Mexico held elections in 15 states Sunday, and the results did not cheer a large portion of the Mexican electorate. One might think this wouldn’t matter. That’s because 60 percent of Mexican voters abstained. But the results will matter both sooner or later. And the reasons are of pressing importance.
Consider the fact that “authorities” began burning ballots just hours after the first count. Many miraculous things often occur in Mexican elections. But just how will Mexico’s election overseers count ashes?
As some people were nonetheless checking the news this week to see how the recount for who really won the governorship of Baja California was going to be conducted, an image-damaging headline appeared. “Mexico, Argentina: The most corrupt in Latin America.” This was the result of a survey conducted by the Transparency International organization. Mexican friends were not surprised by this headline. Yet they tend to flinch when they see it highlighted in the international media. Many instinctively feel they should defend their homeland, no matter what.
The UK Economist headline read: “Something for everyone – except voters.” The Economist noted that while “Leaders of all main political parties appear to have something to celebrate ... voters had little to cheer about. The outcome ... shows the fragmentation, ideological vacuum and venality of local politics.”
And even Mexico’s political and corporate elites could not feel completely comfortable that the election was held in the swirling atmosphere of intimidation, kidnappings and assassinations – some of it, but not all, linked to drug mafias in many states. From the beginning of campaigning, “incidents” began occurring. There was considerable conjecture early on that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto wanted his party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), to lose in Baja California, so his canny, if fragile Pact por Mexico would survive as a multi-partisan key to the first major step toward the future he envisions for Mexico.This vision, unfortunately, is not of a new Mexico, but of a hard-used dream of a Janus-faced Mexico so much a part of the cultural fabric that it’s easy to believe that for him and his colleagues it is lost in the dense, swiftly moving clouds of the past. From the seminal bloody and destructive days of Cortes, the succeeding viceregal Spanish governments of New Spain, to the 1910 Revolution and its social debris, what today is the uneasy society known as Mexico “became a being of two faces. One assuming that a return to the past was possible, the other yearning to wipe it all out and begin anew.” This is the comprehensive, and challenging, observation of one of Mexico’s most probing historians, Enrique Krauze.
During the run-up to Sunday’s election, the deaths and undisguised intimidations of candidates, their aides and members of their families, the old habits of both the PRI of the recent past and the newer drug cartels, were evident; both seeking to shape state and municipal governments across the country. This scenario echoed one face of the Janus signature. When vote-buying and a slew of other abuses were reported during Peña Nieto’s presidential campaign, he vowed that if he won such behavior would be investigated and punished. Not much has been heard since about the hand of justice being applied to that misbehavior. The same words were run out by priista spear carriers this week.
Echoing the other Janus profile, Peña Nieto speaks with latently promising naïveté of a new PRI, and a bright and shining new middle-class Mexico. At the same time he and his cohorts leading the party machine seem quick to haul out familiar coercive “tools” that allowed the PRI to rule Mexico for 71-years. That reign ended, shockingly for priistas, in 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN). Many of the campaign excesses displayed in recent days seemed to issue from the priista fear of the possible strengths any opposition might possess, real or imagined. At the same time, it is true that drug chieftains had an interest in “pacifying” any local political group that did not seem responsive to the detente they were offering.
Peña Nieto’s inaction was noted by opposition parties as at least ten candidates, or family members were killed, another wounded in an attack that left her husband wounded, a niece and assistant dead. Party and campaign officials have also been assaulted, their family members targeted and sometimes killed. Others have reported being kidnapped or shot at, according to media reports.
All of this runs counter to the image of Mexico Peña Nieto has tried to create through the not so subtle gagging of the mainstream media and by keeping drug cartel activity and army and police operations out of notice. Instead, he wants a switch to boasting of a flourishing Mexican middle class, which is mostly a political fantasy. Instead, this increase in election-season violence, say security analysts here, emphasizes the impunity that nourishes attacks during each electoral cycle.
“I can’t remember so many candidates getting killed before an election,” said Jorge Chabat, a security and drug expert at Mexico’s Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE). “It seems like we are in the post-revolutionary era.” He referred to the time following the 1910 Revolution political when assassinations soared as scores were being settled.
These “electoral” attacks and killings sunder democracy, says Alexander Hope, a security expert in Mexico City. “If we have areas where a candidate can’t run because his or her life is being threatened, that lowers the quality of democracy and the legitimacy of whoever is elected,” he told reporters.
Yet it isn’t clear who is guilty of the attacks, the drug gangs or rival political operatives. But clearly individuals were being attacked for running for election. And the attacks were taking place in areas where organized crime and old style politicos rule. This is taking place every election now, “especially in local elections,” according to Jose Antonio Crespo, historian at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City. The cartels have more influence in local elections than “on a national level,” he said. Other experts have pointed out that it is cheaper, less risky and more effective to intimidate local governments.