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 Editorials | At Issue | July 2006 
A Mature Democracy or More Fraud? Mexicans Divided
 Catherine Bremer - Reuters
| | A man reads the morning newspapers in Mexico City July 3, 2006. (Daniel LeClair/Reuters) |
A cliffhanger presidential vote and rival claims of victory have split Mexicans into two camps: those who believe in their young democracy and others who fear the bad old days of fraud are not yet gone.
As the conservative ruling party's Felipe Calderon declared himself president-elect on Monday and his leftist rival, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, huddled with advisors to decide how to challenge the result, their supporters took very different views on the state of democracy.
Some saw the election as another success, showing Mexico had not only embraced free and fair elections but was able to keep calm even when the result was extremely close.
Others who support Lopez Obrador, an anti-poverty crusader, said the election stank of the dirty tricks that were so common in Mexico during most of the 20th century.
"For me, this is fraud. It's not fair," 57-year-old Francesca Contreras said angrily as she wiped clean the counter of her stall in a sprawling Mexico City food market.
"I believe Lopez Obrador won. Entire neighborhoods voted for him ... They are plotting something and they are mocking the people. I hope people rise up, even take up arms, against this."
Although the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has ordered a recount for Wednesday, official returns from 97.7 percent of polling stations gave National Action Party candidate Calderon a lead of 1 percentage point, or nearly 400,000 votes, over Lopez Obrador.
Both had claimed victory on Sunday night after an election that opinion polls predicted would be nailbitingly close.
PRESSURE
Wall Street and political analysts have said they fear a narrow Calderon victory could spark street protests by Lopez Obrador supporters, who chanted victory on Sunday and warned they would not accept foul play.
But some Mexicans were confident democratic institutions can handle the pressure.
"It's great. It was a clean election. They are fighting over who won. This shows we are learning democracy," said Juan Ayuba, 58, selling pickles and glazed fruit at the market.
"It's not like before, when there was a lot of manipulation of the elections. IFE will have the final word."
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled for 71 years until it was finally toppled in 2000, trailed in a distant third place in Sunday's vote.
It was a far cry from the days when PRI presidents handpicked their successors, local party chiefs would coerce the poor to vote for the party and operatives simply stole elections if they faced a real challenge.
Mexico has been scrabbling slowly toward democracy ever since the 1988 election was famously rigged, with the PRI government claiming its computers crashed just as leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was headed for victory.
When the computerized vote count was restarted, PRI candidate Carlos Salinas was winning.
"For 71 years we were under an anarchy and now we are excited because we see things have changed," said butcher Fernando Salcedo of the changed political map.
Many of Mexico's poor remain disillusioned however.
"Ah, so it went into penalties," joked a rubbish sweeper at the market, who hadn't voted or followed the result. "Anyway, why vote? They're all the same, they all rob us."
Tight Race Puts Mexican System to the Test
John Rice - Associated Press
Mexico's struggle against a history of spectacularly dirty elections has inspired an elaborate and costly vote-counting system meant to squeeze out fraud.
That system is undergoing the ultimate test this week in a bitter, dead-heat presidential race pitting two parties with powerful memories of being robbed in past elections. Both claimed victory on Monday, and many feared political turmoil if a major party rejects the official result.
With preliminary returns nearly complete, Felipe Calderon of the ruling National Action Party held a lead of about 1 percentage point over Andes Manuel Lopez Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party.
The result is a challenge to the credibility of Mexico's recently reformed electoral system — one that has turned Mexican elections from a national disgrace into an internationally admired model.
"The Mexican system is much more transparent" than the U.S. system, said George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia and a former Virginia state legislator.
Mexico has a single voter registry, a uniform photo identity card for voters and a national election law, he said, whereas "in the U.S., you have this crazy quilt of 50 state laws."
Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute is legally independent of the government, while in the U.S., partisan state officials tend to oversee the system — something that contributed to controversy over the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
The Institute also provides taxpayer financing for political campaigns based on their vote totals in past races, an effort to even the playing field. Mexico sharply limits private campaign contributions.
Paired with the Institute is an independent Federal Electoral Tribunal, known by its initials as Trife, whose word on all election disputes is final.
Confidence does not come cheap. The IFE's budget for 2006 was about $1.1 billion.
Some 25,000 observers monitored Sunday's voting and reported few problems. But the tight race focused attention on the counting system.
Workers at thousands of polling places sealed ballot boxes Sunday evening, attached reports tallying the votes on paper ballots inside and sent them to the 300 district centers. Preliminary returns so far were based on those figures, transmitted informally to Mexico City.
The legal count starts Wednesday, when district councils add up the ballot box reports. Actual ballots are re-counted only if the local reports are illegible or incoherent or if the package has been tampered with. By law, the councils cannot even stop to sleep before issuing their reports.
Parties have until Thursday to allege irregularities at polling places and until early next week to dispute the district counts. Those challenges ultimately go to the Trife, which has sometimes thrown out the results of congressional or gubernatorial contests, but which has never seen so tight a presidential race.
Grayson said the decision "is bound to wind up in the Trife," which has until Sept. 6 to certify the presidential winner. The new president takes office on Dec. 1.
But Grayson said the rules for the tribunal's decision are vague: "It's going to be somewhat like the U.S. election in 2000, where you have the Supreme Court justices voting without clear guidelines."
Calderon's National Action Party, founded in 1939, suffered through generations of obviously fraudulent elections — votes stolen, ballot boxes stuffed or burned, voters bought or threatened, imaginary vote counts — and gradually won concessions from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Opposition parties were first allowed into Congress in 1946, and federal officials took over from capricious local election organizers. Proportional representation gave the opposition more seats in 1963. By 1989, National Action was allowed a governorship.
The Electoral Institute and Trife were created in 1990. A 1996 reform finally removed direct government control over the election system.
Those recent, dramatic reforms were prompted by the clearly fraudulent election of 1988, which most Mexicans believe was won by leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. His outraged supporters united to form Democratic Revolution.
Despite the transparency, Mexico's history of fraud has fed enormous suspicion of every election narrowly lost — and a willingness to battle against results believed unfair.
"This is not the era of fraud! This is not 1988! The people now are not going to accept it," Marti Batres, a top Democratic Revolution leader, said at an election night rally. As early returns showed a tight race, cries of "Fraud!" echoed from the crowd that had expected an easy Lopez Obrador win.
For Mexico's election counters, no matter who wins, the task now is to convert anger into disappointment. |
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