Diary

Rubén Gallo

On the night of 2 July 2000, Mexico achieved, in less than 15 minutes, one of the most peaceful, transparent and civilised transitions to democracy in modern history. At 11 p.m. José Woldenberg, the head of the Federal Electoral Institute, announced on Mexican television that Vicente Fox had defeated his opponent from the PRI by a wide margin – 8 per cent – and that the elections had been clean and orderly. Minutes later, President Ernesto Zedillo came on television to congratulate Fox and to concede defeat on behalf of the PRI. The final television address came from the losing PRI candidate, who appeared shocked and incredulous. The PRI – the Institutional Revolutionary Party – had been in power since 1929.

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Vol. 29 No. 2 · 25 January 2007 » Rubén Gallo » Diary (print version)
Page 34 | 3128 words

Letters

From John Richmond

Rubén Gallo, in his article on the Mexican election debacle, states that the electoral court’s partial recount did not reveal any irregularities (LRB, 25 January). However, the post-election sample audit did uncover ‘errors’ which would have counted in López Obrador’s favour. The fact was that no one – not the Mexican establishment, the corporate media, the powerful military, organised crime, or the Western powers – wanted a recount because everyone was afraid López Obrador would actually win.

The fraud, corruption and use of force and terror that is decried in regimes considered ‘anti-Western’ has been largely ignored in the case of Mexico, even after Mexican security and military units killed more than a dozen protesters in Oaxaca last autumn. Not only did Gallo not mention Oaxaca, he also failed to discuss the sharp rise in human rights abuses under Vincente Fox, including the terrorising and subsequent ‘suicide’ of the human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa y Plácido.

López Obrador was indeed his own worst enemy, but not in the sense implied by Gallo. He spent months campaigning from the mushy centre-left while Zapatista Subcommandante Marcos launched the Other Campaign, encouraging people to opt out of the corrupt neoliberal electoral process and work for grass-roots change. Many poor Mexicans did not see López Obrador’s social democractic PRD as a real alternative to the establishment parties. Once he swung left, however, his popularity dramatically increased: were the election to be rerun today he would be able to count on the voters – between 5 and 10 per cent of the electorate – who supported the Other Campaign and who have now joined his campaign in a grand coalition.

John Richmond
Toronto