By Nancy Davies

The people of Oaxaca swept away 81 years of misrule by the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) with a massive voter turnout for the election on Sunday. For all state offices—governor, mayors and state legislators—the Coalition United for Peace and Progress (CUPP) won more than 90 percent of the posts. CUPP brought together the parties of National Action (PAN), the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), Convergencia, and the Workers Party (PT), who decided among themselves which party would offer a candidate for which position on behalf of CUPP.

Gabino Cué Monteagudo of the Convergencia Party declared victory in the Oaxaca governor’s race at 9:00 PM Sunday in a speech delivered at the fountain of Siete Regiones in Colonia Reforma of Oaxaca City. He offered his thanks to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, previously of the PRD, who mentored Cue in their visit to every municipality in Oaxaca state; and to Felipe Calderon whose PAN joined the Oaxaca coalition. No single party in Oaxaca has the strength to outvote the PRI, but together, with the assistance of two and a half million voters, they rejected despised Governor Ulises Ruiz’s choice to succeed himself, along with most of his other hand-chosen PRI candidates. In cities which had been plagued by conflict, like Oaxaca, Zaachila and Juchitán, the PRI was defeated. The new mayor of Oaxaca will be Luis Ugartechea Begue.

Accompanied by thousands of followers Cué marched to the city zócalo to celebrate. Earlier, on the basis of exit poll results, CUPP declared a victory so that the PRI would immediately find itself in the eye of a popular uprising if they tried to wrest away the victory by fraud. Cué was declared winner by exit polls at 7:30, and by 8:00 P.M. streets rocked with fireworks, car horns and the Oaxaca love of fiesta. According to one Oaxaca resident, “We went out to see if we needed to join an anti-PRI fraud brigade and instead we found a celebration.”
“We are prepared to defend the triumph of the people in the courts, in case the PRI decides to file a complaint,” Cué stated. The exit polls had given Cué the victory by a margin of eight points before official numbers were released.

Forty-seven year old Cué Monteagudo, was cheated of his electoral win against Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO) in 2004; this year coalition members planned their strategy and forcefully declared they would not permit another fraud. Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union agreed in its political congress to support a free and fair vote. On July 2, the teachers withdrew their massive strike encampment from the capital city’s zócalo. In its stead, the union issued a call for a social insurrection in the event of PRI fraud. State Police began to patrol the streets, supposedly to guarantee security for the two and half million voters.

Azael Santiago Chepi, leader of the union, affirmed that the union’s state assembly resolved at that same meeting to act as guarantor of the popular will before, during and after the vote. He explained that the democratic teachers movement would design a plan of action specifically to combat crookedness and denounce electoral crimes, blackmail, repression, intimidation and deceit on election day, as well as observe at the polls. “In an organized way, with the people, we will raise our voices and repudiate irregularities,” he insisted. That determination was reinforced by each party in the coalition. The federal senator for the PAN, Santiago Creel Miranda, reaffirmed that no electoral fraud would be permitted in Oaxaca.

On voting day thousands observed at the polls, including Oaxacans, other nationals, and foreigners. After suffering years of misrule by the PRI, with its accompanying corruption, repression, and violence, the state had become a focus for national security. Most remember the uprising of 2006 against URO, which lasted five months. According to data released by the National Council for Evaluation of Policy and Development (Coneval), 38.1% of the state’s population suffer undernourishment, and 68% lack resources such as homes or land. Poverty affects more than two-thirds of the population; 7% of all Mexico’s poor live in Oaxaca..

Opposition opinion has long held that this backwardness was deliberate policy on the part of the governors of the state including URO, who maintains an iron hand extending from the lowest caciques charged with controlling remote villages, to the legislature and courts of the state. There is no separation of powers nor transparency for how public funds are spent. Within this context, URO had expressed his desire to move to the national position of leadership of the PRI party at the close of his term in December, a situation which depended on his state remaining in PRI hands.

