South of the border, down Mexico way

Steven Gaal · July 19, 2012

South of the border, down Mexico way

Elites seem to steal election, some upset.

http://therealnews.c...74&jumival=8603

South of the border, down Mexico way,

That's where I fell in love when the stars above came out to play,

And now as I wander, my thoughts ever stray,

South of the border, down Mexico way!

She was a picture in ol' Spanish lace,

Just for a tender while I kissed the smile upon her face,

For it was "Fiesta" and we were so gay,

South of the border, down Mexico way!

Then she sighed as she whispered "Mañana"

Never dreamin' that we were partin',

And I lied as I whispered "Mañana"

For our tomorrow never came!

South of the border, I rode back one day,

There in a veil of white by candle-light she knelt to pray,

The mission bells told me that I mustn't stay,

South of the border, down Mexico way!

Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay!. . . Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay!

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Words and Music by Jimmy Kennedy

and Michael Carr, published 1939

Edited July 19, 2012 by Steven Gaal

Len Colby · July 21, 2012

Point us to any actual evidence the PRI stole the election

Edited July 21, 2012 by Len Colby

Steven Gaal · July 21, 2012

But the major fraud was seen as coming in the lead-up to the elections. Mexican law is strict on how electoral campaigns must be run and financed. But by the beginning of the campaign, suspicions began to arise of collusion between the privately owned media, especially two television channels, Televisa and TV Azteca, and the PRI's electoral machinery, specifically that they were deliberately building up Peña Nieto and undermining the opposition in their supposedly objective news coverage. Evidence to support this suspicion came with an exposé by the British newspaper The Guardian that in fact the PRI had, since the last election campaign in 2006, been giving Televisa money in exchange for undermining the candidacy of Lopez Obrador, a direct violation of Mexican election law.

The perception that Peña Nieto was a manufactured candidate being foisted on the Mexican electorate by over-powerful and corrupt media monopolies helped to spark a large scale uprising of youth, who carried out a campaign against Televisa and against Peña Nieto through demonstrations and social media. This "I am number 132" campaign made a palpable difference in the actual election, helping at least to narrow the distance between Peña Nieto and Lopez Obrador.

(( OOPS Mexico MSM compromised !! (( Gaal))) = follow the PESO $$$

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Mexico 2012: Students Occupy Plaza, Present Evidence of Fraud

Mexico City's nascent #yosoy132 student movement has decided to occupy the country's grand plaza to the country's 1910-1929 democratic government. They's erected tents and a large under-tent field headquarters there. Local police in the Federal District's island of democracy don't seem to mind. Earlier today, they were overheard by this reporter talking with the movement's security team about providing protection against any hostilities.

At approx. 2:30 in the afternoon, the movement's intelligence team received and posted incoming evidence of ballot fraud in yesterday's election. Translated, the announcements read:

"Evidence of FRAUD

3,000,000 ballots pre-marked for the PRI, found in El Paso, Texas.

132,000 found in Yajalon, Chiapas, before the election, marked for the PRI

157,000 found in Oaxaca (Hajuapan de Leon) before the election, marked for the PRI

Only 22,000 ballots distributed to polling places in the Federal District, for individuals [who wished to vote at general polling places instead of their locally assigned polls]."

From #YoSoy132-- Republica-- 2 Jun

The Federal District has approx. 18 million residents, many of whom are registered in their birthplaces but expected to vote in the Federal District. Student leaders said they believed hundreds of thousands were denied the vote.

The above is in addition to growing evidence that widespread vote-buying occurred in the elections, and the suggestion that preliminary "quick count" results and a preliminary electronic count displayed signs of computer tampering.

The student leaders maintained that they were a non-violent movement, non-partisan, and dedicated to securing free elections and democracy in Mexico. A general assembly is planned for 8PM tonight.

http://www.1kenthomas.com/

Kenneth Thomas works as an IT consultant and techologist and lives between Nashville, Ghent, Prague and Mexico City. He speaks German, French, Spanish, some Dutch of the Flemish variety, a smattering of Hebrew and other languages ......

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http://www.opednews....120702-458.html

BREAKING: Computer Fraud in Mexican Presidential Election

J. Lopez Gallardo, a Physics Professor at the University of Texas, claims that there is a perfect "Pearson Coorelation" in the preliminary "PREP" electoral results of Mexico's Presidential election.

This means that the results do not have the random variations we would expect from the reports from actual voting, and must have been generated by a computer simulation or algorythm. Such correlations can be a key sign of rigged elections, such as Iran 2009.

