflam (although AMLO did win Oaxaca handily that year.)

The PAN and the PRD fielded joint gubernatorial candidates in five states July 4th, winning in three of them -- as graphic evidence of Mexico's Byzantine political dynamic, all five of the PAN-PRD coalition candidates were ex-PRIistas. But whether the left's fortunes will prosper in states where it was part of the winning ticket remains to be seen.

In Sinaloa and Puebla, where the alliance scored upsets, the PRD has minimal influence and will not play a pertinent role in the new administrations. But in Oaxaca where the electoral left has aligned itself with the social struggle and Lopez Obrador remains a popular figure, the PRD will command a quota of power.

Which side of the alliance Gabino Cue ultimately favors remains up for grabs at this early hour. The morning after his resounding victory, he telephoned both Felipe Calderon and Lopez Obrador to thank them for their support and invited them both to his December 1st inauguration (don't expect AMLO to put in an appearance).

Perhaps the litmus test for the leftists' strength in the incoming Oaxaca government will be how Gabino Cue handles seething public indignation at URO's prolonged police state regime. "There are widows and orphans. Hundreds were sent to jail unjustly and tortured. Someone has to answer for all this," insists Adelfo Regino, a Mixe Indian lawyer and founding member of the National Indigenous Congress. Adelfo worries that the new governor will offer amnesty to Ruiz and his thugs in exchange for political peace.

Throughout his campaign, Cue pledged justice for the families of the dead but has been quick to reject the creation of a truth commission or the appointment of a special prosecutor. On the other hand, Gabino Cue's election extends a slender beam of hope for justice to the family and friends of Brad Will, cut down by URO's police in Santa Lucia del Camino, a suburb that the alliance won July 4th. Cue's coalition also won Oaxaca city.

2010 is the bicentennial of Mexico's War of Independence from Spain and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, twin celebrations that will have deep resonance in this southern state, the birthplace of three seminal personages in this distant neighbor nation's oft-violent history: Benito Juarez, the Zapotec Indian who rose to become Mexico's first (and last) indigenous president; Porfirio Diaz, dictator from 1876 to 1910 whose overthrow ushered in the revolution; and Ricardo Flores Magon, the anarchist writer and organizer who played a crucial role in the genesis of that first great uprising of the landless in Latin America.

Indeed, the defeat of the PRI is freighted with historical significance, particularly for armed groups who view 2010 as a platform for renewed revolutionary struggle. Oaxaca has traditionally been fertile ground for guerrilla movements.

But for the survivors of URO's 2006 onslaught, optimism is tempered with caution. The next months before Gabino Cue takes office in December will be extremely treacherous ones, frets Gustavo Esteva, rector of the University of the Earth and a theoretician of grassroots organizing in Oaxaca.

The "colatazo" or tail whipping of the PRI dinosaur as the party is so often caricatured, could produce plenty of fresh victims. After 81 years with its foot on the throat of this poverty-wracked, mostly rural and indigenous state, the PRI is not going to go gently into the good night. "We have to get ready for the War!" a drunken Ulises shouted at his compinches on election night.

That war was apparently detonated July 19th on the first day of the state-wide Guelaguetza fiesta, when the outgoing governor ordered his state police to drive APPO street venders from the Oaxaca city plaza. Dozens were injured and arrested in the melee.

Gabino Cue did not win the July 4th election so much as voters turned out to dump URO and the PRI machine, Esteva reasons. Gustavo is amazed that brigades of rebel youths who in 2006 fought Ulises's death squads on the barricades, plastered walls with fierce anarchist slogans, and who usually reject electoral politics as an avenue of change, pitched in to organize the voter turn-out and volunteered as poll watchers in 2010.

The bases do not really trust Gabino Cue to satisfy their demands without a fight, Esteva confides. Indeed, justice is only going to come home to Oaxaca if the social thrust from the bottom that was embodied in the 2006 revolt by the APPO and Section 22 rises up to challenge the new governor to do the right thing.

[John Ross is at home in Mexico City. His latest opus, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City ("gritty and pulsating" -- the New York Post) is available at your neighborhood independent bookstore. For complaints, admonitions, and faint praise write johnross@igc.org.]

The Rag Blog

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Mexican Elections : 'Which Cartel Are You Voting For?'

"Which cartel are you voting for?" Cartoon by El Fisgon / La Jornada.
'United Cartels' are big winners in
Mexico's Super Sunday elections

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / July 9, 2010

See 'The people of Oaxaca speak' by Victor Raul Martinez Vasquez, Below.