The PRI intends to recover the national presidency in the election of 2012. The current Mexican president, Felipe Calderon of the PAN, is regarded as a failure by nearly everyone, particularly due to his inability to control the increased presence of narco-cartels involving thousands of murders and extortion. 2012 presents an interesting moment for those who want neither the PAN nor the PRI for Mexico’s next president.

The PRI may hold an advantage despite its overall unsavory reputation. In this election for governors in twelve states, Aguascalientes (presently PAN), Chihuahua, Durango, Hidalgo, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala (PAN), Veracruz, and Zacatecas (PRD), the PRI won all but Oaxaca, Durango, where the difference is .2%, and Sinaloa. Final results are not yet sure for Aguascalientes or Veracruz. Nine of these states are currently governed by the PRI.

Coalitions against the PRI formed in six states—Chiapas, Durango, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Puebla, and Sinaloa. In Hidalgo, the coalition defeat will be contested in the courts. Two million people—or a third of Mexican voters—were registered to participate. After election results were released, the national leader of the PRI, Beatriz Paredes, claimed that the PRI had done very well by winning in nine states. However, the three states it lost were the ones with the largest populations, so if one thinks ahead to 2012 when Mexico elects its president by direct popular vote, the PRI actually lost voters.

Pre-election Dirty Tricks

The most outstanding pre-election scam by the PRI involved the use of the company Grupo Proisi to count votes. The parties allied in CUPP solicited the State Electoral Institute to rescind the contract, because Proisi has been involved in past fraud. It did not.

Carmen Aristegui, a journalist broadcasting nation-wide on Noticias MVS, released damning telephone recordings of Governor Ruiz speaking with three persons. The most grave was a discussion with José Luis Echeverría Morales. Echeverria is a lawyer who rose through the bureaucratic ranks to become president of Oaxaca’s State Electoral Institute (IEE). The recorded discussion centered on the voting ballots: Echeverria ordered 70,000 extras, to be used by the PRI. CUPP demanded that the IEE president resign.

He did not.

Another of the phone intercepts recorded Raúl Castellanos Hernández, media coordinator for the PRI candidate for governor Eviel Perez Mangaña, and URO. After the expose, Raúl Castellanos sustained that his conversation with URO was manipulated and taken out of context. “It’s part of the uncontrolled dirty war by the federal government” and “a clear demonstration of the desperation that is invading the parties integrated in the alliance (sic) by the evident plummeting of their candidate for governor”. This inverts the facts, although the state PRI blames the federal government for illegal phone taps and their dissemination on the MVS national program.

All possible PRI tricks were applied in Oaxaca, from the electoral misuse of social programs to simple violence. The practice of buying voter credentials goes back for decades. Recently Proceso, the national magazine, printed an article in which author Jose Gil Olmos revealed that elderly people receiving medications as well as food were told that their medicines come from the PRI, and if they don’t vote PRI their free medicines will no longer arrive. The state budget of almost 39 billion pesos pays for political expenses. Ulises Ruiz receives for personal costs 3,539 million pesos, as listed in the Oaxaca expense budget for 2010. This amount, which URO manages at his discretion, represents 10 percent of the state budget and is more than what is destined for indigenous development, jobs, help for vulnerable groups, urban and housing development, tourism, communication and transport. It helped URO’s candidate, Pérez Magaña, by renting airplanes and helicopters, buying votes for a thousand pesos, and renting up to 5,000 voter registration cards for election day.

The amount of resources available to the PRI-PVEM alliance was so substantial that Perez Magaña invited Governor Enrique Peña Nieto and Angélica Rivera to preside at two campaign activities on Saturday May 15; these were regarded by Eviel himself as the beginning of the Mexico State governor’s run for the candidacy for President of the Republic in 2012.

