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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2005 
Expatriates in U.S. Seek a Voice in Mexico Vote
 S. Lynne Walker- Copley News
| | Guadalupe Gómez, an accountant from Zacatecas state who lives in Orange County, can't vote in Mexico's elections but contributes to the billions of dollars sent back to Mexico each year. (Photo: Luis J. Jimenez/Copley News) |
Mexico City – Mexico's immigrants send and the Mexican government receives. For decades, it has been a one-way transaction.
Now, immigrants working in the United States want something in return for sending their dollars home. They want a voice in the way Mexico is governed.
"We need to be heard," said Eliasid Reyes, a Mixtec Indian who earns a living stacking cases of sodas and chips at the Take-A-Break warehouse in Escondido. "We have been forgotten."
Like millions of Mexicans in the United States, Reyes is awaiting an unprecedented vote this week by Mexico's Congress on the critical issue of whether citizens living abroad can vote by absentee ballot in the July 2006 presidential election.
Reyes, 35, has lived in San Diego County for nearly 20 years. He owns a home. He holds a steady job. His children are American.
But in his wallet, Reyes carries his Mexican voter credential right next to his California driver license.
Ever since he received that credential in 1993 in his native state of Oaxaca, Reyes has hoped that one day he will be allowed to help choose Mexico's president without traveling to his village of Santa Rosa to cast his ballot.
If the measure is rejected by the Mexican Congress, Reyes and other immigrants will lose their opportunity to vote until at least 2012. But if a mail-in ballot measure is approved as expected, it could determine the outcome of next year's tight presidential race.
"What is at stake here is the future of Mexico," said Guadalupe Gómez, an accountant from Zacatecas state who owns El Bloquecito Income Tax in Santa Ana. "We have economic power. We've got college educations. We know how a democratic system works. But what they have been telling us is, 'Yes, we want your money, but you cannot have any say in this country.' "
This year, Mexicans working in the United States will send home nearly $19 billion. Much of it goes to support their families, but some is donated to build schools, clinics and roads in their villages. Their contribution to the nation's wealth is second only to revenue from petroleum exports.
"The Mexican community in the United States is starting to create jobs in Mexico," Gómez said, "but we need to be motivated to put our hard-earned dollars in Mexico. We need different leaders."
Although the Mexican Constitution was changed in 1996 to give citizens living abroad the right to vote, the Congress never put mechanisms into place so the vote could occur. It wasn't until last June, when President Vicente Fox sent his own legislation to Congress outlining a system for absentee voting, that a serious debate on the issue began.
Immigrant activists accused legislators of dragging their feet because they were afraid they would be turned out of office if so many Mexican expatriates were allowed to vote. One in 10 Mexicans now lives outside the country. Roughly 98 percent of those expatriates – an estimated 11 million – live in the United States.
Some legislators now acknowledge they were concerned about a possible backlash from immigrants who had been forced to leave their country because the government could not – or would not – improve economic conditions.
"The political parties thought the vote would favor one party over another. I shared that sense of fear, of doubt," said Sen. Silvia Hernández of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. "But there is a change, and that change is to put aside our fears and face reality. Now, I think it will favor our country."
Immigrants who have been lobbying for the vote for nearly 20 years are skeptical about the motives behind the legislators' sudden change of heart.
"They have run out of ways to say no," said Raul Ross, 48, director of the Chicago-based magazine MX Sin Frontera. "Migrants have become a sexy subject. The vote is politically correct. It would be extremely difficult for political actors to say something against us now."
For many Mexican immigrants, voting abroad has become the most important issue on their political agenda.
"We feel the same urgency to vote that women felt five decades ago and that young people felt two decades ago," said Ross, who left the state of Veracruz in 1986. "We do not want to keep being treated like second-class citizens. We want to vote because we want to be equal."
Potential Political Power
By 2050, more than 22 million Mexicans will live in the United States, according to a study released last week by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Hispanic Center.
A Pew study conducted in March found that 87 percent of Mexican immigrants now living in the United States would vote in the 2006 presidential election if they had the opportunity.