MEXICO CITY -- The cartoon in the morning left daily La Jornada summed up the July 4th Super Sunday election here: two citizens are picking their way through the debris of the balloting in which a dozen governorships are up for grabs. "Which cartel are you voting for?" one asks the other.

The cartoon, drawn by "El Fisgon" ("The Busybody"), one of the nation's most acute political commentators, encapsulated the question many Mexican voters have been puzzling over in the heat of a campaign during which front-running candidates have been gunned down, the victims of apparent drug war hits, and others have wound up behind bars, charged with crimes related to Mexico's flourishing drug trade.

In readjusted figures released by Mexican drug war officials last week, more than 25,000 citizens have been slain since December 2006 when President Felipe Calderon declared an ill-advised war on the drug cartels. The number of dead and their survivors constitutes a substantial voting block.

Never before have the cartels so publicly intervened in a Mexican election. On June 28th, less than a week before Super Sunday, unidentified gunmen cut down the gubernatorial candidate for the once and future ruling PRI party in Tamaulipas, a border state wracked by protracted violence between the Gulf Cartel and the gang's former enforcers, the Zetas.

The assassination of Rodolfo Torre Cantu, a shoo-in for the state house, was the highest profile assassination of a Mexican politico since Luis Donaldo Colosio, the PRI presidential candidate, was whacked in Tijuana in 1994, a crime sometimes ascribed to lingering conflicts within the party over his candidacy. State and federal investigators discount political rivalry as being the cause of Torre Cantu's death.

What is dead certain is that the murder of Torre Cantu, the Tamaulipas Secretary of Public Health, was not a case of mistaken identity -- when he was ambushed on an access road to the municipal airport in the state capitol of Ciudad Victoria, the vehicle in which he was riding was plastered with an enormous portrait of the now-deceased politician.

Because the killing came so close to Election Day, new ballots could not be printed in time and Dr. Torre Cantu's name appeared at the top of the PRI ticket. On June 29th, in an emergency session convened by PRI party president Beatriz Paredes, 16 PRI governors selected the dead candidate's brother, Eligio, a civil engineer with no political experience, to replace him should the party win the state house July 4th.

Although no arrests have been forthcoming, one witness purportedly testified that one of the killers' getaway cars was emblazoned with a "Z" -- an indication that the Zetas bear responsibility for taking out the candidate, a message of which the new governor will no doubt take note. PRI officials scoff at reports that the Zetas were tipped off by campaign workers infiltrated by the drug gang to keep tabs on Dr. Torre Cantu's whereabouts.

The PRIista was the second candidate to be cut down in Tamaulipas in the run-up to July 4th. On May 13th, Manuel Guajardo, the right-wing PAN hopeful for municipal president of Valle Hermosa was assassinated outside that northern Tamaulipas town said to be the home base of Heberto Lasca Lasca, "El Lascas," the capo of one wing of the Zetas.

Funeral of assassinated PRI gubernatorial candidate Dr. Torre Cantu, in Tamaulipas. Photo from AP.
All over the state, candidates for municipal and state offices in addition to an estimated 700 election workers dropped out of the July 4th vote taking despite promises that their safety would be guaranteed by military escorts.

"The United Cartels," a handle ascribed to various drug gangs in a "narco-manta" (banner) posted in Matamoros on the border prior to the July 4th election, "are now dictating which candidates the parties can run for office," wrote Proceso magazine correspondent Gerardo Albarron de Alba in an election curtain raiser from Tamaulipas.

Chihuahua, the nation's largest state, is another border entity where the campaign trail was drenched in blood. 1300 Chihuahuans, more than half of them in Ciudad Juarez, have lost their lives since the first of the year, including a pair of candidates for municipal president in the Valley of Juarez outside that conflictive border crossing. Many other candidates were warned not to campaign. Opponents tied Hector Murguia, PRI candidate for mayor of Ciudad Juarez, to "La Linea," enforcers for the Juarez Cartel, which is locked in an intractable battle with Chapo Guzman's Pacific Cartel for control of the Juarez "plaza."

Five nights before the balloting, an assistant Chihuahua attorney general was assassinated on a public street in Juarez. On election eve, a freshly severed head was installed on Murguia's front lawn. Early morning voters July 4th discovered four corpses hung from
the city's pedestrian bridges.

Similarly, next door in Durango where the PAN and the PRI battled down to the wire for the governor's seat, bullets replaced ballots as the Zetas-Chapos gang war rages throughout the state. In the week before the election, 10 were cut down at a Durango drug treatment center -- such facilities are often used by the drug gangs as safe houses for their pistoleros.