Among other frauds and tricks appeared paramilitary groups, kidnappings of supporters of Gabino Cué, and wounding of a reporter with gunshots. “He knows his political and personal future is at stake, therefore he put the machinery of electoral fraud into motion”, indicated doctor Juan Díaz Pimentel, ex-leader of the PRI in the state, being interviewed for Proceso. With programs directly supervised by URO, a minimum of 150,000 votes were bought from the poorest of the poor, accuses the former State Secretary of Health, who pointed out that this part of the electoral strategy was so important that URO himself directly supervised it. Starting in June, the program concentrated on senior citizens, of whom about 240,000 reside in the state. They were taught how to vote. The PRI obtained 150,000 secured votes. Other tricks involved giving out food and cement in return for voter credentials.

The narco-cartels and dirty tricks are national. 22,700 people have died in the country since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006. Separating drug business from political business is now impossible. For an increasing number of officials in recent days, those threats became reality, with a major increase in the past few months related to intense conflicts among the cartels themselves. PRD candidate for governor of Quintana Roo, Gregorio Sánchez, was arrested for organized crime links and his campaign manager Gerardo Mora took his place as candidate. In Sinaloa, Rosario Alejandro Rivera Bodabilla, who functioned as a citizen advisor in the Fifth Electoral District, was killed. Front-running Tamaulipas state gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre Cantu and a state legislator were gunned down on June 28 near Ciudad Victoria. Tamaulipas, a border state, is the scene of bloody violence as the Zeta and Gulf cartels fight for supremacy.

In Chihuahua, criminals shot and killed Guadalupe Mayor Jesus Manuel Lara Rodriguez on June 19 as his wife and child watched. He was a vocal opponent of the drug cartels. Samuel Logan, an expert on Latin American gangs and founding editor of the “Southern Pulse” intelligence report, said criminals are choosing which candidates they cannot tolerate. “It’s evidence of the reach that organized crime has in the political realm,” Logan said. This complicates the situation in states like Oaxaca which heretofore were supposedly free of cartels. But two narco banners appeared in Pinotepa Nacional on the Costa, and a member of UBISORT was assassinated in the Triqui town of Tres Cruces, between La Sabana and El Carrizal, on July 2.

In Oaxaca, on June 7 several young people burned a mobile unit belonging to the PRI candidate Perez Magaña. On Saturday, June 12 the former secretary of Transport, Aurora López, was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. She accused Governor Ulises Ruiz of being the intellectual author behind the attack, and the ex-director of Ministerial Police of Oaxaca, Lieutenant Manuel Moreno Rivas –whom she identified by his voice–of carrying out the kidnapping.

Following the shooting of two PRI city officials in San José del Progreso, that brought to five the number of Oaxacans murdered.

On another dirty front, the director of the New Alliance Party (PANAL), Cristóbal Carmona substituted his own choice of candidates for municipal presidents, disregarding his own national party leadership. According to the PANAL director, URO was involved because PANAL served to siphon off votes from CUPP. The State Electoral Institute accepted the substitutions although the discarded candidates were not consulted. PANAL threw into play its female candidate, Ima Peyreña, who on June 28 quit the race in favor of Gabino Cue. But the PANAL party declared for Eviel Pérez Magaña, the candidate whose unbelievable slogan was “Coalition for the Transformation of Oaxaca”.

Meanwhile, defamatory pamphlets associated Flavio Sosa, a vociferous member of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) and Gabino Cué with the violence of 2006. Sosa set fire to 34 buildings on one day, the posters alleged. Those announcements were paid for by Soledad Rojas Wallas, press director for URO. She demanded in an interview that the transport companies she also owns withdraw their support for Cué: “ ¨Stop helping the opposition, stop this helping someone who doesn’t provide you with food’, they told me (a bus driver reported), and I answered: ‘you have only provoked hunger in Oaxaca and screw your mother because I am going to keep on helping him’. They were attacking me and I fainted. Now I am directly accusing Lieutenant Manuel Moreno Rivas and Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, because it was an act of political intimidation, they don’t want the people to go out and vote.”

