The Narco News Bulletin

"The name of our country is América"

-- Simón Bolívar

Sunday, July 9, 2000

Democracy Watch Exposed

Texas GOP Political Consultant Rob Allyn Admits Covert Activity in Mexican Presidential Campaign

"Democracy Watch" Director Boasts to Dallas Morning News that he was Fox's Consultant All Along

Fox has lost all moral and legal authority to expel human rights observers and journalists from Mexico

Rob Allyn and Marcela Berland: Three Years of Election Fraud Admitted

The Narco News Bulletin smelled a rat from the moment we began watching "Democracy Watch."

This "project" run by US political consultants, claimed to be non-partisan, to monitor the Mexican elections through polls and exit polls to assure a clean result.

On April 15th, we called upon Texas political consultant Rob Allyn, the director of what he said was a "non-partisan" group of "Mexican businessmen" and members of "all three political parties" to disclose their funding sources.

see www.a-roba.punto.com

Rob Allyn wrote us back:

He said:

April 17, 1999

Mr. Giordano:

I read with interest your email to me of last week. You make some very, very good points, and I am taking them up with our sponsors this week.

But his only sponsor, he boasted today in the Dallas Morning News, was the campaign of Vicente Fox.

Study his untruthful words carefully here:

Can you and I possibly meet during our next trip to Mexico this coming
Thursday? We will be coming down to release our first pre-election survey.

Perhaps by then, I will have answers to all of your questions. I will work this week to explore whether we might be permitted to release the names of our donors.

It was pure show. He had no intention of seeking answers to any questions, or exploring anything. Narco News rejected his offer to meet in private. And it's a good thing we did. But listen to him in the context, now, that Fox, his client of three years, has won the election, in his April letter to Narco News:

In the meantime, I hope you will appreciate the dilemma of our contributors, who retained us to work for transparency in the elections process -- yet have a justifiable concern over negative repercussions for their support of a project which those in power will no doubt view as anti-government.

"To work for transparency in the election process?"

Allyn and the Fox campaign invented the phony group "Democracy Watch" and then invented a non-existent group of "businessmen" with a bunch of invented "concerns" about being seen as "anti-government."

Nothing at all transparent about that. Allyn even tried to buy us with access and flattery:

Let's talk directly as soon as we can. I firmly believe, having read your bulletins in the past, that you will see that we are on the side of the angels in this matter.

Rob Allyn

We rejected his offer cold. We knew he was trying to manipulate our coverage. Now, in today's Dallas Morning News, he admits it.

In an article titled "The Texans on Fox's Team," by Alfredo Corchado with an assist from Mexico City bureau chief Lawrence Iliff, Allyn now admits what he hid before. And he's portraying himself as James Bond rather than the electoral delinquent that he is.

MEXICO CITY - Oftentimes, Rob Allyn's biggest challenge was trying to remember his covert identity. If he slipped, he risked his role in a secret mission to push along Mexico's first bloodless revolution.

Puzzled waiters and hotel receptionists would stare as Mr. Allyn, a well-known Republican political consultant in Dallas, painfully pondered the many fake names before signing a bill. Who was he this time, José de Murga, Francisco Gutiérrez, or Alberto Aguirre?

"Basically, for three years I'd go home from my real job to a secret job," Mr. Allyn said. "I led a second life for that period."

Oh, such hardship! Having to choose between three credit cards at restaurants! While 400 foreign journalists and international human rights observers have been expulsed from Mexico in the past presidential term. Not one of them had three credit cards, most didn't have one. And they ate beans and tortillas in the jungle, while Robbie Allyn "painfully pondered" his menus at restaurants that accept credit cards, that is, the top one percent of Mexican restaurants!

Listen to their true confessions in today's Dallas Morning News:

For three years, Mr. Allyn and two of his colleagues at Allyn & Co. quietly made forays into Mexico and played a key role in helping shape and hone the message of "change" that maverick presidential candidate Vicente Fox used to dethrone the 71-year-old Institutional Revolutionary Party.

...The experiences of the three Texans, who for the first time agreed to speak openly, offer a rare insight into Mr. Fox's strategy leading to his landmark victory on July 2. It also exposes for the first time the U.S. consultants behind the Fox campaign. While the media hounded several Washington insiders, including James Carville and Dick Morris, as the likely candidates, it was Mr. Allyn and his team all along.

For three years -- obviously on tourist visas -- they worked and got paid in a partisan political campaign in Mexico.

