Mexico's Election Crisis
6 July 2006
The Nafta crowd does not want to see Lopez Obrador in office. From the beginning the old ruling PRI to the party to which pro-Nafta Fox belongs has sought to use a variety of tricks to keep Obrador off the ballots and tried to have him disqualified. That had to stop when he put a million men into the streets of Mexico City to stop the efforts of Mexico's neo-liberal political faction. This election is pivotal. While many sites and blogs that I visit constantly talk about NAFTA and how it is effecting Jobs here in America, the reality is that the effects of this free trade agreement are felt to a much greater degree in Mexico than in the US.
Economic growth in Mexico has slowed to a crawl. Peasants are being forced off of their land because the big agribusiness in Canada and Mexico are driving them out.
Source:
CEPR
As in America, the imperial faction seems to be complicit in a vast election fraud and (I will say it) conspiracy. It does not take a genius to figure out who is always on the losing end of these games. In Mexico exit polls clearly showed that Obrador was the winner by a slender margin. Somehow that did not matter to Mexican election officials. Nearly three million votes were not counted and yet, that too did not matter to election officials. So what were they basing their preliminary 'results' on? Wishful thinking? Yes it appears that powerful elements already had their candidate chosen. The pro-Nafta Felipe Calderón stands with the rich, powerful business interests that are using any and all methods, legal and illegal to ensure that the free trade agreement stays in place and is expanded.
Under the PRI's seven-decade reign, the period between election day and the official declaration of a winner--always a member of the PRI--was utilized to cook the final results. Now under the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and with outgoing president Vicente Fox calling the shots, the abuse of state power is once again evident. - The Nation
The reality is not that hard to understand. The rich have an agenda and it is completely at odds with the needs of the poor of Mexico. They want to drive farmers off of their land and give it to the rich for a song and a dance. They want to allow the North American corporations a free hand in Mexico to undermine the rights of workers and dump products on Mexico to drive out smaller competitors. This is about the corporatization of North America and if the vast majority of America's cannot see it, a large number of Mexicans can.
How much involvement there was from the US in the election fiasco is a matter of much speculation. But Greg Palast notes in a fine article that a US company called ChoicePoint 'obained' voter registration information in Mexico
This past Friday, we reported that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had obtained Mexico's voter files under a secret "counterterrorism" contract with database company ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. (See Bush Team Helps Ruling Party "Floridize" Mexican Presidential Election.)The FBI's contractor states that, following the arrest of ChoicePoint agents by the Mexican government, the company returned or destroyed its files. The firm claims not to have known collecting this information violated Mexican law. Such files can be useful in challenging a voter's right to cast a ballot or in preventing that vote from counting. - Greg Palast
What is a company like this doing in Mexico with access to (or perhaps stealing) voting records? Keep in mind that this is the company that in Florida excluded thousands of would-be democratic voters from voting using fraudulent 'felon' lists (94,000, mostly black voters and more than enough to swing the election towards Gore). This company which receives no-bid contracts from the GOP are part of a troubling trial of voting irregularities that always seems to benefit the pro-corporate interests that support Bush.
Neo-liberalism
Lets face it, it does not work. It's only success is that it makes a few more people richer while the middle class gets squeezed and the poor get much poorer. The big mega-corporations make lots of money and carry enormous weight inside pro-Nafta governments. They get no-bid contracts, sweetheart deals and are basically above the laws. Yet one of the often touted benefits of these free trade agreements is rapid economic growth. This clearly has not happened and the pro-Nafta faction has cleverly left this inconvenient fact out of their campaign strategy in Mexico. The reality though is that the neo-liberal approach is being challenged throughout Latin America. This has caused a near panic in Washington. Nafta is a key part of the agenda for those who are trying to 'globalize' the planet into one great big happy prison camp.
Neo-liberalism is a failure in the US as well. With unemployment statistics that must remove millions of long term unemployed from its count in order to keep the numbers low, the two largest automakers on the verge of Bankruptcy and debts that are not repayable and investors shying away from the dollar, the model is clearly a failed one. Except for a small click of interdependent corporations and wealthy individuals who have benefited immensely from the dismantlement of American industrial power and the reduction of million of Americans to statistical non-entities there have not been many benefits seen by ordinary Americans. The future is being written right before our eyes. The New World Order is based on the ascendancy of Corporate power and the the marginalization of worker and people power. They only way they have been able to move their agenda forward here in America the past few years is through two clearly fraudulent Presidential elections. They are working on the third in Mexico and are rigging up the vote-machines for '08. While many Americans slumber and sleep and are distracted into political languor. The Mexican people are not that politically lethargic, if they think they were robbed they will not sit still and let it be stolen form them. They know that it is ultimately their homes, livelihoods, families and maybe their very lives that are at ultimately at stake. Most Americans have not figured that out yet, but a growing number are finding it out the hard way. If there is fraud and it the people that hold power in Mexico refuse to allow Obrador to become President, I suspect protests and perhaps a national strike to take place until something gives. Vote fraud brings with it social unrest. The right to vote is a very hard fought right and anyone who understands the history of Mexico will tell you that. Democratic legitimacy springs from democracy, not fraud. I think the imperial faction may find that out the hard way in Mexico.
I am not going to say who won this election. I do not know. But the stakes are very high. This is going on south of the border while, in America they are still sitting in movie theaters, drinking booze and popping anti-depressants. They haven't got a clue as to the stakes of the game, and probably won't until it is their job that is gone and their home is taken from them and find that they cannot even vote without a valid mailing address. The advancement of the New World Order is dependent on the continued existence of New World Idiots. Thus the imperial faction will surely win in America. The good news is that Mexico may very well be another story.
By,
Mark S. Watson