HispanicVista Columnists
Who Needs Badges?
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By
Raoul Lowery Contreras/HispanicVista.com - September 25, 2006
Following
the lead of two thirds of Mexican voters in the July 2nd Mexican
Presidential election, the seven independent members of the Mexican
Electoral Tribunal voted unanimously to reject calls of election fraud,
election tampering and the exercise of free speech by Mexican business
people.
The Tribunal commented that President Fox may have bent some electioneering
rules a bit by suggesting that this was no time to change horses in the
middle of the stream. They also noted that Mexican business did bend some
electioneering rules by campaigning hard for conservative business oriented
candidate Felipe Calderon, but that such campaigning, or Fox’s hints did not
materially affect the voting or vote totals.
The Tribunal has finally and just one day short of the legal deadline named
a winner of the presidential election. He is the winner who won with a
quarter- million-vote margin on July 2nd. He is the winner of most of
Mexico’s northern states, the very states that are the economic engine of
the entire Mexican Republic.
There are two halves of economic Mexico: the north and the south.
The north exports millions of dollars worth of produce and manufactured
goods to the United States. It has economic and industrial powerhouse cities
like Monterrey, Juarez and Tijuana that experience labor shortages even as
they offer good jobs that provide child care, free lunches and free
transportation to and from work for women and regular paychecks for hundreds
of thousands of workers. Calderon carried these areas by thousands and
thousands of votes. These are the people who followed Pancho Villa to
victory.
In the south, we find poor uneducated peasants who try to scrape a few pesos
from worn out land cultivated by them in the same manner as their
forefathers did a thousand years ago. Many do not speak Spanish, the legal
language of the land. Most are herded to the polls to vote as their caciques
(chiefs) tell them to. It is on their backs that the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) built its 70 year-long dictatorship. They reveled
in that role. These are the people who followed Emiliano Zapata to defeat.
It was from the PRI political dictatorship that Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO)
learned his politics. Campaigning as a rabble-rousing Huey Long-type servant
of the poor (“Everyman is a King”), AMLO built enough support among the poor
and dispossessed to win the mayor’s office in Mexico City. He then commenced
running for President with promises of taking from the rich (and, more
importantly, the growing middle class that owes its huge growth to President
Fox and Calderon’s party, the PAN) and handing all to the poor.
AMLO was heavily favored to win in every presidential poll. He was expected
to run away with the election. Outside events and people, however, affected
the Mexican voter’s thinking and his lead shrunk to nothing in the final
days before the election.
In South America, an Indian leftist won the Bolivian presidential election
and he promptly expropriated the natural gas industry in the country that
was mostly owned by foreigners from Brazil. Mexican business interests
mounted a huge television campaign pointing out that what happened in
Bolivia would happen in Mexico under AMLO.
Former business executive and retiring President Vicente Fox warned of a
surge to the left and suggested now was not the best time to “change horses
or riders.”
The question is, did these two factors overwhelm AMLO’s huge television
advertising campaign? He spent far more than Calderon did on television, yet
still lost. He was so confident, he refused to participate in the first of
three Presidential debates.
When AMLO claimed fraud, he basically said, take my word for it. He produced
not an ounce of evidence that there was a massive vote theft by an organized
conspiracy or “coup d’ etat” as he claimed. He demanded a 100 percent
recount of all votes cast, but did not produce any federal law or
constitutional provision that allows a total recount. The Election Tribunal
took the results from those precincts AMLO complained most about and did
recount them producing a 4,000 vote gain for AMLO out of the three million
votes plus recounted. Not enough…
The Tribunal’s seven members voted unanimously to reject AMLO’s claims of
fraud and for a full recount for which there is absolutely no legal or
constitutional basis for one.
The election is over! Felipe Calderon won. There is no legal appeal to the
Tribunal’s decision.
However, AMLO doesn’t accept the Tribunal’s decision, nor does he accept the
vote of the people.
Mexico City newspaper El Universal reports---- "I am expressing my decision
to reject the Electoral Tribunal´s ruling," López Obrador told supporters
gathered in Mexico City´s Zócalo (Main Plaza) Tuesday night. "And I do not
recognize (the election winner, Felipe Calderón), who would flaunt himself
as head of the executive branch."
An election was honestly held, according to hundreds of thousands of
observers and non-partisan Election Day citizen workers. Millions voted…Two
thirds of Mexican voters voted against AMLO. Nonetheless, he declares
himself the winner.
Perhaps he should be declaring to the world and to Mexicans, “Badges, I
dun’t need no steenking badges.”
Contreras’ books, THE ILLEGAL ALIEN: A DAGGER INTO THE HEART OF AMERICA?? and A HISPANIC VIEW OF AMERICAN POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION are available at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com