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 Editorials | September 2006 
World Leaders Should Fight Government Corruption
 Nuestra Comunidad
| | Just as worldwide campaigns against drug trafficking and terrorism are orchestrated, why not launch a direct campaign against corruption, fraud and other blights? |
On July 2, presidential elections took place in Mexico. Two months later, after a long and winding count, Felipe Calderon of PAN (Partido Accion Nacional) won.
This means the same party to which current president Vicente Fox belongs will continue to lead.
Calderon beat Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD (Partido de la Revolucion Democratica) by 233,831 votes, or 0.57 percent.
From the very beginning, Lopez Obrador claimed there was fraud and asked that the final votes be recounted. The government electoral tribunal Trife only authorized the recount in certain voting districts. This process gave rise to several irregularities.
Trife admitted to Fox and business organizations it had unduly intervened into the electoral process, but that this intrusion was not reason enough to declare the process invalid. Therefore, Calderon was declared president-elect.
Lopez Obrador did not accept Trife's decision, declared a state of civil disobedience and organized mass protests.
On Sept. 16, Lopez Obrador called for a national democratic assembly in which strategies for peaceful civil resistance were outlined.
He also announced that a parallel government would function for the next six years, as this would be the "legitimate" government because Calderon is a "spurious" president.
One-party rule
Political and administrative crises are not new in Mexico. The simple fact is that all the rottenness the PRI party accumulated during its 70 years in its one-party dictatorship is rising to the surface.
A country, a city or a town, which is governed for decades by the same party without interruption, can only be a source of disgrace. Throughout PRI's hegemony in Mexico, all power was used to perpetuate its leaders. The president of the moment chose his successor and the powerful political machinery saw to it he would win the election.
This is why more than a few chapters in the history of Mexico deal with electoral fraud and other manners of insult to democracy.
It is not the first time this country formed a parallel government. The first one recorded was by Benito Juarez in 1864 when Maximiliano de Habsburgo was proclaimed emperor of Mexico with the backing of Napoleon III and Mexican conservatives.
In modern history, Fox himself belonged, at one time, to an alternative government. During the presidential elections of 1988, the candidates were Carlos Salinas de Gortari, PRI; Cuahtemoc Cardenas, PRD; and Manuel Clouthier, PAN.
When the results were broadcast, Cardenas was in the lead. Suddenly, the president of the federal electoral commission, Manuel Bartlett, appeared on television to announce the counting system "was broken" Therefore, the presentation of electoral information had to be suspended.
When the system was re-established, the winner was Salinas de Gortari, who was eventually declared president and whose government Mexicans remember with sadness.
Cardenas protested and claimed there was fraud but, in the end, accepted the results.
Clouthier did not proceed in the same manner. As Eileen Truax, the Los Angeles reporter for La Opinion recently commented, the current president, Fox, held the title of secretary of agriculture in that parallel government.
Clouthier died in a traffic accident on the Culiacan-Mazatlan road in 1989. The circumstances surrounding his death have not been made clear, according to Clouthier's biographers in Wikipedia.
Among the several chapters of proven electoral fraud recorded in the history of Mexico, two occurred recently: The elections for governor in the states of Tabasco and Colima had to be annulled.
Latin America's legacy
With Fox's election, PRI's hegemony effectively ended in 2000. Doubtlessly, all the evils accumulated during PRI's lengthy rule have not disappeared, and cannot easily do so. The one-party tyranny is not a phenomenon affecting Mexico exclusively, but nearly all countries in Latin America. They have all been, to a certain extent, governed by castes, which make fraud and corruption their favorite means to keep their leaders in power.
Bringing jack-boot governments and their effects to an end is a task of titanic proportions. A truly serious outcome of those governments is they do not govern as they should. They do not use their power to make countries prosper and to benefit all inhabitants.
Poor oppressed
This is how, in Mexico and other Latin American countries, the masses of poor people keep growing and remain destitute. These poor masses are ripe for exploitation by populists, extremists, demagogues and the corrupt.
I am not asserting the most recent Mexican elections were fraudulent, but there is no proof of the contrary either.
Even though Trife's decision has been made, there is, after all, the discredit of government agencies. If this were not so, Lopez Obrador and his thousand followers would not have an argument to challenge the electoral decision.
What is going to happen in Mexico during the next six years? Nothing other than continuing to go deeper into crisis. This is a matter that should be monitored by countries such as the United States or other powerful nations in the world.
Just as worldwide campaigns against drug trafficking and terrorism are orchestrated, why not launch a direct campaign against corruption, fraud and other blights? If the world manages to improve in this sense, underdeveloped nations would start to find paths of progress, which among other things, would prevent rich countries from getting filled up with poor immigrants.
The writer is editor of Nuestra Comunidad, a Spanish-language weekly published by the Courier-Post. |
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