LEFTIST LATIN AMERICA: Election News -- The Mexico Situation

Too close to call. It should be an North American election mantra. Instead of democracy, we’ll sit around and chant to ourselves, because it seems that these days whenever we go out and vote, no matter how many millions cast ballots, the races always come out too close to call.

Isn’t that strange?

The latest Twilight Zone election episode is currently unfolding in Mexico where on the 2nd of July Mexicans went to the polls to choose between National Action Party candidate Felipe Calderón and Party of the Democratic Revolution candidate and current mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The former the free-market and generally right wing (read: favored by Washington) candidate and the latter being the leftist.

Election reports were confounding. While Obrador lead in the polls for months before the race, his poll numbers steadily declined in the final weeks. Early on he cried corruption. And Mexican elections are no stranger to fraud. Calderón was declared victor on the 7th, a winner by 244,000 votes, or, less than a percentage point. Meanwhile, millions of votes haven’t been counted.

Since, millions (people, not votes) have demonstrated in  the capital in support of Obrador’s request for a recount. And the episode grows more bizarre with a tinge of North American deja vu -- the election's heading for the courts.

Wise is the demand from El Universal in Mexico for a complete recount. And a sharp take offered nowhere else but in The Inquirer’s recent interview with Greg Palast, “You notice that the press announced that the elections in Mexico were clean? Take a look at the bylines and find one that doesn’t say Mexico City. I know Mexico City was clean — Obrador is the mayor. There’s no question. The election was stolen out in the hinterland. But they wont go out to Guerrero State. Why? They’d get shot. Find one goddamn byline from this election that isn’t Mexcio City in a U.S. paper. I challenge you.”

Comments

[Emerson Fry]

First of all, I must give you credit for being so bold. I don't often see such deliberate, obvious and deceitful misquotation in the media. You write that Colin Powell said that the election was stolen. This is true, but he said that about the Ukrainian elections 2 years ago. I know that because that is what the link in your column shows. Yet again we see proof that leftists both inside and outside the US are not above lies and hypocrisy to advance their own selfish and misguided aims.

[New York Inquirer EIC]

Emerson Fry,

It was not a bold move at all. It was an error and has now been corrected.

Thank you for pointing it out.