Thursday, August 17, 2006
The Mexican Scalia?
Water cannon, covered by tarps, and police stand ready to quell unruly PRD legislators near the Mexican Congress. Image by José Carlo González from La Jornada.
Mariano Azuela Güitrón, ministerial president of the Supreme Court of Mexico, says that the court will not intervene in the election. Article 97 of the Constitution is obsolete he says, cut off at the feet.
Talk about legislating from the bench.
He's effectively carved out a space independent from Mexican law for the Elections Court, requiring that the evidence that the election was stolen be gathered and made public before the high court intervenes.
Well, if you can watch a Google vid, you can see for yourself. Seven districts, representing perhaps a thousand precincts worth of unsealed ballot boxes (25,000 ballots?), ballots outside of their envelope, ballots not folded as would have happened if they had been inserted into the ballot box, etc. And this is in a place where the the PRD was strong enough to get a camera in the door.
The Mexican police have water cannon and barricades outside the Congress. Do real democracies need riot control to hold an election?
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