In the discussion on Gallardo's Twitter pages, another professor suggests that Gallardo may have summed the data incorrectly.

The "PREP" is a preliminary, electronic vote reporting system. It is used to transmit voting data from Mexico's polling places on election night, providing early results prior to a fully count. In 2006, there were multiple concerns that this system was manipulated to produce the appearance of a win for the right-wing candidate. That election was later contested on multiple grounds.

Mexico's Presidency was stolen via centralized fraud in 1988, and the same was claimed for the 2006 election.

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http://alibi.com/new...Imposition.html

Election or Imposition?

================================

The dinosaurs rule Mexico once again.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, held power in Mexico from 1929 to 2000, using strategies of intimidation, corruption and outright voter fraud to maintain its position as the country's leader. After the opposition party PAN took the presidency in 2000, the PRI became known as "the dinosaurs," representing the antiquated, undemocratic system of the past.

Except the past is now the future.

Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI candidate, was named the next President of Mexico following the July 1 elections. And "named" is the correct term here—not "elected." Thousands of reports provide evidence that the PRI was up to their old tricks on election day.

The website contamos.org.mx called on citizens to send in cell phone pictures and other reports of electoral irregularities. They received more than 3,000 reports, many of which have been independently confirmed. The website features photographic evidence of (among other things) pre-marked ballots and PRI functionaries voting multiple times.

Screenshots of the Federal Election Institute's website seemed to show votes disappearing as the official vote count was updated in real time. And, perhaps most damning of all, a University of Texas—El Paso professor appears to have proven an impossible statistical relationship in the vote counts as they progressed through election night, suggesting the official results were fabricated on a nationwide scale.

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Edited July 21, 2012 by Steven Gaal

Steven Gaal · August 12, 2012

Good overview update

====================

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/09/the-second-mexican-earthquake/

August 09, 2012

The Second Mexican Earthquake

by ROBERT SANDELS

There have been two major Mexican earthquakes in recent years, the telluric one that killed thousands of people in 1985 and the electoral one July 1 that didn’t kill anyone but made a lot of people mad.

Emerging details of the voting reveal manipulations of Byzantine complexity and vast national implications. The legal challenges and street protests against the nominal winner Enrique Peña Nieto will last at least another month. After that, no one can say.

During the 71 years of its one-party rule, which ended in 2000, Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the government were essentially the same thing. The party’s candidate was by default the next president and the campaign was not so much a plea for votes as product placement for the benefit of voters who might have never heard of him. The party’s ideology is not important; the PRI just is.

Fraud was prevalent but usually unnecessary in those days of token opposition though it produced a rich cynic’s catalog of fraud applications: the carrusel (the carousel — voting early and often), the ratón loco (crazy mouse — the runaround given to unwanted voters in search of a ballot), carro completo (the full car – the PRI wins everything) and the taco (a handy roll of pre-marked ballots). [1]

This time the manipulation was big and brutal but within the normal range of probability given that the political system had 24 years to adjust to elections, which since 1988, have been seriously contested by parties actually capable of winning.

Testing the electoral machinery

This election is the first one to be tested under the electoral code put in place in 1990 by the ruling PRI itself. Second-place candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who lost to President Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in the more-than-likely fraudulent 2006 election, is the candidate of a center-left coalition anchored by his Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). AMLO has demanded invalidation of the election, but the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has already unofficially rejected every point in the complaint even though final authority to rule on it rests with judges of the Electoral Tribunal (TEPF). A ruling is due by September 6.

Shopping for votes

Allegations of fraud include multi-million dollar contracts with television giant Televisa to provide Peña Nieto with extensive favorable coverage and AMLO with nothing; doctored polling results giving the impression of Peña Nieto’s inevitability; exceeding campaign spending limits; vote-buying with prepaid gift cards at the Soriana grocery chain; and vote-buying with bank cards purchased through dummy companies using laundered money.

In a July 2 news conference, AMLO said he had evidence that the PRI distributed 260,000 such bank cards nationwide at a cost of 74 million dollars. [2]

Other evidence suggests that the PRI exceeded spending limits during the first month of the campaign. Overall, Peña Nieto’s 90-day campaign may have cost 340 million dollars – more than 10 times the limit. [3]

Aside from the sheer magnitude of these allegations there was a puzzling laxity by the PRI in covering its tracks. Whether this was due to careless arrogance or the result of a party sleepwalking through the 12 years it was out of power, the PRI has yet to offer a credible explanation for how millions of pesos of unknown provenance ended up in the hands of voters.

