Mexico masters art of stealing elections

Sore loser? No. Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) refuses to concede the Mexican presidential election because the presidency was stolen from him.
The thievery had eerie echoes of the purloined American presidential election in 2000. George W. Bush lost Florida to Al Gore but chicanery and the Supreme Court denied Gore the White House.
Elizabeth DiNovella, writing in Progressive about the Mexican theft, notes: “Like Florida, there was an incredibly high number of annulled votes. The IFE (Federal Electoral Institute) declared nearly one million votes null.”
It is doubtful if any other country is more rife with election corruption than the so-called democracy of Mexico.
The fraudulent election this summer included voter intimidation, coercion, ballot-dumping, vote-buying and counting of extra ballots. Other odious irregularities: the unenrolled allowed to vote, proselytizing inside polling places and poll workers without IFE credentials.
And what an odd coincidence: both López Obrador and Gore led in the exit polls.
No wonder many Mexicans smelled a rat after the election. The Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) routinely stuffed the ballot box and bought votes for 71 years to stay in power.
The PRI perpetuated its biggest fraud in the 1988 presidential election. The leftist candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, had a big lead when the counting computers mysteriously “crashed.” When the computers were “working again,” they delivered the presidency to the PRI.
Felipe Calderón, conservative candidate of the National Action Party (PAN), was the beneficary of the 2006 robbery, being declared president by the IFE. (One astonished Mexican university professor called the Calderón victory impossible.)
Calderón’s fellow conservative, outgoing President Vincent Fox, violated Mexican law by campaigning for Calderón.
Fox took official tours as president to campaign against López Obrador, decrying populism, demagogy and “false messiahs.” He spent lavishly on public service messages praising achievements of his government.
Moreover, López Obrador’s party was shut out of the IFE, the election board of judges. As James McKinley wrote in the New York Times: “the entire apparatus of the state was against him. This an old tune in Mexico, one that many know the words to.”
While negative campaigning is barred by Mexican law, it thrives. One ad for Calderón said López Obrador would seize people’s homes as it was said in 1800 that Jefferson would burn all the Bibles in America if elected president. Another negative ad linked López Obrador to Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan president, who has become a Latin American bête noire to the United States just as Cuba’s Castro is.
López Obrador represents the Have Nots and the working people. He represents the wave of leftist governments sweeping Latin America including Chavez, Lula da Silva in Brazil and Vásquez in Uruguay.
In sharp contrast, Calderon is pro-business and represents the Haves. He wants a flat tax, a regressive measure that would lower taxes on business and the rich.
Typical of the positions of López Obrador, former Mexico City mayor: financial aid to single mothers and the elderly, renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement that hurts corn and bean farmers, resistance to privatization of oil and electricity firms, and free medicines and pensions for the aged.
Noam Chomsky in “Class Warfare” tells the truth about privatization: “giving away public assets for a fraction of what they are worth to rich cronies. Every president of Mexico…comes out a billionaire…as do all his friends and associates.”
López Obrador’s motto: “primeros los pobres” (first the poor). He wanted to crack down on tax evasion because wealthy Mexicans pay few taxes. He would have striven to improve the standard of living for the huge number of Mexicans now living in poverty.
While López Obrador does not use the flaming rhetoric of Subcommander Marcos of Chiapas state (“savage capitalism”), he is a populist in the true sense of being for the people against corporations and Big Business.
“When you talk about populism, you have to be careful,” he noted. “One talks about it when there are programs to help poor people but rescue the bankers and we call it development.”
Bribery, electoral fraud, indecent enrichment of Mexican presidents and other forms of corruption are imbedded in Mexican culture. These crimes suppress The People.
As Adam Smith, symbol of capitalism, admitted in his “The Wealth of Nations”: government is “instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor.”
The power structure in Mexico makes sure that leftists are kept out of power. They are a threat to the status quo and anathema to the right-wing Bush administration.