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Mexico’s Presidential Election Could Get Really Dirty

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Published by DD
Sources  The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Business Insider ,
World Politics Review


This year’s election in Mexico is already shaping up to be one of the dirtiest and most violent in decades.   General elections are scheduled to be held in Mexico on 1 July 2018.   Voters will elect a new president to serve a six-year term, 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 128 members of the Senate. 

IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE

Though dirty and violent political campaigns are no longer shocking nor big news this one could  shock the nation  like nothing since the assassination of  Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994. 

Colosio was the presidential candidate for PRI and was murdered at a rally in Tijuana, Baja California (according to the official govt. report) by a lone gunman.    His message of hope and change was beginning to resonate with voters who were fed up with a political system mired in corruption and abuse of power.  He was young photogenic and the public adored him.  PRI was getting nervous about his campaign to eliminate corruption.   Almost immediately after his death conspiracy theories started flying.  He was viewed by many as Mexico's JFK.  Colosio's death shocked a nation that had not seen a political assassination in almost seven decades.

Over time political assassinations became a fact of life, especially at the local and state level.   Throughout Mexico over the past decade, 112 current or former elected officials, including mayors and council members, have been killed, according to Mexico's National Association of Mayors.   Sixty-three of those deaths have come under President Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, who took office in December 2012.

There were 26,573 killings in the first 11 months of last year in Mexico, the most since at least the start of the century, as drug cartels fought for territory. Twenty-one of them were mayors or former mayors, according to Alcaldes de Mexico, a magazine that tracks the deaths.

 The attacks on local officials has taken place amid the fragmentation of criminal groups around the country, which are breaking down in to smaller, usually more volatile groups.

"Organized crime has become more politicized because it's become more local," Alejandro Hope, a security consultant and former official for CISEN, Mexico's civilian intelligence agency, told Bloomberg. "They're more concerned about who wins and who loses elections."

The arrests and killings of drug cartel leaders, including Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, have caused criminal groups to splinter and to focus more on extortion and kidnappings, making their connections with local power structures more critical, Hope says.

If the last week of December is any indication the remaining six months before the election do not bode well for the local candidates.

 On December 24, an activist from the center-left party Citizens' Movement was found shot dead in western Jalisco. On December 28, Saul Galindo, a state congressman and mayoral candidate from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, was shot and killed in the same region.

On December 29, Arturo Gomez, the PRD mayor of the town of Petatlan on Guerrero's Pacific coast, was shot three times through a window of a restaurant where he was dining with friends, dying later at a hospital. 




Relatives and friends of mayor Arturo Gomez carry his coffin during his funeral in Petatlan, Mexico, on Dec. 29, 2017Photographer: Francisco Robles/AFP via Getty Images
December 30 saw three killings. Juan Jose Castro Crespo, a former state congressional candidate from the center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was killed in Baja California. Gabriel Hernandez, a town-council member from the PRD in Jalapa in Tabasco, was found stabbed to death in his home. Mariano Catalan Ocampo, a PRD member who was municipal director of general services and was expected to run for mayor, was shot in the downtown of tourist city of Zihuatanejo on Guerrero Pacific coast.

On December 31, Adolfo Serna, a PRI mayoral candidate, was shot dead in his hometown of Atoyac de Alvarez, also on Guerrero's Pacific coast, just hours after posting a Facebook message urging locals to unite to improve society. 

Dirty Tricks

Bloomberg reported this:

Mexico’s elections have often had a dark side. Not only have candidates been killed, illicit cash has flowed,  vote counts have been mysteriously interrupted, and ballot boxes disappeared.  

 Lopez Obrador’s early lead, combined with his past, is one reason why credible institutions will be key in 2018. Amlo, as he’s known, was edged out by Felipe Calderon in 2006 by a margin of less than one percentage point. He claimed fraud. His supporters camped out in Mexico City’s business district for months, often bringing life to a standstill.
Amlo checking his watch

 
Ricardo Anaya , Pan candidate is polling in second place


Jose Antonio Meade< PRI candidate is polling in 3rd place




Several Independent candidates  without a party affiliation will also be on the ballot for the first time in modern Mexican elections and will undoubtedly  complicate the election by fragmenting the vote   According to the Pew Institute 93% of Mexicans are dissatisfied with the way democracy works in their country   characterized by a corrupt ruling class serving vested interest that has not served the population at large.  Political reforms established since the last Presidential election which allowed Independents to run have generally been welcomed.  

