Mexican Election in Limbo

By Chuck Collins, AlterNet. Posted July 3, 2006.

Election Day started across Mexico on Sunday with thousands of poll workers assembling cardboard ballot boxes at over 130,489 polling stations. But the day ended in uncertainty, as the head of Mexico's Federal Election Institute, Luis Ugalde, went on national television to declare that the presidency was too close to call.

President Fox joined Ugalde in calling on all candidates to patiently await the official vote count, which they expect to have by Wednesday.

The scenario of a razor-close election is everybody's nightmare. Each campaign had hoped for a decisive victory by Sunday night so that voting irregularities and scattered examples of voter coercion wouldn't become the focus of voting results. One thing is for certain: Roberto Madrazo, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Part (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 years until the 2000 election of Vicente Fox, is in third place.

The next president of Mexico will either be Felipe Calderon, candidate of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) or Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). Both candidates addressed rallies shortly after the electoral commission, each declaring confidence in their victory.

Tens of thousands of supporters of Lopez Obrador gathered in a chilly rain on the central plaza in Mexico City. "According to our information, we have won the presidency," Lopez Obrador declared to his supporters. "Smile," he concluded, paraphrasing his campaign bumpersticker. "We have already won."

The New York Times reported today that there is an "electoral crisis" in Mexico and rising anxiety, especially if Lopez Obrador and his followers believe they lose the election because of fraud. The Times called Lopez Obrador a "firebrand leftist" and repeated candidate Calderon's characterization of his opponent as having an "authoritarian streak."

Lopez Obrador has said he will honor the results of a fair election, even if he loses by one vote. But if history is any lesson, Lopez Obrador is no Al Gore. He won't walk away from a stolen election without a protest. His political rise has been characterized by having to respond to dirty tricks. And if anyone is justified in being a "firebrand" about stolen elections, it is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

A mysterious crash

In 1988, Lopez Obrador was a leading organizer in the presidential campaign of leftist candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Early on election night, Mexico's own electoral system showed Cardenas with a substantial lead over PRI candidate Carlos Salinas. Then there was a mysterious computer crash, and the country woke up the next morning to an announcement that Salinas was the victor. Lopez Obrador led a voter rights movement in protest, with marches, sit-ins, civil disobedience and road blockades in his home state of Tabasco. He persisted in his protests, and in 1991 led a voter rights protest march from Tabasco to Mexico City.

In 1994, Lopez Obrador was inspired by the Cardenas campaign to run for governor of oil-rich coastal Tabasco, where he had grown up as the son of a shopkeeper. His opponent was none other than Roberto Madrazo, whom he is now facing in this presidential bid. Madrazo claimed victory in an election characterized by widespread fraud, including crude examples of PRI vote-buying.

Lopez Obrador's followers occupied the governor's mansion, and once again Lopez Obrador took to the streets, again leading a march to Mexico City to have the election annulled. President Ernesto Zedillo, who had just been elected president on a pledge of electoral reform, was embarrassed by his fellow party member Madrazo's fraud. He tried to intervene by offering Madrazo a cushy federal job, clearing the way for Lopez Obrador to assume the governorship. Madrazo rebuffed him, and protests continued for years.

In April 2005, the other major parties, PAN and PRI, conspired to knock Lopez Obrador off the presidential ballot, charging that as mayor of Mexico City he had ignored a court order. Only after millions of Mexicans took to the streets did President Fox's prosecutors back down and drop the charges.

A clean vote?

In the coming days, hundreds of civil society organizations and independent vote-monitoring organizations will issue their reports about the cleanliness of the voting process and election. These will influence the emotional climate into which the election results will be announced. But the Mexican electoral system has come a long way since 1988 and even 2000. The independent Federal Election Institute is well-resourced and politically independent, and by all accounts ran a fairly clean election.

While the situation could appropriately be characterized as an electoral crisis, there are several positive signs. For two presidential elections, the people of Mexico have rejected the PRI, a party that still holds 17 of the country's 31 governorships and has a powerful infrastructure of supporters in every region of the country. And the fact that there is a close election, the closest in this country's history, reflects progress in Mexico's transition to democracy. If there are protests in the coming days, it's because Mexicans demand nothing less than a fair election.

Battling the PRI machine

In the rural hamlet of San Pedro Mixtepec, located in the southern state of Oaxaca, several men swept the central plaza to tidy up for Election Day. Four women in traditional Zapotec shawls, one with a sleeping baby on her back, unpacked voting supplies sent by federal authorities.

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. He lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.

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