Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
A country literally blanketed with illegal electoral propaganda does not bode well for a credible outcome. And if it is a matter of holding elections to establish democratic criteria about majority and minority opinions in society, in that case, illegal propaganda not only muddies the outcome, it renders it illegitimate. And that illegitimacy is a sure source of prolonged social and political conflict.
Is that what President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wants? A prolonged social and political conflict starting with the recall election scheduled for April 10, exactly seven days from now? Because his government, his party, and he himself have done everything humanly possible to muddy and delegitimize the election.
As a first step, the President began to conflict with the election and uses it as a tool to disqualify the autonomous electoral body (INE) that he does not control; he had his party deny it sufficient budgetary resources to carry out a well-organized election throughout the country since he forced it to reduce the number of polling places that correspond to a national electoral exercise. From that moment on, the smell of conflict was perceived.
By reducing the budget, he wanted to disqualify the INE from being able to carry out the exercise effectively and, thus, try to show the INE as an expensive and inefficient instance tied to “interests of the past”. In a word, to discredit it.
Subsequently, the Morena party forced INE to accept a bogus mechanism to collect the necessary signatures to call for the consultation. Instead of using the digital registry and alleging that there were areas of the country without internet, the falsifiable instrument of… a photocopy of the voter’s credential was imposed. Cities “without internet” such as Mexico City, among hundreds of other urban centers, registered millions of endorsements with photocopies. Journalists who rummaged through the boxes of submitted signatures discovered that they were photocopies of credentials handed in at federal and local offices of applicants for social programs. In other words, they showed that the collection of signatures was a State operation, not an authentic citizen exercise.
This fact is crucial because it proves the 4T’s intent to carry out a substantive violation of the electoral law in force that governs this electoral process. The recall law makes it clear that neither public authorities nor political parties should participate in the promotion of the vote in this exercise that is presumed to be exclusively of the citizens. From that moment on, everything began to descend into a hell of a systematic breach of the law.
The fact that signatures were collected in the files of the federal and state governments gives the whole process an unmistakable whiff of illegitimacy.
Despite all the maneuvers and manipulations of the law and the intervention of authorities, suddenly, and for reasons yet to be clarified, the President and his party had a panic attack. They felt that despite their shameless achievement of using public resources to present “signatures” to INE for the election to proceed, they possessed information suggesting a meager public interest in the process. Surely some surveys confirmed a likely low turnout and little interest in the process.
The President then made a strategic decision. He declared the entire campaign period open for the hunt and that all his people could take up arms and shoot in all directions. Masks off! This is the new battle cry of AMLO and Morena. Do whatever you have to do to raise the vote; up to that moment, squalid.
Putin set the example: everyone to bomb the country, that not a tree is left untouched nor a citizen unacquainted with his responsibility. No mercy and take no prisoners – this is fatherland or death!
● The first step in the new stage of the electoral process, now expressed as a low-intensity war, was for Morena and its faithful allies to exercise their simple majority in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate to approve an “interpretation” of the law governing the elections, allowing all government officials to promote the vote in favor of their interest openly, and also legitimizing Morena to act openly in the promotion of the vote.
This “interpretation”, already challenged before the Electoral Tribunal of the Judiciary of the Federation (TEPJF) and dismissed by that jurisdictional body, has not stopped an army of public officials from acting in violation of the law. They do not care about the law. They care about power.
Public officials disguised as “citizens” are swarming all over the country, promoting the vote in favor of AMLO in an aberrant recall election of the President’s mandate, promoted and financed by the President himself. They are citizens but paid by the taxes of all Mexicans to perform their official duties, but not to be militants of a political party, much less electoral activists.
The second step of the low-intensity war has been the saturation of the country with images of the President, claiming that he is not alone, that not voting for him means losing social benefits and will open the doors to a regression back to the long neoliberal night.
With lies, deceit, and a Goebbelian policy of propaganda saturation to the point of exhaustion, AMLO competes against AMLO in this bizarre election.
With each passing day, the recall becomes more and more an act that takes power away from the citizens and gives it to a single character: the President. Hands up, citizens, the recall is an armed robbery!
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