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Opinion polls consistently show that in next Sunday’s presidential election in Mexico opposition candidate Vicente Fox is neck and neck with ruling party candidate Francisco Labastida, threatening the 71-year-old grip on power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which it has managed to retain in the last few decades with the help of a well-oiled, government-run political machine, virtual denial of opposition access to the media and, whenever necessary, outright fraud at the polls. After having led world-wide with his condemnation of Peru’s president Alberto Fujimori for allegedly having gained his reelection through the use of these same resources, President Clinton would face a serious dilemma if on July 2 the beleaguered Mexican government—which is already charged by independent observers with wide use of the first two of those unfair methods—is seen as having resorted to ballot tampering to maintain the PRI in power for another six years.
Successive U.S. administrations have been silent about Mexico’s long history of electoral fraud—as they have generally done about such practices in other nominally democratic Latin American countries. But the Clinton administration departed from this policy when reliable observers reported that the electoral process in Peru, as well as the first voting round on April 9, were tainted by unfairness and fraud. Even before the count was over, State Department spokesman James Rubin warned Fujimori about winning in the first round. “If that were to happen, and thus there would be convincing proof of fraud, in our view, this would pose a substantial challenge to restoring the credibility of the government in Peru,” he said.
And close to the second round scheduled for May 28, Clinton personally issued another stern warning. “The people of Peru will go to the polls in the near future for a second and final round to choose their president,” he said. “I urge that the concerns about the electoral process underscored by the Organization of American States mission to Peru . . . be fully addressed in preparations for the second round.”
Charging those concerns were not addressed, the Clinton administration urged the OAS to condemn the election—a request that turned out to be unsuccessful.
Now, however, as reports from Mexico have raised concerns about the possibility of vote tampering and coercion in the electoral process leading to the July 2 presidential election, the Clinton administration is remaining silent, a double standard that suggests that it does not want to upset its second largest trading partner nor alienate the large number of Mexican-Americans in the United States on whose vote Democrats regularly count.
Next Sunday’s elections have been billed by the Mexican government as the cleanest in the country’s fraud-tainted history. But Jose Woldenberg, who heads the independent body organizing them, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), is upset over President Ernesto Zedillo’s rejection of his plea to stop publicizing government programs within 30 days of the poll. On the contrary, Zedillo had increased government propaganda and blatantly illegal giveaways to an extent unprecedented in his six-year administration.
The IFE also pointed to other irregularities it feared could taint the result, such as the use of public funds for vote buying and voter coercion as well as the clear bias towards the PRI shown by the media, which have stepped up coverage of the ruling party candidate while portraying the main challenger in a negative light, if at all—a result of the pressure the government exercises through its advertising as well as newsprint allocation. Campaign coverage by both newspapers and broadcast media “started out balanced but is no longer so,” said last week IFE’s Woldenberg.
So great is the concern that the two main opposition parties, Fox’s conservative National Action Party (PAN) and the leftwing Party for the Democratic Revolution (PRD), headed by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the patriarch of the Mexican left who is a distant third in the polls, temporarily put aside their bitter rivalry and agreed to coordinate efforts to track and denounce instances of fraud.
The potential for fraud could be the tie-breaker in deciding the winner of the closely contested race. “The fraud may be less than ever before, but because it represents the margin for victory it is more important than ever before,” said Daniel Lund, a leading pollster.
In his visit to Washington two weeks ago, outgoing president Zedillo used his public appearances with an approving Clinton at his side to extol the merits of the country’s democratic transition. In a marked difference with his attitude towards Peru’s Funjmori, Clinton has not expressed publicly any U.S. concern about the election.
Any perception by foreign observers of improprieties in the Mexican electoral process and in the election itself would create a serious problem for the Clinton administration. Over the years, the United States has looked the other way when independent observers have reported that elections in Mexico were not as free and fair as they should be. But now, after the U.S. led the European Union into heavily criticizing Peru’s Fujimori for procedures that were similar to those of which the Zedillo government is charged by México’s own electoral commission and others, it is hard to imagine how the Clinton administration would be able to remain silent if they were believed to have had an effect on the outcome.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com