Agrandissement : Illustration 1
“You’re welcome if you want to cover this election day with us, although I have to tell you : nothing extraordinary is happening." For this local journalist, "nothing extraordinary" means that votes are being bought and sold as usual, and that, thank God, no violent incident has been reported.
In many Mexican media, sold votes were analysed as a neutral category of votes, along with the youth vote, the senior vote and the truck drivers’ vote. A headline in the free street newspaper Metro, in a professional expert tone, intended to present bought votes as "the decisive electoral variable in the state of Mexico.”
The “biggest vote-buying operation in Mexico’s electoral history”
The magnitude of electoral corruption in the State of Mexico 2017 election for governor, nevertheless, ended up sparking a national campaign by various groups of intellectuals and activists concerned with the PRI's prolonged rule in the region.
Almost two days after polling stations closed, the Mexican electoral institute’s final results showed scores of 33.7 percent for del Mazo and 30.8 percent for Gomez Alvarez. In many polling stations, preliminary results in which MORENA leaded were allegedly manipulated by artificially inflating the total number of votes. After the PRI officially won the election, a group of artists, lawyers and academics united under the hashtag #NiUnFraudeMas called for «mega marches» against electoral fraud in Mexico city, Coahuila state and Veracruz.
During the campaign, the group of observers gathered the citizens’ complaints independently from electoral authorities. The civic group observed an average of four electoral irregularities a day in the State of Mexico since April 6, the main trick being the use of regional welfare programs to fill campaign venues of the PRI-led coalition. According to #NiUnFraudeMas, the Mexico state electoral process was marred by the “biggest vote-buying operation in Mexico’s electoral history.”
«Locking up» professional sectors
The professional sectors that supported PRI candidate del Mazo in Mexico state are the operators of public transport and informal trade, as well as state police officers. In a region that absorbed a great deal of the mass rural exodus of the 90s, these three sectors remain the biggest employers.
Del Mazo, in exchange for such support, has agreed to raise public transport fares. As for representatives of street trade, the vote for the PRI is a guarantee of not being evicted. The state police, according to an independent police union, were either confined to police stations to prevent them from voting or obligated to take a photo of their ballot paper, to make sure they voted "correctly."
Carrying masses of voters to the polls
The Mexican press widely reported “mobilization” of 3,000 voters in Ecatepec and Nezahualcoyotl, which was stopped on Sunday morning as a result of a police operation conducted by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office on Electoral Felonies (FEPADE).
Speaking on behalf of #NiUnFraudeMas, political scientist John Ackermann said the FEPADE did not prevent the use of hundreds of buses, taxis, vans, transporting bikes, police vehicles and plateless “mafia-style” cars to carry a whole mass of voters to the polls.
Blackmail on welfare
#NiUnFraudeMas reports that women beneficiaries of a social program for single mothers called Prospera were threatened with losing their benefits and blackmailed into attending a campaign rally for del Mazo in the town of Atlacomulco.
Jaime Cardenas, a lawyer and former member of the National Electoral Institute's general council, says the administration of Governor Eruviel Avila Villegas gives out vouchers called “tarjetas con todo,” referring to del Mazo's campaign theme “Fuerte y con todo.” The vouchers are worth $US25 and feature the PRI logo. In exchange, citizens are required to provide a copy of their voter credential.
Was Mexico State “too big to fall” for the regime?
In spite of serious social and security issues, the 87-year rule of the PRI was not interrupted in the State of Mexico. And, from Peña Nieto’s point of view, it must not be. As a matter of fact, Peña Nieto knows from his own personal experience that the winner of Mexico State is often the winner of presidential elections. The media coverage of this election, as a consequence, was almost as intense as it would be for a presidential contest, the next one being scheduled for 2018.
The left-wing candidate Delfina Gomez Alvarez, from the MORENA party, surprisingly kept a three to seven point lead over del Mazo in polls until election day. Despite the PRI's official spending of more than US$6 million on buying off the whole Mexico state, MORENA was supposed to win.
U.S. readers know that polls are not trustworthy. But they also know, thanks to investigative reporter Greg Ballast and the TeleSUR show "The Empire Files," that the Republican party stole millions of votes in the contentious 2016 U.S. presidential election.
What significant discrepancies between the final results and the polls often show is the presence of fraud. Several local and national media consider that Mexico State was “too big to fall” for the PRI, and that fraud was initially part of its plan to keep it.
The PRI’s fragile position
Since post-revolutionary years, the PRI has been winning elections by mobilizing professional sectors. When farms and industry were the biggest employers —– that is to say, before Mexico accepted free trade with the U.S. and Canada in 1994 —– the PRI was a mass party composed of farmers, workers and employees of state companies which formed friendly unions on the ground and cultivated loyalty within the organization.
Antorcha Campesina, for example, has always been a farmers’ union and a satellite of the ruling PRI. The PRI’s 70-year rule, in Latin America’s “oldest democracy”, was interrupted in 2000. The country’s radical demographic and social transformation in the wake of regional free-trade had destabilized the PRI system.
The “new,” overtly neoliberal PRI of President Enrique Peña Nieto is now losing ground again, defending 15 states that remain loyal since the battering regional elections of May-June 2016. After losing three states in that election, the PRI targeted the Veracruz governor Javier Duarte, who was accused of embezzling more than US$1 billion and cooperating actively with organized crime in the deaths of many journalists, activists, and random citizens.
In Mexico State, the reputation of the PRI administration of Governor Eruviel Avila Villegas was also significantly harmed by its incapacity to address security issues, and particularly femicides. The Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico, at the very start of the electoral campaign, reproached Avila Villegas directly for the “general impunity” surrounding soaring femicides in the entity. More than 1,500 women are presently missing in the State of Mexico, 263 were murdered in 2016 alone.
Please stop talking about «democratic norms»
Far from aknowledging the election outcome, MORENA leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says votes have to be recounted one by one and promises to challenge the results in courts. In the long judicial battle to come, MORENA is expected to mention its 17 recently killed supporters as well as abductions, beatings and judicial harrassment towards its activists.
“The Mexican government, instead of blabbing about the so-called 'rupture of democratic norms' in Venezuela, had better focus on our dysfunctioning democracy,” MORENA activist Gustavo Hernandez Flores told the news website Transeunte. Gustavo was abducted, beaten up and threatened with death during the campaign by members of the PRI-related Antorcha Campesina in Chimulhuacan, Mexico State.