At the same time thousands of letters distributed by the PRI and the PVEM accused Gabino Cué, Flavio Sosa, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the PRD senator Salomón Jara of being “a danger for Oaxaca.”

Violence in San José del Progreso, site of the silver mine the community does not want, occurred on June 21. The parish priest Martín Octavio García Ortiz, dragged from his vehicle, was beaten and hospitalized. He then was placed under arrest, charged by the PRI government with training guerrillas and inciting violence. The municipal president of Santo Domingo de Morelos, Nicolás García Ambrosio, and the municipal union representative Miguel Ángel Pérez García, were assassinated in an ambush in Santa María Tonameca, Section 22 reported. García Ambrosio was a primary school teacher. And these are just some examples of why Oaxacans expected fraud.

The election

In Oaxaca, a richly indigenous state, only 152 municipal presidents are selected by political party. The remainder are chosen by usos y costumbres, the traditional open assembly. For CUPP, 102 candidates were nominated by the PRD. Thirty-seven candidates represented the PAN, including for municipal president (mayor) of Oaxaca, Luis Ugartechea Begué. Convergencia offered eleven, and two others were PT. The PRI nominated candidates for all 152 places.

For state representatives (there is no senate in Oaxaca) results are not yet known, but it is supposed that winners will mirror the more than 90% for CUPP candidates in the municipalities.

The weather was fine, and people flowed steadily into voting places, with neither long lines nor empty spaces. Profound popular support for Cue and against URO moved the win. Less than twenty hours after PRI candidate Perez Magaña issued his concession speech, on July 5 the zócalo of Oaxaca appeared sun-drenched, tranquil and relaxed.

Source: Upside Down World

By Cyril Mychalejko

Oliver Stone’s new documentary about Latin America’s leftward political shift and its growing independence from Washington is being lambasted by the media. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as Stone calls out the mainstream media in his new film South of the Border for its mostly one-sided, distorted coverage of the region’s political leaders—most significantly Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez .

In an interview with CBS about his new film Stone remarked about America’s obsession with empire, maintaining global hegemony, and the paranoia that accompanies such obsessions, saying, “We’re a sick country.”

And as if on cue, the mainstream media has published a flurry of attacks on the documentary, consequently supporting Stone’s arguments in the film about ideological biases and misinformation tainting media coverage about the region, while revealing symptoms of this “sickness” he mentions, such as intellectual impotence, pathological lying, and ideological blindness.

One spectacular example is courtesy of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which published a hit piece by Ron Radosh entitled “To Chávez, With Love.” In it Radosh remarkably calls out Stone for not mentioning the economic successes of Chile under the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet during the 1970’s as a point of comparison to show how Venezuelan society under Chavez is suffering. For Radosh and the editors at the WSJ, a bloody regime who would kill, torture and/or disappear a filmmaker like Stone is not only a success, but a model to be duplicated. Sick indeed.

On the other end of the minuscule ideological spectrum represented in the U.S. mainstream media is a blog post by Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic. Peretz, who uses the same title as the WSJ piece, actually praises Rodosh, calling him a “brave historian.” In a healthy society one could accuse Radosh of being brave, in a perverse sort of way, for thumbing his nose at decency and morality by publicly praising a murderous regime because you would expect widespread condemnation to follow. That, sadly, is not the case.

Peretz goes on to call the democratically-elected Latin American presidents interviewed in Stone’s documentary “tyrants”, while calling Stone’s work “trash,” nothing more than ideological-drivel and intellectual laziness. But how could we question the judgement and intellect of a journalism professional with 36 years at The New Republic, whose acute foreign policy judgements include urging former President Bush to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein in a letter (which he co-signed) written by The Project for the New American Century and sent to Bush 9 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks?

