"Deja Vu in the DF" from the Texas Observer...

[Bridget Burke]

In which John Ross arrives in Mexico City (the Distrito Federal, hence the DF) to cover the election. He reminisces about the election theft of 1988, when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the first PRD candidate, "lost." And he examines the tactics being used against PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Could it happen again? (As of this writing, it appears that it has.)

While at the Texas Observer site, you might want to check out a few more articles. Of course, all of us Texans at DU already subscribe to the Observer, offering "Sharp Reporting from the Strangest State in the Union" for 50 years. (Don't we?)

www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2248

One excerpt, which might enlighten the anti-immigrant crowd who suggest the Mexicans fight to reform their own country:

This will be my fifth presidential election here. But none has equaled the high drama of 1988, when Salinas and the PRI, blindsided by the arrogance of power, failed to see Cárdenas coming and had to steal ballot boxes, burn their contents, falsify tally sheets, and “crash” vote-tabulating computers. On election night, electoral officials lied to reporters, telling us that “the system had collapsed.” It didn’t come back up for 10 days, when Salinas was declared the winner with 51 percent of the popular vote.

Thousands of voting stations were never included in the final results, and most of the public refused to believe the official results. The post-electoral period was bloody—as was the pre-electoral period. Two of Cárdenas’ aides were assassinated on the eve of the election. PRI malfeasance was met with a groundswell from the disaffected, who rose against the only party they had ever known and demanded economic and political democracy—and that the ballot boxes be re-opened and all votes recounted.

Between 1988 and 1991, more than 500 members of Cardenas’ fledgling Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, were killed in political violence. In 1991, the PRI and the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, voted to destroy the evidence and burned the ballots.....

The PAN-PRI putsch to beat back López Obrador, who led the presidential pack by as much as 18 points for 30 months before Calderón’s media onslaught, reached fever pitch in 2005. Fox and unctuous PRI standard-bearer Roberto Madrazo tried to bar López Obrador from the ballot—and even to imprison him—for the heinous crime of trying to build an access road to a hospital. (He was enjoined from doing so by court order. See “La Lotería Más Grande,” July 16, 2004.) AMLO turned this legal lynching on its head by mobilizing 1.2 million citizens for a silent march through the city he then governed as mayor. The April 24, 2005, march was the largest political demonstration in the history of this republic.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. K&R. More eyeballs need to see this. nt

[Bridget Burke]

2. Thanks.

I just posted a link to the article in one of the Mexican election threads. This forum does get rather quiet.