Sunday, July 30, 2006
The Mexican Crackup
Translation by Google, with minor human embellishment. By way of El Machete
Ignacio Ramone, The Mexican Crackup, Diplomatic World, August 2006
A massive fraud.
And indisputable.
Mr. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission admitted it. The twenty-five Foreign Ministers of the European Union expressed their “serious concern”. “It is important that we transmit in the clearest possible way the concern of the European Union and that of all the Member States on the result of the presidential election”, declared the Minister Dutch for the Affairs Foreign.
Reporters without Borders recalls that “this election intervenes after four years of a continuous degradation and without precedent of the press in the country”.
In Washington, personalities like Mssrs. Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski affirmed that the United States could not accept the official results. The National Democratic Institute (NDI), chaired by Mrs. Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State; Freedom House, directed by Mr. James Woolsey, former head of the CIA; American Enterprise Institute, impelled by the Gerald Ford former president; the Open Society Institute, controlled by Mr. George Soros--all denounced “massive manipulation” and called for “economic sanctions”. Senator Richard Lugar, president of the commission of the Foreign Affairs of the Senate and envoy of president George W. Bush, did not hesitate to speak openly, him also, of “frauds”: “It is clear that there was a program vast and concerted frauds the day of the election, either under the direction of the authorities, or with their complicity. ”
You rub the eyes? You ask yourselves how such declarations in connection with the recent presidential election Mexico could escape to you? You cannot imagine how this could be so. None the personalities or institutions quoted above denounced what has just occurred to Mexico.
All the reported comments - authentic -, relate to the presidential election of November 23, 2004… in Ukraine (1). The “international community” and the usual “organizations of defense of freedoms”, that one knew to be so active in Serbia, in Georgia, in Ukraine and still recently in Byelorussia remain, so to speak, stuck dumb in front of the “electoral coup d'etat” which is made under our eyes in Mexico (2). The planetary outcry is imagined if, on the other hand, this same election had proceeded, for example, in Venezuela and if the winner - by a difference thus from hardly 0,56% of the votes - had been… president Hugo Chávez.
The Mexican poll of July 2 presented in opposition two principal candidates: Mr. Felipe Calderón, of the Party of National Action (PAN, the right-wing Catholic party, with the incumbency), declared victorious (provisional) of the poll by the electoral federal Institute (IFE), and Mr. Manuel Andrés López Obrador, of the Party of the democratic revolution (PRD, moderate left).
Well before the beginning of the campaign, it was clear for president Vicente Fox (PAN) and the authorities of the incumbency that Mr. López Obrador with his campaign against poverty was the candidate to be defeated. By all the means. Since 2004, an operation, containing clandestine videotapes obligingly distributed by the chains Televisa and TV Azteca, tried to discredit Mr. López Obrador. Vainly.
The following year, under the eccentric pretext of non-observance of the legal standards regarding construction of an access road to a hospital, Obrador was condemned, and deprived of the right to run for election. Massive demonstrations of support ended up forcing the authorities to restore Obrador's rights.
Since then, the destructive enterprise continued, reaching delirium during the election campaign (3). More especially because a wind of panic blows on Latin-American oligarchies (and on the administration of the United States) since the left carries it everywhere (almost): in Venezuela, in Brazil, in Uruguay, in Argentina, in Chile, in Bolivia… these new alliances do not exclude Cuba any more (4).
In such a context, the victory of Mr. López Obrador (the electoral court will decide on September 6) would have too important geopolitical consequences. Which neither employers nor the great Mexican media want. Nor Washington. At any price. Even if it means the sacrifice ofdemocracy.
But Mr. López Obrador and the Mexican people will have the last word.
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