But Allyn and his assistants are STILL deceiving the people on both sides of the border:

...they worked mostly for free, getting paid only for campaign commercials produced for Mr. Fox....

When a political consultant "gets paid for campaign commercials" he receives 15-percent of the money spent on buying ads on TV, radio and in newspapers. On TV alone, Vicente Fox spent $60 million US dollars. Do the math: The buyers made $9 million US dollars on television ads alone. Any radio or newspaper or magazine ads were simply gravy. But Allyn is still strutting around as if he worked "mostly for free."

And the Dallas Morning News, if it doesn't immediately fire every reporter and editor that touched this poor excuse for a news story, will never have an ounce of journalistic credibility covering Mexico again. To not even ask Allyn about "Democracy Watch" is an ethical crime of journalism.

Listen to the hardships that Robbie Allyn and Company endured:

The campaign over, the media savvy strategists talked of once drinking brandy - Mexico's Presidente label - with the future president of Mexico in the back of a bullet-proof Suburban and of the many safe houses, which always included an empty swimming pool.

Ah, yes, brags Allyn. Such contact with the Mexican people! Servants came to clean the swimming pool each day!

But the financial benefits for Allyn -- as explored by The Narco News Bulletin in our Open Letter for an Open Process to Allyn and the Democratic firm of Penn, Schoen and Berland who participated in this election fraud -- go way beyond the TV ads:

Mr. Allyn created a series of controversial spots for Dallas billionaire Sam Wyly during the Republican primaries. The ads defended Gov. George W. Bush's environmental policies while questioning Arizona Sen. John McCain's environmental record in Congress.

The "Dallas Billionaire" is in the electricity business. And thus, will benefit from Fox's plan to privatize the electric industry in Mexico. Were Allyn's spring contracts with Sam Wyly -- also mentioned in our letter to Allyn (we were right about these electoral delinquents) -- padded to include getting Fox elected in Mexico?

Also helping Mr. Allyn in Mr. Fox's campaign was his assistant, Mari Woodlief, 31.... Blond and blue-eyed, she traveled under the assumed name of La Señora Hernández. Another Allyn assistant, Michael Portman....

"Whenever I rode around in Vicente's bullet-proof Suburban the kid inside of me was going wild, playing 007," recalled Mr. Portman, 25, who has since left Texas for Hollywood where he's working on a screenplay. "It was total Tom Clancy's Patriot Games, or Hunt for Red October, the shoot 'em up fantasy with no guns. It was cool, very cool."

But all their cloak-and-dagger crap was to feed their own big egos and hide from the Mexican people the "transparency" that they claimed to enforce:

Although Mr. Fox never asked Mr. Allyn to keep his role secret, the Dallas political consultant said he didn't want to be the center of attention or become a political liability in nationalistic Mexico.

So he and his colleagues used fake names...

No mention here, by the Dallas Morning News, of Allyn's other motive for remaining "yuppie clandestine." The secrecy was meant to allow Allyn to front for the fraudulent "Democracy Watch" project.

The Dallas Morning News has lost its credibility in covering Mexico with this story. They write:

Mr. Allyn's romantic tale of an American witnessing history unfold in Mexico is hardly unique. During the 1910 Mexican Revolution, journalists like John Reed... played key roles in documenting the events that shaped Mexico in the 20th century.

Mr. Reed later went on to cover the Russian Revolution, penning Ten Days that Shook The World.

The Narco News Bulletin doubts that Allyn or the Dallas Morning News reporters have ever read a word by John Reed. They have certainly never walked with revolutionaries. They are simulators, enemies of democracy, and now that we soon won't have the disgraced NY Times bureau to report on much longer, Narco News will be offering special vigilance to the games of the Dallas Morning News.

A Message to Vicente Fox

Today's revelations in the Dallas Morning News, Mr. President-elect, are that:

For three years you used foreigners -- and were used by them -- to participate in Mexican politics without disclosing that fact.

During these three years you said nothing in defense of the hundreds of foreign human rights observers and journalists expelled from the country under Article 33 of the Mexican constitution (prohibiting direct involvement in Mexican political affairs, but not, legally speaking, journalism or human rights observance).

That your foreign campaign operatives created a phony human rights group, "Democracy Watch," to "monitor" the elections.

Therefore, when you arrive December 1st to the presidency, you will have already lost all legal and moral credibility to continue the policy of expelling and deporting foreign journalists and human rights observers from Chiapas, Guerrero or any other part of Mexico.

And you can thank Rob Allyn for that. We know we do.

¡ BASTA!