Next door in Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug culture, which also selected a new governor July 4th, the headquarters of the three major political parties were firebombed by unknowns. At the closing campaign rally for PRI gubernatorial candidate Jesus Vizcarra, a small plane dumped thousands of leaflets on the diehards depicting the candidate in the company of "El Mayo" Zembada, number two in Chapo's cartel -- the leaflets were slugged "its all in the family."

At the other end of the country in Quintana Roo on the Yucatan peninsula, the left-coalition candidate for governor, "Greg" Sanchez was removed from the ballot after he was formally indicted on charges of laundering vast amounts of money through private bank accounts. Sanchez, an evangelical preacher and former mayor of the luxury resort city of Cancun, explained the discrepancies as "an accounting error." The ex-left candidate reportedly owns a ranch on the Chiapas-Guatemalan border through which hundreds of undocumented Cubans (Sanchez's wife is a Cubana) and tons of Colombian cocaine are guaranteed safe passage.

Sanchez, currently locked up in a maximum-security federal prison, is the second big-time Quintana Roo politico to be collared by Mexican authorities for drug crimes. Mario Villanueva, governor between 1993 and 1999, was convicted of transforming that Caribbean state into a free duty port for Colombian cocaine cartels, and is currently fighting extradition to the U.S.

But perhaps the bitterest face-off this July 4th had more to do with presidential elections upcoming in 2012 than with the "United Cartel's" campaign to secure political space. In the conflictive southern state of Oaxaca [see story below], the shoot-out between outgoing governor Ulises Ruiz's successor and right-left coalition candidate Gabino Cue had already cost seven lives by Election Day. Ruiz, whose police state tactics triggered civic rebellion in 2006 during which dozens of his opponents were executed by roving death squads, is in line to take over the presidency of the PRI once the smoke has cleared back home.

Oaxaca is one of five states in which the left-center PRD and the right-wing PAN affiliated in a joint effort to push back the PRI July 4th, an arrangement of bizarre bedfellows brokered by Manuel Camacho Solis, ex-Mexico City mayor and former PRI bigwig who is now a PRD honcho. Just four years ago in the 2006 presidential face-off, PANista Felipe Calderon was awarded a fraud-saturated victory over the PRD's Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the two parties have been at each other's throats ever since.

The PRD-PAN coalition claimed broad victory in Sunday's election in Oaxaca winning both the governorship and 24 out of 26 seats in the state congress.

Despite the painful loss of his successor Eviel Perez, Ulises Ruiz is banking on becoming the next national president of the PRI and heir to the current Boss of all Bosses Beatriz Paredes, a slot that would put him in an advantageous position to call the shots in the 2012 "presidenciales."

Paredes, the most prominent woman politician in the land, who is always garbed in one of her trademark voluminous "huipiles" or colorful Indian muumuus (she brags that she has never worn the same one twice), has designs on the 2012 PRI presidential nomination and appears to have struck a deal with her party's senate leader, Manlio Fabio Beltrones ("Don Beltrones") to derail the ambitions of current frontrunner Enrique Pena Nieto, the short but photogenic governor of Mexico state who is backed by the TV giant Televisa.

Which of the candidates will win the support of which drug cartel is expected to be the deciding factor in who wins the nod.

The Super Sunday electoral fiesta was billed as the last stop on the electoral calendar before 2012. Even by Mexican standards, the July 4th balloting was the most devious stand-off in recent Mexican electoral history, marked by tapped telephone conversations suggesting the illicit distribution of state funds in Puebla, Oaxaca, and Veracruz, phony polling, the wholesale bribery of the already bought-and-sold-mainstream media, homophobia (a doctored photo of the PRD-PAN candidate in Puebla in drag), lie detector interrogations, demands that candidates submit to "anti-doping" tests, and robust narco-violence.

In a maneuver to soft peddle the role of the PRI, a party that mismanaged Mexico for seven decades of cradle-to-the-grave corruption, the Institutional Revolutionary Party has aligned itself with the Mexican Green Ecologist Party (PVEM) whose only attachment to the greening of Mexico is the color of the money, and in some states to the PANAL, a vanity party owned by teachers' union dominatrix Elba Esther Gordillo. The PRI-led coalitions masqued their true identities behind such titles as "Para Cambiar Veracruz" ("To Change Veracruz"), "Zacatecas First!", and "Todos Tamaulipas" ("All Tamaulipas.")

Not to be outdone, the PRD-PAN coalitions and PRD alliances with other left parties like the Party of Labor (PT) and Democratic Convergence hid behind similar benign sounding front groups and it may be weeks before the real winners can be separated from the losers.