Not every one wants to vote, of course.
"I feel transplanted. I feel that I have made the full transition. The stakes are higher for me here," said San Diego immigration lawyer Lilia Velasquez, 50, who came to the United States from Guerrero state when she was 19.
"Mexico seems remote. It is like being able to vote in Switzerland. How is that going to help?"
But others say the vote abroad would forge a strong new group of political binationals who would participate in Mexico's economic development if they had the power to hold the country's leaders accountable.
"Just open the door. That is the demand of Mexican immigrants," said Primitivo Rodríguez, Mexico coordinator of the Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad, who lived in the United States for nearly two decades before returning to Mexico.
"The vote is the doorway to a gold mine. Open the door and we'll do the rest."
The drive for absentee balloting began in 1988, when a small group of activists petitioned then-presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cardenas. Ten years later, Cardenas' son, Lazaro, of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, introduced the first legislation. Since then, the Mexican Congress has considered 17 separate proposals to set up the machinery for an absentee vote. One of them passed the lower Chamber of Deputies in 1999, but it was defeated by the Senate.
Carlos Olamendi, 48, who left Puebla state 25 years ago and now runs a restaurant in Orange County, was one of the activists who spoke to Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas about the issue.
Olamendi plans to fly to Mexico City this week so he can be in the halls of Congress when legislators make their decision.
After years of disappointment, he believes victory is within reach.
"For the first time, we will have the right to participate in the political process," Olamendi said. "That's our contribution to the Mexican system. We, the immigrants, came to (persuade) Mexico to establish a solid and a strong basis for democracy. That's what 2006 means to us."
Where To Cast Ballots?
Congress wanted the votes to be cast in ballot boxes at Mexican consulates – a proposal that mirrors voting in cities and towns nationwide.
But the Senate's proposal, which appears likely to be approved during a special session of Congress this week, calls for a totally new way of voting in Mexico – casting ballots by mail.
Both proposals present problems.
If Mexicans were to line up at consulates, the voting could be disrupted by U.S. Border Patrol agents searching for undocumented workers or by vigilantes, said Hernández, the PRI senator. And in some cases, consulates in large cities are simply too far from the small towns in middle America and the South where many Mexicans now work.
Mail-in voting, however, relies on the Mexican Postal Service, which is "synonymous with sluggishness, insecurity in sending and receiving mail, the violation of correspondence," said PRI congressman Heliodoro Díaz, who heads the subcommittee on the Mexican vote abroad.
As if to seal that negative impression, which is shared by virtually every Mexican, the director of the postal service told Congress earlier this month that his agency is ill-equipped to handle the volume of correspondence that would be generated by a mail-in vote. Further, he said, the postal service cannot guarantee the secrecy of votes that come through the mail.
The legitimacy of each vote is critical because the election is expected to be tight.
Although none of the parties has chosen its candidate, there is little doubt about the contenders. Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD is expected to face off against his archrival from Tabasco, former PRI Gov. Roberto Madrazo. A third candidate is likely to be former Interior Minister Santiago Creel, of Fox's National Action Party. Although polls show Creel trailing his opponents, his presence in the race will divide the vote, possibly ensuring that no candidate wins a majority.
"Imagine how much this could complicate things for us, in the framework of a election that will be very competitive, where the votes abroad could contribute significantly to define the results of the election," PRD congressman Miguel Alonso said.
The Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, which is responsible for overseeing Mexico's federal elections, says the mail-in ballot is the most practical plan, at least for the 2006 election.
"Voting at booths (in the consulates) is the ideal to reach one day," IFE adviser Alejandra Latapi said. "Nonetheless, talking about the reality of the process, the budgetary constraints and our technical capacity, the mail-in ballot is the best option we have."
For now, Mexicans in the United States say they don't care how the vote is conducted.
"It doesn't matter if the vote is by mail, at the ballot box, if it is via Internet, if it is by phone," Ross said.
"If the vote is with smoke signals? Perfecto. The bottom line is we want to vote." |
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