Mexico's trial by video - "Devil in the Blue Shirt"
The video flashed around the globe as an example of electoral corruption in Mexico, the guy stuffing a ballot box in Guanajuato, turns out to be one of Mexico's million citizens, a low paid country school teacher, doing his duty to his country on election day, sorting and counting votes. AMLO's party in Guanajuato has disassociated itself from the video, which AMLO had aired on 80-foot screens for the sake of what may be the world's biggest town square, the Mexico City Zócalo; altough what's in the 900 pages of evidence he submitted to the court, he wouldn't say. The video was distributed and duly spit out by the left wingnut press, ever panting for an illegal election somewhere on the face of the earth. Not that this has proven, so far, to have been a legal election, but let's be honest when we attempt to show otherwise.
Also on Monday, candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador released a video in which an election official in Salamanca, Guanajuato (the PAN-dominated state that Narco News has compared to Florida in U.S. post-electoral conflicts due to the high concentration of documented irregularities and outright frauds carried out by election officials there) is caught stuffing many ballots into a ballot box. Captured on video, he sports a blue-and-white shirt (PAN’s campaign and logo colors) and has quite the guilty look on his face as he stuffs one ballot after another into the box. In the Salamanca district, IFE reported that Calderón received 93,062 votes to 23,278 for Obrador. The video – so newsworthy that even pro-PAN TV Azteca broadcast it yesterday – has further fueled the public anger; an image worth a thousand words and a to-be-determined part of seventy thousand votes. (As soon as someone gets it online, Narco News will link to it; in the meantime, here is a photo of the perp caught in the act.)
Here is the "perp" - Gilberto Castro Razo, moving ballots into their proper boxes, a practice agreed to by the PRD and other parties ahead of the elections. Another one of those rich PAN people in the north of Mexico, he probably makes $200 a month. Poor Gilberto, the laughing stock of his small village, he looks much less sinister without the ballot box. I saw him on Mexican TV defending what remains of his good name. The PRD representative at this casilla in Salamanca, Guanajuato backed him up.
The PRD representative at the casilla, which was surreptitiously taped (is that legal, I wonder?), who certified the results said, "López Obrador needs to learn how to lose." Undeterred, AMLO announced that his own people had been bribed. Evidence? We don't need no stinking evidence.
I agree with the PRD representative in Salamanca, Guanajuato, Juliana Barrón, not without some sadness: AMLO needs to learn how to lose. He doesn't know how to win, either. I liked AMLO a whole lot more before this election than I do since, because I feel that if anyone is tampering with the Mexican election system, it is AMLO. This is not to say the election wasn't manipulated or even stolen, but unlike US elections, the Mexican system provides for challenges throughout the process, concluding with an elections court for final determination. AMLO didn't need to rile up his supporters to have satisfaction. He just needed to respect the system and go to court.
Meanwhile, the Mexican elections court begins its proceedings, televised to the Mexican public. You probably won't see the blue-shirt video, though, as AMLO has already said he has no idea of what was happening in the video and the court has thrown it out. I guess AMLO just threw it out there to see where it could lead, the way politicians do sometimes. The reputations of the casilla workers in Salamanca, Guanajuato? Who cares? Not AMLO.
Mexico's Electoral Court Weighs Lopez Obrador's Fraud ClaimsJuly 12 (Bloomberg) -- Mexico's Federal Electoral Court began considering a 900-page claim by presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador aimed at overturning results of the July 2 election, a bid election lawyers said will probably fail.
-snip
Lopez Obrador's broad challenge asks the court to annul the election, said Cesar Nava, a lawyer from the National Action Party, which has a copy of the lawsuit. Lopez Obrador, who has declined to make his complaint public, has said he's not requesting the election's annulment.
The court said in a statement it received notice yesterday Lopez Obrador presented challenges in 225 out of 300 electoral districts and Calderon is challenging 129 districts.
The National Action Party submitted challenges calling for the annulment of about 500 polling places as a defense against Lopez Obrador's court case, Nava, who's heading up a team of about a 1,000 lawyers working on the challenges, said in a news conference last night.
Calderon's grounds for the annulments ranged from polling stations being installed in the wrong place to the alleged illegal substitution of voting station workers, Nava said.