The Independent candidates as whole are not doing it just for show.  They have optimism given the success of outsiders and insurgents in the Americas have tested establishment parties at the polls and in many cases won.  Even in Mexico they look at the success that Jamie Rodriquez, better known as "Bronco" won the governorship of Nuevo Leon as an Independent.  He is the first non PRI Governor to hold that seat in Mexican history.  (He will also be on the Presidential ballots in 2018)

One of the most interesting and most unlikely Independent candidate is running without any real expectation of winning but to make a profound symbolic statement about racial and gender inequality that are still the norm in Mexico.  She is Maria de Jesus Patricio, better known as "Marichuy",  an indigenous woman from Chiapas.  


With the rapid advance in technology hackers have become much more proficient and malware programs developed that can shut down or control computers.   So when analysts say next year’s presidential race could be one of the dirtiest ever, it’s worth paying attention. The bar is high.     

The country is suffering the worst wave of violence this century. That could transform the clashes that are a feature of campaigns into something more dangerous -- especially if the vote is close and contentious, as it’s widely expected to be.

 “This could be the worst election since democratic races were born,” said Jesus Cantu, a political scientist at the Tecnologico de Monterrey. “If we look at what the federal government and political parties have already done, as well as some electoral authorities, we have no reason to be optimistic.”

The task of ensuring a smooth vote falls to regulators who are underfunded. And in October, President Enrique Pena Nieto fired the top electoral prosecutor after he spoke to the media about an ongoing bribery investigation -- which concerned the previous presidential vote.

The position was just filled by Hector Marcos Diaz. But the previous prosecutor’s firing just as he was investigating Pena Nieto’s previous election campaign weakens the watchdog’s ability to crack down on vote-buying, according to Kenneth Greene, who researches Mexican elections at the University of Texas at Austin.

 The practice will likely be “bigger than ever in 2018,” says Greene. His polling has found that 21 percent of respondents had been approached with an offer to buy their vote. Of those willing to name a party that made the offer, 78 percent said it was a PRI representative.

The independence of the new prosecutor may not even be the watchdog’s biggest concern. Congress just slashed its budget by 300 million pesos ($16 million) -- the largest cut in the agency’s history, right before the largest election in the nation’s history.

 Another headache for the vote watchdog is the special court that has to approve its decisions, and has been proving stubborn.

Regulators have been trying to go after political parties for flouting financial rules during last June’s local ballots. The election institute says that more than a quarter of the money spent in Mexico State, the nation’s largest, came from unregistered sources.
 
And in Coahuila state, the agency found unreported funding was so high that it pushed the PRI’s campaign spending above legal limits -- grounds for annulling the vote (which the PRI won). But the regulator’s audit was twice overturned by Mexico’s highest electoral court.

“Part of the concern we have in the national electoral institute is that some criteria of the court tends to relax or make less severe the auditing process,” said Lorenzo Cordova, the institute’s top official.

Another advantage the PRI gains from incumbent status is its ability to advertise out of the public purse. After spending double its publicity budget last year, Pena Nieto’s administration has proven savvy at using the media to keep in front of viewers’ eyeballs.

 All political parties are buying media, sometimes with cash under the table, according to Luis Carlos Ugalde, a former head of the vote regulator. But the PRI -- which holds the presidency and the largest number of state governorships -- can commandeer more resources, he said.

  Hacking of the Mexican electoral system, either by the ruling PRI or by a foreign government such as Russia, is a significant risk, says Tony Payan, director of the Mexico Center at Rice University’s Baker Institute in Houston.

 “I don’t think the PRI is above manipulating the election, not just by buying votes in the streets but tapping into the computers,” Payan said. The PRI didn’t immediately comment.

Payan points to a famous precedent: the election of 1988. It was almost the end of seven decades of uninterrupted PRI rule. Instead, Salinas won. Government officials admitted after leaving power that on election day, as the vote count began to show opposition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in front, it was shut down -- with an announcement that “the system crashed.”

That phrase became a rallying cry against electoral fraud. It remains so today -- especially among Lopez Obrador’s supporters.

DD note;  What ever dirty tricks are used to influence the election it will not be pretty.



















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