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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2006 
Poor Voters Wined, Dined and Bullied
 Richard Boudreaux - LATimes
| | Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador greets a girl during a rally in the city of Tlaxcala, Mexico on Thursday, June 22, 2006. Mexico will hold presidential elections on July 2, 2006. (AP/Marco Ugarte) |
Ecatepec, Mexico — Want to add a room to your house? Get fitted for reading glasses? Take home a bicycle or container of gasoline? Better yet, qualify for a free-meals program?
If you're needy and registered to vote in Mexico, now is the time to try to improve your lot. It's election season, and all over the country the three big political parties are dispensing campaign largesse among the poor, with the hope or understanding that they'll return the favor July 2 at the ballot box.
Alicia Perez, 87, is getting her share.
Beaming with delight, she joined scores of senior citizens under a tent in the main plaza of this Mexico City suburb last week to sign up for a new $70 monthly food subsidy. Each was handed a registration number stapled to a flier for presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Along the Pacific coast in Oaxaca state, blankets, mattresses and other supplies authorized last October after Hurricane Stan are emerging belatedly from warehouses, residents say, and being offered up to voters on behalf of PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo.
Truckloads of building materials are on the move in several states, much of them channeled from a federal anti-poverty program to the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, to be doled out on behalf of its nominee, Felipe Calderon.
Six years after a landmark election ended decades of single-party domination, the deposed regime's art of courting voters with giveaways has spread across the political spectrum, challenging a young democracy that has moved only halfheartedly to halt the practice.
Now the first election of the new pluralist era, a tight race between the pro-business Calderon and left-wing populist Lopez Obrador, could be decided as much by payoffs — or pressure to cut them off — as by proposals.
Under Mexican law, it is illegal solicit or coerce votes in exchange for cash or material benefits more valuable than the hats and T-shirts routinely handed out at campaign rallies. Political parties are prohibited from taking over the distribution of food subsidies, disaster relief or other government benefits during an election campaign.
Electoral authorities are investigating such giveaways but have little power to stop them, and each party's quiet defense of the practice enables others to get away with it.
"No party wants to put a stop to vote-buying," said Alfredo Fuentes, an election official in Oaxaca. "It is so much easier to try to buy the votes of illiterate peasants than to educate them about political platforms."
As a result, Mexican campaigns are famously rich in enticements for the poor. These include medical checkups, eye exams and glasses, sewing machines, bicycles, haircuts, school supplies, life insurance policies, amusement park rides, vegetable seeds, bank loans, food baskets and, when nothing else will do, cash.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had monopolized federal power since 1929, resorted to such come-ons in the late 1980s when opposition parties began mounting serious challenges. Vicente Fox complained during his successful run for the presidency in 2000 that his PRI rival was buying votes "in plain view of everyone."
Once in power, Fox's party, the PAN, began imitating its rivals and ignoring the law. Today all three main parties lead state and municipal governments and raid their treasuries to woo needy voters.
In Oaxaca, where the PRI runs the state government, the party's formidable vote-inducement machine has been handing out overdue hurricane relief.
Standing bare-chested on the dirt floor of his tiny office, Isaias Rodriguez, the nonpartisan mayor of Cerro La Esperanza near Oaxaca's coast, displayed 220 sheets of corrugated tin roofing meant for homes damaged last fall. The material arrived only last month, he said, with instructions that it be stored until a PRI official could come to distribute it at a campaign rally.
"I'm supposed to be the authority here, but I'm being used," Rodriguez said.
Although Mexico's pluralistic politics hasn't stopped such election law violations, it has helped expose a few.
Poor farmers in Chapantongo, in Hidalgo state, lined up at the home of a local PAN official to receive concrete blocks, cement and water storage tanks for which they had qualified under a federal housing program. But the supplier accidentally delivered the materials to the PRI-controlled city hall, prompting a criminal inquiry.
Presidential campaigns are also running roughshod over a ban on an uglier form of influence — coercion.
The most common form of arm-twisting is to summon beneficiaries of a government welfare program and warn them that if they fail to vote a certain way, the benefits will cease. Residents of several villages in Oaxaca said local PRI officials controlling enrollment lists for Oportunidades, the largest federal anti-poverty program, have threatened to exclude anyone who doesn't vote for their party.
Sergio Aguayo, a veteran crusader for free elections, estimates that 4 million voters are feeling such pressures from all three parties.
A special prosecutor for electoral crimes is studying 187 complaints from the campaign, most alleging vote-buying or voter coercion, but does not expect to rule on any before election day. Nor have electoral authorities obliged any party to halt such violations.
"Ideally, we would detect, sanction and stop these practices during the campaign, because otherwise even bigger offenses will follow," said Marco Gomez, one of nine policymaking counselors of the Federal Electoral Institute. But because its enforcement powers are limited, he said, the institute has opted for a campaign urging Mexicans not to be influenced by giveaways.
Gomez believes it is working. "People are more and more aware that their vote is 100% secret, something they can cast independently of what they receive," he said.
Interviews point to a generational divide, with elderly voters appearing more vulnerable to manipulation.
Marcelo Gonzalez, a farmer in his 60s, was promised enough material to add a bathroom and kitchen to his two-room house in Zimapantongo, in Hidalgo state, if he voted for Calderon. That's exactly what he would do, he said.
But Daniel Chavez, 26, said he felt no such obligation after Calderon's party delivered concrete blocks to build his mother a home nearby.
Lopez Obrador, whose Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, has never held the presidency, urges voters tempted by his rivals' giveaways to "take the bait without biting the hook." But the PRD does its own share of baiting. In April, its campaign workers offered up containers of gasoline to entice hundreds of indigenous voters to a rally in Xpujil, in Campeche state.
The food subsidy handouts in Ecatepec are a more subtle campaign ploy. Officially, the senior citizens are being signed up for a benefit offered by the city's PRD mayor-elect.
What makes the activity illegal, election officials say, is that those handling the registration are openly campaigning, distributing Lopez Obrador's toothy image on a flier with the slogan: "Smile, we're going to win." The campaign activists are also warning that the subsidy might be less than promised if their man loses.
"In reality, yes, this is a form of illegal inducement," said art dealer Noe Santander, 46, who was signing up his mother. "But all the parties are doing it, and I don't feel beholden to any. Whatever they're giving away, we're entitled to it. We pay for it with our taxes." |
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