Monday, July 24, 2006

 

In Mexico, Strains Along Democracy's Path

Contested Vote Puts Electoral Reforms, Institutions to Test

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 25, 2006; A11

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/24/AR2006072400991_pf.html

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's political future -- thrown into a state of uncertainty by a three-week electoral crisis -- will be decided in a boat-shaped building in this city's working-class south.

The modernist structure did not exist in 1988 during Mexico's previous disputed presidential election. Nor did the seven-magistrate electoral court it houses. Nor did a genuine Mexican democracy.

Now, pressures are building on Mexico to hold together that democratic system, which is still in its infancy six years after the end of one-party rule and a little over a decade after broad electoral reforms were enacted. The strain has raised questions about the integrity of vote-counters, and the electoral court faces major challenges ahead.

"Our transition to democracy is now entering a moment of great difficulty, of great danger," said Roger Bartra, a self-described leftist historian in Mexico City.

Stoked by ever-more incendiary rhetoric, the capital has tensed since the July 2 presidential balloting ended with a result that remains disputed. Felipe Calderón, dubbed the "virtual" winner by the Mexican news media, redoubled security after the parked sport-utility vehicle he was sitting in was kicked by protesters screaming obscenities. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the runner-up, has called for "peaceful civil resistance." And there are fears that López Obrador's mostly poor followers could resort to violence if their calls for a full recount fail.

Dozens of large posters, installed downtown by well-known artists who support a recount, have been torn apart, presumably by vandals who don't. Other demonstrators who want a recount have gone on a hunger strike and moved into tents outside the electoral court, known as the Federal Judicial Electoral Tribunal.

The votes were counted by the 16-year-old Federal Electoral Institute, an internationally respected government body. López Obrador accuses the institute of rigging computers to ensure Calderón's half-percentage-point victory and of ignoring manipulation of vote tally sheets in tens of thousands of polling places. His complaints, and Calderón's counterarguments, will be heard by the 10-year-old electoral tribunal, which has until Sept. 6 to certify a winner.

"It's good that we have the institutions to channel the challenges," said Carlos Heredia, who became a leading adviser to candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas after his loss in the contested 1988 presidential election. "What has me concerned is whether the institutions have the confidence of the citizenry -- that's the big question in the air."

A huge López Obrador rally earlier this month suggested that at least some do not have faith in the process. The candidate's supporters lampooned the system, booing each time the name of the electoral institute's chief, Luis Carlos Ugalde, was mentioned. Homemade banners read "No to the Institute of Electoral Fraud," and a sign, accompanied by a traditional Mexican skeleton figure, said "Democracy is dead."

Meanwhile, demonstrators have accused President Vicente Fox, of Calderón's National Action Party, of siding with Calderón and trying to limit their free-speech rights. Fox and Ugalde have responded to the attacks by vigorously defending the integrity of the electoral system.

But there are serious questions about the integrity of the elections court. A month before the election, the court's chief magistrate, Leonel Castillo, told Milenio magazine that the court would reject any recount request, a statement that would likely have led to demands for a recusal in a U.S. case.

Both the electoral institute, known as IFE, and the tribunal were created in the reform movement that followed international condemnation of the 1988 presidential election, which was won by the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, immortalized as "the perfect dictatorship" by author Mario Vargas Llosa.

Cárdenas, the left-leaning candidate who lost in 1988 after a suspicious election night computer failure, conceded following a brief attempt to use street protests to force a reevaluation of the results. He had no choice, said Manuel Camacho Solís, a top aide to the winning candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Camacho Solís, who later switched parties and has become a top López Obrador adviser, is now viewing an election crisis from the opposite side -- the one declared the loser.

"It was a completely different world in 1988," Camacho Solís said in an interview. "There was no IFE, we didn't have an open press, the United States government was supportive of the PRI; so was [Cuban President Fidel] Castro. The government was authoritarian, it controlled everything."

Faced with those obstacles, Cárdenas called off demonstrations, averting unrest and earning an enduring reputation for statesmanship.

López Obrador and his followers have something Cárdenas never had, Camacho Solís said: real hope that someone in authority, magistrates of an electoral court, will listen. But that sense of hope could vanish in an instant, he said, if López Obrador's core supporters in Mexico City's poorest neighborhoods think they aren't getting a fair hearing from the court.

"What's at risk now is our democratic progress backsliding," he said. "The society could become ungovernable. The choice is simple: recount or disorder."

Calderón's campaign advisers argue that a recount is unnecessary, and they accuse López Obrador of being a provocateur. In a recent television interview, López Obrador called his opponents "fascists" and suggested that subliminal messages were inserted by his opponents in potato chip and juice advertisements.

"One of the most important success stories of Mexico has been the normalizing of democratic elections," Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican consul general in New York and a Calderón adviser, said in an interview. "We have to make sure that the whims of one man, of one party, don't undermine the credibility of that system."

Top Calderón campaign officials concede that they have been losing the public relations war with López Obrador since both candidates claimed victory on election night. López Obrador's recount message is concise and catchy: "Vote by vote, polling place by polling place."

Calderón's pitch, which will form the basis of his legal argument against a recount, is more nuanced and doesn't fit neatly into a slogan. And his message has been less consistent.

Calderón argues that Mexican law allows recounts of polling places only where clear inconsistencies have been found. The vote-by-vote count, he says, already took place on election day. And the count was conducted, he says, by citizen poll workers who were given authority under election reforms that took vote-counting power away from the government.

The New York Times and the British newspaper, the Financial Times, have each called for a recount, as has the human rights group Global Exchange, which sent election observer teams to Mexico. Calderón has been courting influential publications in phone calls, and his top aides have been flying to the United States to plead his case to editorial boards and financial markets.

"I won the election. It's very important for people to know that," Calderón said in a recent telephone call to a top Washington Post editor. "The real dilemma is not whether the election was free and fair. The real dilemma is whether Mexico is going to solve these issues through mobilization in the streets or by following our laws and institutions."

López Obrador and his legal team now hold news conferences almost every day, each featuring new fraud allegations or new takes on old allegations. But some of the claims have not held up to scrutiny, raising questions among many observers about the strength of his case. At one polling place, a representative from López Obrador's own party rebutted the candidate's claims that a video showed a man there illegally stuffing a ballot box.

The tribunal that will decide the case is described as activist by many Mexican legal scholars. It has been more inclined to annul elections than to order recounts.

The magistrates are poring over 38 boxes of evidence presented by López Obrador. The court has shifted to 18-hour daily schedules to meet its Sept. 6 deadline. Out on the sidewalk, protesters keep vigil. They squint upward at the office wing of the court complex, which has balconies covered with potted plants, giving the place the appearance of an upscale apartment building.

The magistrates at work inside are limited to 10-year terms, and all but one -- a replacement for a magistrate who died -- is hearing the biggest case of his career as he prepares to step down. When the new president takes office in December, six of the magistrates who put him there, members of the first electoral tribunal of Mexico's young democracy, will already be gone.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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