Nonetheless, preliminary results signal a clean sweep for the PRI in four out of five northern narco states, including Baja California which only selected municipal presidents and a local congress July 4th. The one-time ruling party also appears to have sustained the victorious roll that won it a majority in both houses of congress in the 2009 mid-terms over Calderon's battered PAN with big wins in Quintana Roo, Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, Aguascalientes, and Zacatecas -- the only state taken from the PRD camp (and the only one governed by a woman).

Prolonged post-electoral struggle in Veracruz, where the PRI margin of victory is being tenaciously contested by the PAN, is predicted. Oaxaca, Puebla, and Sinaloa, three states in which the PAN and the PRD joined forces, will be governed by the coalition -- although whether the left PRD will actually have a significant voice in administrating the affairs of the states is dubious.

But the big winner, as is so often the case, was the Party of No with just under half the eligible voters failing to turn out at the polls, many because of fears of threatened narco-violence such as in Chihuahua where only 30% of the electorate showed up. In Ciudad Juarez, thousands of citizens wrote in ballots protesting Calderon's on-going drug war.

Corporate media on both sides of the border framed the Super Sunday shebang as a referendum on Felipe Calderon's failing war on the drug cartels. Assuming this to be the case, guess who lost?

[John Ross has lived in Mexico City's old quarter for the past quarter of a century. His latest opus El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City ("gritty and pulsating" - The New York Post) chronicles this passage. He is currently at home, contemplating life after the World Cup. You are invited to send your complaints to johnross@igc.org.]

Signs of the times in Oaxaca. Photo from Upside Down World.

The people of Oaxaca speak

By Victor Raul Martinez Vasquez / July 6, 2010

When the people rise up,
demand bread, liberty, land,
the powerful tremble
from the mountains to the sea.

In critical historical moments, the people teach. Some say the voice of the people is the voice of God. The people of Oaxaca have now spoken to the authoritarian regime which has caused so much suffering. In spite of that regime's dirty war, fascist propaganda, alarming waste of public resources and the climate of terror it created in hopes of controlling votes, the people of Oaxaca, as they did in 2006, rose up and voted overwhelmingly against those it judged to be unworthy.

The elections of 2010 are historic and for many reasons:

They're the first elections in which the PRI government has been defeated in 81 years -- first as the Partido Nacional Revolucionaria (PNR), later as the Partido de la Revolucion Mexicana (PRM) and, finally, as the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI).

And Gabino Cue, the first Governor of Oaxaca not drawn from the ranks of PRI, won by a margin of more than 100,000 votes or 10% more than that of PRI's candidate, Eviel Perez Magana. Cue's legitimacy as the new Governor is therefore beyond dispute. It should at the same time be recognized that Eviel Perez contributed to the legitimacy of Cue's victory by openly accepting it. Cue should not waste the "democratic bonus" he now enjoys.

The vote is also historic because PRI lost control of the state Congress. According to preliminary analyses, PRI will have about 14 of the 42 deputies, el PAN 13 or 14 and PRD 10 or 11 which means the coalition of PRD and PAN will have a majority permitting it to dismantle the authoritarian legal structures now suffered by the people by writing a new Constitution or by drafting a series of radical constitutional reforms that create a more democratic juridical system. The new deputies must now seize this opportunity given and expected of them by the people.

The vote is historic because the people of Oaxaca moved beyond abstentionism. Some 56% of the people voted in contrast to participation at the national level of 40%. The people knew a historic moment had been reached and now expect those elected to fulfill their new and demanding responsibilities.

The people have now achieved what the past legislature refused to do. They made a political judgment against Ulises Ruiz and pronounced him guilty of the violation of human rights and inexcusable conduct in the successor to the Governor's office. The people have voted and the people have condemned him.

The political dynamics in Oaxaca have shifted to a new place, a different place in which all the repercussions of this election cannot yet be known. We are involved now in a process that began years ago. The result of the current elections are part of a much longer historic process whose most recent stages were reached in 2004 and 2006. The PRI government failed to understand what was going on during those years and gave the people more of the same: corruption, repression and lawlessness, arrogance, lies and defamations.

An immediate result of this election is that the PRI political class is now in the opposition and without the generous help of the government in power its political weight in the state will certainly change. Gabino Cue has no desire to eliminate PRI. Revenge is not on his agenda and he speaks of reconciliation. At the same time, the people who elected Cue do expect justice to be done by the Governor they put in office.

-- Source / Noticias de Oaxaca

Thanks to Val Liveoak /The Rag Blog

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