Speculation is that some of it was narco money and some was money transferred from state coffers by priista governors. AMLO’s coalition produced a bank statement and a recorded phone call purportedly showing that Peña Nieto’s campaign manager had spent State of Mexico public funds on the campaign. [4]

If narco money was involved, that implies that drug users north of the border inadvertently helped elect Peña Nieto. If any of it was state money, then Mexican taxpayers inadvertently helped pay for their own degradation.

Election authorities seemed slow to respond to the election-fraud evidence, but radio journalist Carmen Aristegui and her staff took just two days to track down some of the phantom companies that bought bank cards and to uncover suspicious links between them and members of Peña Nieto’s campaign. Aristegui reported that the headquarters of one such company was located in a dental office and another had a non-existent address. [5]

Within days of the election crowds of shoppers began trying to redeem their gift cards for merchandise at Soriana grocery stores. Many of them readily admitted to reporters that they had sold their votes to PRI party workers. Some were angry that they had done their part but had received inactivated cards or cards worth only a few pesos. Some Soriana shoppers complained that they had not gotten as much money for their votes as others. “So, my vote is worth less?” asked a disgruntled shopper. [6]

The avalanche of evidence seemed to catch the PRI unprepared. Backtracking on earlier blanket denials, Peña Nieto’s campaign manager said the party had indeed bought cards but they were to pay workers for ordinary campaign expenses and therefore were not reported as ordinary campaign expenses. [7]

Electoral earthquake

Whatever the outcome in this post-election struggle, Mexico is experiencing an electoral earthquake likely to have political consequences that bring to mind the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City.

When the tremor struck on September 19, President Miguel de la Madrid’s government was nowhere to be seen except in some places guarding favored businesses from looters. The calamity that killed as many as 40,000 people exposed Mexico as a country with a political system but not much of a government. During the first days after the tremor, ordinary citizens took control to organize rescue operations.

Civic action in the face of government impotence contributed to the emergence of a popular movement that culminated in a new political alignment led by the National Democratic Front, which ran Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas against Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI in the 1988 election. Early returns showed Cárdenas ahead of Salinas until the government’s computer system mysteriously failed. A PRI official is supposed to have uttered the now immortal line: “se cayó el sistema” (the system crashed). De la Madrid later admitted that he allowed the results to be rigged to keep the PRI in power. As a party operative put it to him, ‘It is a tradition that we cannot break without causing great alarm among the citizens.” [8]

After that, Salinas never really established his legitimacy. PAN leaders began making power-sharing deals with Salinas in exchange for their support and were rewarded with control over a number of states. Some expect that if Peña Nieto takes office under mounting popular and political constraints he will be forced to govern through consensus. While there has been consensus ever since the 1988 election it has been confined to the PRI-PAN two-backed monster.

As the PRI drifted away from the revolutionary principles implied in its name, much of the electorate drifted away from the PRI, a tendency accelerated by the Salinas disaster. There was the Zapatista indigenous revolt in Chiapas in 1994, an uprising against just about everything including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Salinas signed the same year. And there was the assassination of the popular Donaldo Colosio, Salinas’ choice to succeed him in the 1994 election. To many Mexicans, it looked like a plot hatched high up in the PRI to shut down Colosio’s populist campaign and his talk of separating the party from the government. Several other political assassinations followed, including that of the PRI’s secretary general, for which the president brother went to prison.

In 2000, out of ideas and facing an election it could not easily fix, the PRI allowed PAN candidate Vicente Fox’s victory to stand. The 2000-2012 experiment in PAN governance reached its nadir with Calderon’s exhausted presidency.

The PRI was generally expected to win this year because Caldron failed at everything and now leaves the nation with 60,000 dead and thousands disappeared in his ill-advised narco war. Calderon’s neo-liberal economy is doing fine only if you don’t look at it, and much of the population is afraid to go out at night.

In the weeks following the July 1 election, Calderon has taken to dedicating roads and bridges. He no longer claims that most of the dead in his narco war must be narcos or they wouldn’t be dead.

Combining what he considers his two great accomplishments, Calderon recently dedicated a new highway in Tijuana while praising himself for making Mexico a safer place.[9] His answer to the endless assassinations of journalists filing inconvenient reports on the narco war is that they should wear bullet-proof vests. [10]

Both he and Fox threw their support to Peña Nieto when only preliminary election results had been announced — Fox openly and Calderon through various gestures culminating in a probably illegal meeting with Peña Nieto to plan the transition for the not yet president-elect. It was the PAN’s most declaratory act legitimizing the election and signaling the continuance of unitary PRI-PAN rule.

