Countdown to July
2, 2000
The Narco News Bulletin
History
of Electoral Fraud
1988, 1994, 1999...
2000?
"Poor
Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States."
--
popular Mexican expression
1988:
The Narco-President Wins by Electoral Fraud
Exhibit A:
Excerpted from the World
Policy Journal,
Fall 1989
Mexico Under Salinas: A Façade of Reform
by Andrew Reding
"At the heart of
the problem is the widespread perception that Salinas owes his
own office to electoral fraud.
"It is common knowledge
in Mexico that the ruling party shut down the computerized vote
tabulation system on election day last year, when early returns
showed Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, candidate of the center-left
National Democratic Front coalition (FDN, predecessor of the
PRD), leading in the race for the presidency.
"It is also common
knowledge that an independent count based on official tally sheets
from the 55 percent of polling locations where opposition parties
were able to maintain poll watchers showed Cárdenas leading
Salinas by 40 to 36 percent, and that the government has steadfastly
refused to disclose results from the remaining 45 percent of
polling locations.
"From incomplete
and aggregate data released by the PRI-controlled Federal Electoral
Commission, however, a team of statisticians has since been able
to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the government
resorted to wholesale inflation of its electoral totals in order
to steal the election from Cárdenas.1
Their findings confirmed what Mexicans had known all along: in
a poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times in August, less than
a quarter of the population was found to believe that Salinas
had won the election.
"It is against this
political backdrop that Salinas was inaugurated, the irony of
his position y richly reflected in the symbolism of the ceremony
itself. Held in the center of the capital city that, by government
admission, had voted for Cárdenas by a two-to-one margin,
the inauguration was guarded by army units charged with keeping
a hostile citizenry a safe distance away."
Footnote # 1:
José Berberán
et al, Radiografía
del Fraude: Análisis de los datos oficiales del 6 de julio (Mexico
City: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1988), 153 pp. ("X-Ray of Fraud: Analysis
of official data about July 6th")
"The statisticians
found two telltale signs of massive tampering. In place of the
single bell-shaped curve that would be expected to describe the
distribution of votes obtained by each party, the PRI was found
to have two such curves: one centered around a mean of 36 percent
(its true national average), and the other peaking around an
implausible 100 percent.
"A second diagnostic
test revealed the provenance of these 'unanimous' results. Whereas
totals for each of the opposition parties had last digits that
occurred with roughly equal frequency, the last digit of PRI
totals was 60 percent more likely to be a zero, indicating that
the PRI had inflated its totals by simply adding zeros to its
actual vote count.
"This explains the
government's determined refusal to engage in a public recount,
which would only expose it to national and international embarrassment."
Burned Ballot
for Cárdenas against Salinas
Burned
Ballots in Guerrero July 6, 1988
"In Guerrero, the
opposition tabulated 80.5 percent of the votes on the basis of
copies of official tally sheets.
"It counted 359,369
votes for Cárdenas and 90,796 for Salinas.
"When the official
vote count was released, Salinas wound up with 309,202 and Cárdenas
with 182,874.
"Some 10,000 of the
missing Cárdenas votes were discovered burned beside a
highway outside Ometepec; another 20,000 were found under a pile
of ashes outside Chilpancingo; and others were stolen from voting
booths and dumped out of helicopters over Coyuca."
Exhibit B:
US Officials
Backed Fraudulent President
Remarks During a Meeting
With President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico
October 3, 1989
"All of you from
Mexico City and elsewhere, welcome!
"Well, I normally
don't say anything at a photo opportunity. But I just can't tell
you how pleased we are to have the President of Mexico here in
the White House, what an honor it was to have him and Mrs. Salinas
up at Camp David for what was almost a family evening. But this
is a very important visit for the United States. I hope you feel
welcome; we want you all to feel very welcome."
-- Then-US
President George Bush
Salinas, as Mexican
president, privatized the banks, television stations and other
industries.
Meanwhile, he
nationalized the narco.
During his term
(1988-1994), with the support of two US administrations (Bush
and Clinton), Mexican drug trafficking organizations surpassed
their counterparts in Colombia in this multi-billion dollar industry.
Two weeks after
Salinas left office in 1994, the peso crashed and the Mexican
middle class was destroyed.
For every million
Mexicans whose livelihood was ruined, there is a millionaire
who was enriched beyond dream. And many of them -- especially
in the banking and media industries -- are white-collar narco-kingpins.
Swiss prosecutors
were the first to detect that the Salinas family had laundered
billions of US dollars that had been looted from Mexico during
Carlos Salinas' presidency.
Tomorrow on Narco
News:
18 Days
to the Mexican Election
Do you
know where your ambassador is?
A Watchdog for
the Underdog