Those who who have been following the Mexico News Roundups here on dKos will be used to the steady drumbeat of major U.S. newspaper editorials calling on the candidate of the center-left
Por El Bien de Todos ("for the good of all") coalition, Adrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO), to suck it up and go away already. It's good to know, I think, that there are still real journalists out there who at least don't presume to know or understand more about the situation on the ground than those silly locals. Follow me beyond the flip to a surprisingly even-handed post-mortem analysis of the electoral process by the
NYT's James McKinley Jr.
Most of those who clicked on the link to this diary probably know that Mexico's special federal election tribunal on Tuesday decided to abrogate its constitutional duty by not further investigating the evidence of voter fraud or considering throwing out the July 2 presidential election b/c of the illegal tampering with the process by the Fox administration and moneyed special interests in collusion with U.S. right wing groups. Instead they certified the election and declared right winger Felipe Calderón president elect. McKinley starts by summarizing the verdict of the election tribunal. He then asks
Yet a significant slice of the voting public still believes that the election was marred by fraud and that the country's electoral institutions are corrupt. To some extent that is because his leftist rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has waged a fiery campaign to persuade his supporters that his narrow loss on July 2 was part of a broad conspiracy between President Vicente Fox and business leaders to deny him victory. But why do between a quarter and a third of voters, according to recent opinion polls, agree with him?
Actually, that seems to depend on where you poll, among other things. In mid August El Universal did a poll among inhabitants of Mexico City that found a whopping 59% saying the election was stolen.
McKinley reminds Americans that Mexico has a long history of manipulated elections - it ain't exactly a stretch to suspect foul play now:
One reason is history. After decades of one-party rule sustained by fraudulent elections, many Mexicans still deeply distrust their institutions and courts.
He points to the evidence of voter fraud which the election court has chosen to ignore:
Mr. López Obrador pointed out that more than half of the tally sheets from the nation's 130,000 election precincts contained errors in arithmetic, a sign of widespread incompetence among poll workers or of extra ballots magically appearing in some boxes and disappearing from others.
The seven-member electoral tribunal rejected that argument, chalking up the irregularities to human error, which they said had affected all parties, and so could not be fraud. They also denied the left's request for a full recount based on the errors.
Of course the magistrades of the election tribunal (the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación TEPJF) simply claimed that the irregularities affected all parties. The results of the partial recount conducted in August have been kepts under wraps, and as recently diaried by El Cid, from what little data are available, one can get well the impression that the discrepancies dramatically benefited Calderón. Why doesn't the TEPJF publish the results of the recount? Why didn't they at least take another sample in a different region (the August sample was mostly taken in states carried by Calderón) to check with the discrepancies were indeed geographically homogeneous?
But McKinley also explains an important issue that has been mostly ignored by the U.S. media: the fact that Mexican law strictly prohibits government officials from campaigning and bans any form of soft-money influence in elections. These laws were crassly violated during the so-called "dirty war" against AMLO in the run-up to July 2:
For instance, most of Mr. López Obrador's supporters complain bitterly about the "intervention" of President Fox in the election. <snip> There is no doubt that Mr. Fox used his position as president and his official tours to campaign vigorously against Mr. López Obrador. <snip> The president also warned against "changing riders" in midstream and said that government handouts to the poor, a centerpiece of the leftist's campaign, would bankrupt future Mexicans. Meanwhile, the Fox administration spent extravagantly on public service messages praising the government's achievements.
Such use of the bully pulpit may seem tame in the United States, but in Mexico it is against the law for a president or any elected official to use public resources to campaign for his party's candidate. The law is rooted in history. For seven decades before Mr. Fox's election in 2000, Mexico was ruled by one party, with the sitting president choosing his successor and spreading government largesse to make sure he was elected.
<snip>
Worse in many leftist's minds were the actions of various business leaders. Toward the end of the campaign, the largest business association, as well as some big companies, spent more than $19 million on advertisements aimed at undermining Mr. López Obrador, who promised to raise taxes on the rich and on business.
The advertisements never mentioned candidates by name. But some of them said, for instance, that Mexico did not need a dictator like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, to whom Mr. López Obrador is often compared by his enemies. Others noted that Mexico's economy had been stable for 10 years and said that "betting on change" could bring back the days of economic crisis.
Without commentary - and I, too, find it hard to comment on this bizarre argument - McKinley reports the magistrates' verdict that while the law was broken, the illegal activities didn't swing the election. Nevermind the fact that up until the propaganda war by the Fox Administration and business interests reached fever pitch, AMLO had been crushing Calderón in the polls:
The election law does not explicitly forbid a president to express support for a candidate, but the magistrates said in their ruling on Tuesday that Mr. Fox had come dangerously close to putting the election's validity in doubt. <snip> The judges called the ads "black propaganda."
United States voters are used to these "soft money" campaigns and take them in stride. But here, once again, such spending is illegal under the election law and is plausibly considered to be fraud by many of Mr. López Obrador's supporters. The magistrates agreed, saying the business leaders had broken the law. But they said the impact was too slight to warrant annulling the election.
And the result? Of course, the TEPJF, the entire election process, and other government institutions have lost a whole lot of credibility:
Mr. López Obrador's followers also have no confidence in the Federal Electoral Institute, which organized the election. In October 2003, when congressional leaders were making deals to appoint new members to the institute's governing board, Mr. López Obrador's party was shut out. Since then the leftists have regarded just about every decision the electoral institute makes with suspicion.
In the end, the court ruling may have put Mr. Calderón in the president's office, but it has not dispelled feelings among Mr. López Obrador's supporters that they were robbed. <snip>Mr. López Obrador is now calling for a "national convention" this month to mount a civil disobedience campaign to "re-found the republic" and reform "institutions that don't deserve any respect."
How far the movement can go and whether it can remain peaceful remains to be seen and may depend on how deep the suspicions of fraud, as seen in Mexico, run.
What is sure is that Mr. López Obrador has defined himself for many voters as the candidate who lost the election, not through his own errors but because the entire apparatus of the state was against him. That is an old tune in Mexico, one that many know the words to.
Indeed.