Josefina Vázquez Mota, the PAN’s presidential candidate, was left in an embarrassing exercise in self-mockery. She was not Calderon’s choice and she could not run on his presidential misadventures. For her agreeable vacuity, political analyst Julio Hernández dubbed her “lady of the perpetual smile.” [11] She was an unnecessary presence in the campaign after Peña Nieto was groomed to block the leftist forces for the fourth time.

Were the Electoral Tribunal to annul the election Congress would then choose an interim president and call an election in 14 to 18 months. Since the Electoral Tribunal recently awarded the PRI’s coalition additional seats in Congress, it now appears to have a majority, which means it could select a priista as interim president.

Poet and activist Javier Sicilia thinks a re-run of the election would at least set a precedent of “minimum dignity and confidence,” but politically, it would be just as disgraceful as the first one. “Without iron-clad controls that include severe criminal sanctions against coerced votes and the collection of money of doubtful origin…annulment would be of little use and the moral grandeur of annulment would turn into … a joke.”

“We are on the point of losing the country,” said Sicilia. [12]

The electoral tremor produced its own popular movement that grew out of a confrontation in May between Peña Nieto and students at a private university in Mexico City, where he was jeered and heckled him off campus. (He inadvisedly took brief refuge in a bathroom.) When the campaign claimed the students were stooges of the left, 131 of them appeared in an iconic YouTube video displaying their student ID’s. The Yo Soy #132 (I am #132) movement was launched and has been building a loose organization ever since, joined by groups with long-standing grievances against the system.

Some electoral authorities seem to believe that vote buying is not exactly illegal and anyway was not enough to account for Peña Nieto’s three-million vote margin. But alas, given the broad-daylight mugging of the popular will in this election it’s doubtful that anyone can ever know what the real numbers were.

The mangled corpse of the 1988 election went missing in 1991 when the ballots were officially burned by order of the Mexican Congress.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Robert Sandels writes for Cuba-L Direct and CounterPunch

Notes

[1] Diccionario Electoral, Instituto Nacional de Estudios Políticos, <http://diccionario.inep.org/A/ACARREO.html>.

[2] Andrés Manuel López Obrador, news conference, 07/25/12, <http://lopezobrador.org.mx/2012/07/25/presenta-amlo-mas-pruebas-sobre-financiamiento-ilicito-en-la-campana-de-pena-nieto/>.

[3 Fraude 2012, pp.8, 9, <http://lopezobrador.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/folleto-Fraude-2012.pdf>.

[4] Ricardo Monreal Ávila, news conference, 08/03/12, <http://lopezobrador.org.mx/2012/08/03/se-presentara-denuncia-penal-en-contra-de-pena-nieto-y-el-pri-por-probable-comision-de-los-delitos-de-lavado-de-dinero-evasion-fiscal-y-delincuencia-organizada-monreal/>.

[5] Carmen Aristegui, Noticias MVS, 07/05/12, < <http://ww2.noticiasmvs.com/podcasts/lo-mejor-de-carmen-aristegui/el-monexgate-655>; 07/19/12, http://www.youtube.com/watch’v=rxO5J3gm1Fo>.

[6] La Jornada (Mexico City), 07/04/12), <http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ultimas/2012/07/04/.

[7] The expenditures were “To cover the expenses of the general representatives who supervise the representatives in the polling stations.” Milenio, 08/01/12, http://www.milenio.com/cdb/doc/noticias2011/4bebf627c557d45f6c373222df489d40.

[8] The New York Times, 04/09/04, <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/09/world/ex-president-in-mexico-casts-new-light-on-rigged-1988-election.html’ref=cuauhtemoccard>.

[9] Azteca News (Mexico City), 08/03/12, http://www.aztecanoticias.com.mx/notas/mexico/125143/calderon-tijuana-es-mas-segura-que-hace-6-anos.

[10] Zeta, (Tijuana) 7/23, http://www.zetatijuana.com/2012/07/23/decreta-calderon-chalecos-antibalas-a-periodistas-en-riesgo/.

[11] Julio Hernandez, Astillero, La Jornada, 06/25/12), http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2012/06/25/opinion/004o1po.

[12] Proceso, 08/04/12, http://hemeroteca.proceso.com.mx/?page_id=278958&a51dc26366d99bb5fa29cea4747565fec=315404&rl=wh.

[13] CNN México, 05/11/12,