Mexico: stolen election? posted by Richard Seymour

They say if voting changed anything, it would be illegal. Perhaps it would be more precise (if less concise) to say that if voting changes anything that the capitalist class can't handle, they'll find a way to thwart it, up to and including subverting or banning elections. So, what's up with the Mexican election? The left candidate, Andres Lopez Obrador is hardly a radical - he promises a bit of investment in the infrastructure and social services, plans to give some subsidies to the poor, but has basically promised 'technical measures' (neoliberal management) to run the economy. Obrador is, for all intents and purposes, a social neoliberal, like Lula. There would seem to be little to separate him from his bland right-wing competitor, Felipe Calderon of Vicente Fox's National Action Party. And yet, the stock market doesn't seem to like him very much, and American newspapers are being less than subtle in vilifying him - the NYT recently described him as having an "authoritarian streak" without any apparent reason. Calderon himself only began to pick up in the polls when he started a personal campaign against Obrador, comparing him to Hugo Chavez, but even then only retained brief leads in the polls. He has for some time previously trailed far behind Obrador, and was still trailing right up until election day.

At the moment, there appears to be less than a one per cent gap between them. According to La Jornada some of that difference is made up of the ex-pat vote, which sided heavily with Calderon - although only a tiny fraction of ex-pats, less than one per cent, actually requested absentee ballots so that they could vote. This suggests that it was the wealthier ex-pats (businessmen and so on) whose social position in the society to which they had emigrated was secure, who were most able to vote. >Many news sources are reporting angry Mexicans declaring a fixed vote on a par with the 1988 election in which the government suddenly declared that the elections had to be stopped mid-count because 'the computer system went down', an excuse no one bought.

Approximately three million votes have not been counted, which - given that the slight lead for Mr Calderon is sustained by a few hundred thousand votes - points to the need for a recount and, potentially, a criminal investigation. The head of Mexico's IFE, the electoral monitoring agency, is alleged to have had conversations with Vicente Fox on the night of the election. There is a strikingly high percentage of votes declared 'null' - 2.14%, much larger than the gap separating the two main presidential candidates.

There were suggestions before the vote that the US was intervening heavily to ensure Obrador did not win. Greg Palast obtained some documents showing that the US government had decided to create 'counterterrorism' lists regarding a number of Latin American companies six days after 9/11. These countries had nothing to do with terrorism, but they did share one thing: each was either governed by a leftist or their government was seriously challenged by a leftist. The company given the contract to compile these lists was Choicepoint, the same company that scrubbed Florida electoral rolls for the Bush team. The files obtained by the FBI in this case were lists of registered voters. Choicepoint agents were arrested by the Mexican government and, according to the Feds, the files were "destroyed". Sure they were. Palast now reports claims from the Obrador campaign that PAN officials had access to voter files that should have been the exclusive privy of the electoral commission.

Many are claiming that this is a re-run of the Bush 'victory' in 2000. However, one crucial difference remains: Mexican lefties are not to my knowledge running around blaming Patricia Mercado or some other candidate for having had the temerity to stand and offer an alternative. Funny that.

Also worth mentioning is that although the debate is presently narrowed down to the psephological minutiae of tiny differences between the declared vote for Calderon and that for Obrador, the bulk of the votes went to left or left-of-centre candidates. This is reflected both in the breakdown of presidential votes and of votes for the Chamber of Deputies. Every other represented party claims to stand on the left, with the exception of the liberal New Alliance party.