With Peña Nieto's election marred by media bias and voter fraud, Mexico's ailing economy is hobbled by democratic deficit
Mark Weisbrot
guardian.co.uk,
Mark Weisbrot
guardian.co.uk,
Enrique Peña Nieto moved to reassure the student movement, saying: 'I understand your complaints.' Photograph: Guillermo Arias/Xinhua Press/Corbis |
The media rewrites history every day, and in so doing, it often impedes our understanding of the present. Mexico's
presidential election of a week ago is a case in point. Press reports
tell us that Felipe Calderón, the outgoing president from the PAN
(National Action party), "won the 2006 election by a narrow margin".
But
this is not quite true, and without knowing what actually happened in
2006, it is perhaps more difficult to understand the widespread
skepticism of the Mexican people toward the results of the current
election. The official results show Institutional Revolutionary party
(PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto
winning 38.2% of the vote, to 31.6% for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of
the party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and 25.4% for Josefina
Vázquez Mota of the PAN. It does not help that the current election has
been marred by widespread reports of vote-buying. From the Washington Post:
"'It was neither a clean nor fair election,' said Eduardo Huchim of the Civic Alliance, a Mexican watchdog group funded by the United Nations Development Program."'This was bribery on a vast scale,' said Huchim, a former [Federal Electoral Institute] official. 'It was perhaps the biggest operation of vote-buying and coercion in the country's history.'"
It may not have been enough to swing the
presidential race, but for those who know what actually happened in
2006, the voters' lack of faith in the results is completely
understandable. The official margin of difference between Calderón and
López Obrador of the PRD, who was also the PRD's nominee in the 2006
election, was 0.58%. But there were massive irregularities.
The
most prominent, which was largely ignored in the international press,
was the "adding-up" problem at the majority of polling places. According
to Mexico's electoral procedures, each polling station gets a fixed
number of blank ballots. After the vote, the number of remaining blank
ballots plus the number of ballots cast are supposed to add up to the
original blank ballots. For nearly half of polling places, this did not happen.
But
it got worse than that: because of public pressure, the Mexican
electoral authorities did two partial recounts of the vote. The second
one was done for a huge sample: they recounted 9% of the ballots. But
without offering any explanation, the electoral authorities refused to
release the results of the recount to the public.
From 9-13 August
2006, the Mexican electoral authorities posted thousands of pages of
results on the web ,which included the recounted ballot totals. It was
then possible, with hundreds of hours of work, to piece together what
happened in the recount and compare it to the previous results. At the
Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), we did this for a large random sample (14.4%) of the recounted ballots. Among these ballots, Calderón's margin of victory disappeared.
This
may explain why the electoral authorities never told the public what
the recount showed, and why the authorities refused to do a full recount
– which would have been appropriate for such a close election with so
many irregularities. A full recount could easily have reversed the
result, or found the election to be completely indeterminate.
At
that time, I was struck by the lack of interest in the media as to
either the "adding-up" problem, or the results of the recount. Both of
these results were readily available on the web. Although it was
laborious to tally the recount data, any news organization with a
modicum of resources could have done the work. But none was interested.
López
Obrador made the mistake of claiming that the 2006 election was stolen
without demanding that the recount results be released – possibly,
because he didn't trust that these would be any more accurate than the
original count. He did call attention to the adding-up problem, but the
media ignored this and mostly portrayed him as a sore loser.
Both the 2006 and 2012 elections were manipulated in other ways. A study from the University of Texas shows
that there was significant media bias against López Obrador in 2006,
and that it was much more than enough to swing a close election. About
95% of broadcast TV is controlled by just two companies, Televisa and
Azteca, and their hostility toward the PRD has been documented.
In
the current presidential campaign, the media duopoly ran into criticism
for not broadcasting nationally the first presidential debate on 6 May.
After student protesters were dismissed in the media as outside
agitators, a protest
movement against the TV media was launched – called "Yosoy#132" ("I am
#132"), after 131 of the initial protesters produced a viral video
showing their student IDs (that is, to indicate that they were genuine
students).
John Ackerman rightly criticized
President Obama for congratulating Peña Nieto as the winner before the
official results were in. This was similar to the Bush administration's
efforts to aid Calderón in 2006, which began immediately after the vote.
The Calderón campaign to establish his "victory" as a fait accompli was
modeled after the Bush team's successful exploitation of its "home
field advantage" in Florida in 2000, as chronicled in Jeffrey Toobin's
excellent book, Too Close to Call.
As I have noted previously,
it is not because Mexico has a rightwing electorate that it has gone
against the trend of the last 14 years in Latin America. One country
after another (Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay,
Paraguay, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and others) has elected and
re-elected left governments in response to Latin America's worst
long-term economic failure in more than a century (1980-2000). Although
the rest of the region has done better over the past decade, Mexico has
not.
Some have pointed out
that the other left presidents in the Americas also faced hostile,
biased media, and nonetheless won. This has certainly been true in all
of the above-named countries; some, such as Bolivia, have even worse
media bias than Mexico. But Mexico is, as the saying goes, "so far from
God and so close to the United States".
It
is one thing to portray a leader of Ecuador or Bolivia as "another Hugo
Chávez", as the media campaigns there and elsewhere did. These
candidates mostly laughed it off. But when the media in Mexico does the
same to López Obrador – as it has been doing since 2006 – it has another
meaning. Mexico shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States and
sends 80% of its non-oil exports north. Not to mention the 12 million
Mexicans living in the United States.
Mexico's rightwing media are
in a stronger position to boost an effective scare campaign. From
Greece to Ireland to Mexico, that is how the elite maintains its grip on
power in failing economies – not by offering hope, however tenuous, of a
better future, but by spreading the fear that any attempt at a positive
alternative will bring Armageddon.
So long as Mexico's right
controls the TV media – and can get some extra insurance by manipulating
the electoral process as needed – Mexico will have a very limited form
of democracy and will also fall far short of its economic potential.
•
Editor's note: the article originally stated that the 2006 "adding-up"
problem applied in a majority of polling places; in fact, it did so in
nearly half. This was amended at 4pm on 10 July 2012
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