The Narco News Bulletin The Narco News Bulletin-- Simón Bolívar
Editorial Published on June 12, 2000
Election Fraud and the Narco
Countdown to the July 2nd Mexican Elections
"The Government should be a product of popular vote, not of a gang of electoral delinquents"
Chilpancingo, Guerrero 1999 photo D.R. 1999 Al Giordano
Editorial The Narco News Bulletin Does Not Support Any Political Party or Candidate.
The reports of the next three weeks are not intended to influence any election. Nor do they attempt to say that elections in Mexico are any more corrupted by drug money than those in the United States or other countries.
We have already published The Influence of Drug Money in the US Presidential Campaign, and will continue reporting the facts and our analysis of the impact of US drug policy throughout the hemisphere.
It is now three weeks before the July 2nd Mexican elections.
We would be negligent if we did not tell our readers the truth.
The winner of the July 2 vote in Mexico will receive less than 50 percent of the vote. And he will be president.
There won't be a "second round" to guarantee a majority victory.
Recently in Perú and in the Dominican Republic -- important narco-political centers both -- the second vote never came: the opponents of the real US-backed candidates in both countries simply folded their tents in frustration.
Barring an earthshaking development in these few days left, the longest-standing ruling party on earth -- the PRI, or Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party -- will win. And it will win by stealing the election. The theft has already taken place. Only the simulation remains to be counted.
Sympathy for El Chamuco The best reflection of the popular despair -- a majority of Mexicans do not want the election to end this way -- comes not from the voice of The Narco News Bulletin, but from the words of the outstanding Mexican political humor magazine El Chamuco, in today's issue: June 11, 2000.
These are the words of the political cartoonists who have helped us to laugh between the tears and human suffering caused by US policy in Mexico.
They are well known among the Mexican public by their pen-names: El Fisgón, Helguera, Hernández, Patricio and Rius.
This is from their editorial of June 11th:
"The country's situation falls apart day after day. The PRI detours resources toward the presidential campaign and a new electoral fraud is being prepared. Fox throws a tantrum on national TV and to distract from his ridiculous behavior and he launches a smear campaign against Cárdenas (one more!). The situation at the National University continues to rot. The Fobaproa bank bailout scandal seems to have no end and it's clear that the bankers like the Sada family are shameless. Carlos Salinas threatens to return to Mexico. Zedillo continues as president. And the country is on the brink of a social explosion....
"...Completing this sinister chain of catastrophes and disgrace, El Chamuco announces that very soon we will definitely stop publishing. The reasons for this closing don't have anything to do with political, economic, editorial or distribution questions, but simply that the authors of this lampoon are burnt out. And this has happened because the politicians are making so much nonsense that there is nothing left for us to do."
In other words, the very talents who helped Mexico to "pack up its troubles in an old kit bag and smile, smile, smile," can't bring themselves to do it anymore.
They wanted to change their country. They gave voice to the majority of Mexicans and reflected the vox populi like no other media. But they're giving up. Surrendering. Three weeks before the election.
And as they confirm the defeat of the once unconquerable human spirit, they put the face of the man who is still running Mexico -- the Godfather of the Narco-State -- from exile in Dublin, Ireland, former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, on the cover:
"You Choose"
Cover of El Chamuco #113: June 11, 2000 The level of hypocrisy from Washington regarding electoral fraud in Mexico and elsewhere is imperial. They are stealing hope itself. And not just in Mexico.
They recently stole it in the elections of Perú and the Dominican Republic.
Black Spring: 2000 The United States has perpetrated two election frauds in two narco-democracies already this year.
In Perú, one of the only cocaine-producing countries on earth, the US State Department played on both sides of the electoral dispute.
The US Ambassador, protector of the regime of Alberto Fujimori, also held closed-door meetings with the "opposition candidate" Alejandro Toledo, a former World Bank employee. After Fujimori engineered a massive electoral fraud on April 9, the US called for a "second round" of voting.
It was a cynical public relations move without teeth: Washington can't throw stones from a glass White House.
The fact remained that the second vote would also be fixed, and so Toledo simply bowed out of the race. And Fujimori rules again.
What's more, in recent days came another proof of foreign meddling in Perú's election:
A high-level consultant to Toledo and his Perú Posible coalition turned out to be a foreign spy. According to the daily La Republica on June 7th, Toledo campaign "consultant" Roberto Flórez Araoz turned out to be an intelligence agent of the government of Spain, the European regime that is increasingly serving as a bridge for covert US policy in Latin America. Flórez Araoz in fact worked for the Spanish Embassy in Lima.
"He Spied on Toledo!"
Headline in La Republica about Spanish intelligence agent in Perú campaign
Toledo's party expulsed the spy from the campaign. This, in the same week that Toledo was in Spain meeting with that nation's president (oh, how the world powers love a gullible "opposition" leader!) But the damage, of course, was done weeks before. Fujimori will stay in power until 2005.
Likewise, did anybody in the US media report on the influence of narco money in the Dominican Republic and its May 17th elections? The publication, From the Wilderness, did. And The Narco News Bulletin published it as our story of the month in Issue #2.
In that Caribbean Republic, the candidate of the U.S. Narco-Ambassador Charles Mannatt won. His name is Hipolito Mejía of the Dominican Revolution Party, and he won because of Washington muscle. (There are some election-watch organizations who are confused about this matter. They believe, without offering proof, that the Clinton administration was behind the incumbent party that Mejía challenged. We point them fraternally to the painstakingly documented story by Michael C. Ruppert.)
Meanwhile, Venezuela, the only country in all América, according to Human Rights Watch, to improve the human rights situation within its borders in 1999, in fact canceled an election in which the current president was bound to win by a large margin.
Venezuela postponed its election this Spring because it felt the safeguards against electoral fraud were not fully in place.
The praise for this democratic act is as silent as the condemnation of clear examples of electoral fraud elsewhere: a crime that is, at its root, the robbery of democracy.
The US media -- whose foreign correspondents are, with few exceptions, so obedient to Washington, upon which they are dependent upon for "official" sources -- nonetheless portray Venezuela president Hugo Chávez as a kind of authoritarian.
We ask: What authoritarian ever cancelled an election he was bound to win by a large margin? History will judge that Chávez seized the higher moral ground from Washington in the troubled history of democracy at the beginning of the 21st century.
This strange behavior from Washington has everything to do with protecting the fragile US-imposed prohibition on drugs. It is a prohibition that perhaps once served other goals -- it never made a dent in the drug trade -- but now it is making a mess of every other policy it touches: economic, political, human rights, immigration, democracy itself.
The war-on-drugs is the lynchpin of injustice in the hemisphere. And until that problem is tackled, there will be no democracy, nor human rights, in our América.
Beginning this week, we will report the facts so inconvenient to those who traffic in the language of democracy and drug wars as they blow a curtain of smoke around their trafficking of drugs and their perpetration of electoral corruption.
The prohibition on drugs, as we shall see these weeks in Mexico, is the money spigot for electoral fraud.
from somewhere in a country called América, June 11, 2000
Al Giordano
publisher
The Narco News Bulletin
Fighting for Our América