The Village Voice also gets into the fray with a vacuous review by critic Karina Longworth. Longworth, who in the past was honest enough to admit that she “know[s] very little about journalism,” displays that she knows even less about Latin American politics and Washington’s historical relationship with the region. Longworth was upset that Stone would allow the leaders of these “regimes” to have a voice stating their positions, something seldom seen in the U.S. media (one of Stone’s and the film’s main complaints). She later mocks the idea that the United States might have anything to do with the political and economic underdevelopment of the region. The Village Voice would better serve its readers by leaving Longworth to review movies such as Macgruber, which unlike South of the Border she thoroughly enjoyed.

Tom Gregory, a self-described Democrat and contributor to another “lefty” outlet, The Huffington Post, writes that, “Stone wears the cynicism of a man looking for relevance.” First, who the hell is Tom Gregory? Second, while he goes on to accuse Stone of spoon-feeding viewers propaganda he is the one guilty of spreading propaganda, such as his false assertion that Chávez is “anti-semetic”, a charge based on a bulletin by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles which misquoted Chávez. The media unfortunately perpetuated this lie because reporters and editors couldn’t be bothered with fact-checking information they published, or with amply correcting their mistakes and amending subsequent public misperceptions created after the fact. Gregory, obviously, is no different.

As you can imagine Forbes, The Washington Times, and The New York Post are among other outlets that joined the circus of attacks and misinformation. But The New York Times seems to have taken particular umbrage to Stone’s new film, maybe for being featured in it for its editorial celebrating the short-lived military coup against Chávez in 2002. Larry Rohter and his review “Oliver Stone’s Latin America” attempts to fact check Stone (a practice the newspaper unfortuantely didn’t employ during the Bush Administration’s march to war in Iraq) and set the reader, and potential viewer straight.

One “questionable assertion” Rohter takes issue with is “Stone’s contention that human rights, a concern in Latin America since the Jimmy Carter era, is ‘a new buzz phrase,’ used mainly to clobber Mr. Chávez.” But human rights is in fact a new “buzz phrase” (or imperial alibi) used selectively by Washington and media outlets like The New York Times against countries deemed Washington’s adversaries. Human rights is now dangerously being used as a potential excuse for intervention through doctrines such as the U.N.’s “Responsibility to Protect”. But for Rohter to know this he would actually have to read publications other than The New York Times.
Rohter also decides to draw attention to an ongoing dispute over the responsibility of the deaths of 19 people during the Washington-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002. He pits an anti-Chávez film X-Ray of a Lie against Stone’s assertions which borrow from a film sympathetic to Chávez called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. But while Rohter focused on this dispute he missed, or deliberately ignored, an opportunity to examine the big picture issue regarding his employer’s coverage of the coup, its lack of coverage of the Bush Administration’s role in it, and its continued hostile coverage of Venezuela’s president. I guess self-criticism and reflection is not in Rohter’s job description, nor a policy in general for journalists at the “newpaper of record”.

Rohter later in his article labels Bolivian President Evo Morales as a “Chávez acolyte”, an insulting and inappropriate label revealing his ideological biases, and then tries to defend Bechtel’s role in an International Monetary Fund (IMF) scheme to privatize Bolivia’s water system, which led to price gouging, and as a result a country-wide uprising which chased the multi-national corporation and its consortium out of the country.

Finally, Rohter lazily cites a review from his colleague at the Times, who called Stone’s film a “provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism,” and Entertainment Weekly’s quip that the film was “rose-colored agitprop.” Conspicuously missing are voices supporting Stone’s documentary and point of view. But that is what Stone’s been saying all along.

Honest criticism of Stone’s film should be welcome. It is certainly debatable whether South of the Border will be a popular and effective “101 introduction to a situation in South America that most Americans and Europeans don’t know about.” I hope it is. I hope that it reaches a broad audience and moves viewers to seek out more information on the history and current events of Latin America. But the reviews aforementioned do little more than expose the ideological biases that dominate the U.S. media and the laziness that afflicts journalists today.

These failures of the media are part of the reason why America is ailing.

Cyril Mychalejko is an editor at www.UpsideDownWorld.org.

Source: Upside Down World