Corruption hits airwaves, politicians exposed in Mexico

I think movie attendance has dropped dramatically in the past 10 days. Why bother on going to the movies when there is much more fun at the TV News?

Corruption is not new. What's new is to have it exposed.

And what's even more dramatic is that the big blows have been against those who somehow were better able to sell to the general public the idea of being "different".

The Mexican Greens have nothing to do with Greens elsewhere. I wrote it in another thread (will post link later). Yet, they managed to send another message: "vote for an ecologist, not for a politician", while selling their love (their 5% of the vote) to the highest bidder.

The other party involved is the PRD.
Major Lopez Obrador was elected on the motto "Brave Honesty". And he has played the role of the populist politician who lives modestly and helps the poor.
People on the "red circle", as we call it down here, now better.
Bejarano's, his political right-hand, is one of the creepiest people you could ever meet. He has become a millionaire through all kinds of dirty handlings, specially organizing land and building occupations by homeless people (who pay him with some money and lots of party work), and then blackmailing the rightful owners. In the newspaper I worked for, we discovered that the milk they were giving the poor people, almost for free, not only had the party logo, which is against the law, but also had remains of feces inside.

Who filtered the videos?

-In the Green's case, it was the internal opposition, within the party. Not that the dissidents are any better: another bunch of rich kids, with a High School level of making politics, who want to take control of the business.
-In the PRD's case, it was also "friendly fire", with a little help of a congressman from PAN (President Fox's party). Carlos Ahumada, the entrepreneur who is shown giving the money is associated with another faction of the PRD (may hypothesis is that he is the financial "front" of that group), and was tired of being blackmailed by the Lopez Obrador bunch.

The whole affair is dangerous, since it will probably lead to a gigantic mud fight, and to popular dissapointment about the efficiency of democracy.
At the same time, it is good that some of the people can tell that some wannabe emperors have no clothes.

And finally, a few hard news precisions to be made.

1. Bejarano didn't choose Brozo's program to proclaqim his innocence. He actually was in another morning program speaking against corruption (Ponce's case), when in the studio next door (and the adjoining channel) evidence of Bejarano's own corruption was being presented in Brozo's program. He was lead to Brozo's show (he thought he was to repeat his anticorruption speech) and became pale when he saw himself filling a suitcase of money. Brozo told him "We are f*cking fed up of people like you" and, at that moment, Bejarano presented his resignation as local representative.

2. The "Green Boy" has that nickname, not because of his looks, but because he's daddy's son, he's Junior. His father founded the Green Party, was king of it, and he's the heir.

Here's the link:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9208&highlight=

Former president of Mexico says he declared winner early
Posted on Mon, Mar. 08, 2004
Former president of Mexico says he declared winner early
By Susana Hayward
Knight Ridder Newspapers

MEXICO CITY - Former Mexican President Miguel de La Madrid Hurtado has revealed that he ordered Carlos Salinas de Gortari declared the winner of the 1988 presidential election after his interior minister warned him that Salinas had lost in Mexico City and surrounding areas.

In a soon-to-be-released memoir, de la Madrid doesn't say that the election was fraudulent, but his version of how Salinas was selected is the closest yet to acknowledging that the results were questionable.

"I felt like a bucket of ice water had hit my head," de la Madrid wrote of the moment when Interior Minister Manuel Bartlett told him that Salinas had lost in Mexico's most populous region. "I feared results were similar across the country."

The ex-president said he then called Jorge de la Vega, the secretary-general of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled the country since 1929, and told him what Bartlett had said.

"And he answered me: We have to proclaim the triumph of the PRI; it's a tradition we can't break without causing alarm in the population," de la Madrid wrote. De la Vega added that if Salinas weren't declared the winner immediately, "it will be impossible to convince them of his victory," according to de la Madrid.

De la Madrid's confession is the latest in a country recently obsessed with digging up its past political skeletons. Since the 2000 presidential election of Vicente Fox - the first non-PRI politician to hold the post in seven decades - Mexicans have been examining past political transgressions in ways that until recently were unimaginable.

Last month, the former head of Mexico's secret police was arrested on kidnapping charges stemming from the disappearance of suspected political dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s, and the prosecutor charged with investigating those cases has said he's pursuing charges against former President Luis Echeverria.

Salinas' ascension to the presidency in 1988 has long been considered suspect. Bartlett announced that counting equipment had crashed just when a Salinas opponent, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, appeared to be in the lead. When counting resumed, Salinas was ahead.

De la Madrid's account of election night in his 871-page memoir, entitled "Change of Course," is the first insider's account of what happened. A copy of the book, to be published by the government's Economic and Cultural Foundation, was obtained by Knight Ridder.

At the time of the July 1988 presidential vote, Mexico had yet to recover from the economic crisis that had begun shortly before de la Madrid became president in 1982. Salinas, then 40, had been de la Madrid's minister of planning and budget and was harshly criticized as being out of touch with the common Mexican and for being a Harvard-educated political economist, much like de la Madrid, who also is a Harvard-trained economist.

The political opposition had offered two serious contenders for the presidency: Cardenas, of the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party, and Manuel Clouthier, of the conservative National Action Party. The campaign was the hardest fought in recent Mexican history.

In the memoir, de la Madrid, now 69, portrays himself as an innocent in the world of electoral manipulation, saying he asked Bartlett when more information on the tallies might be available. "He thought my attitude was disingenuous, as all of us were who believed there would be results at 11 p.m.," de la Madrid wrote. "Afterward, I learned that even though polls closed at 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., tallies weren't concluded until 1 or 2 a.m."

What happened in the meantime was the declaration by Bartlett that the computer system counting the ballots had crashed.

De la Madrid also portrays Salinas as unwilling to accept victory without the ballots' having been counted. "Mr. President, how can I go out like this?" de la Madrid quoted Salinas as saying.

But de la Madrid and others were convinced that the country "would be in panic" if Salinas wasn't declared the winner, and party officials feared social instability if Cardenas won, he wrote.

The Federal Electoral Commission on July 13, 1988, gave official results that showed Salinas with 50.3 percent of the vote, Cardenas with 31.12 percent and Clouthier with 17 percent. Only 19 million, or 52 percent of those eligible, voted.

Even after Salinas was declared the winner, de la Madrid says neither he nor Salinas was comfortable with the result.

"The circumstances have affected Salinas," he said in an excerpt written in August 1988. "I feel a certain change in his character: I feel he's angry. He's mad at the opposition and with himself, because the PRI failed. I suggested he get over the anger before Dec. 1" - the date when presidents change power after their six-year term ends.

As for himself, de la Madrid says he didn't have a moment's peace until his successor assumed the presidency.

"Finally, Salinas and I must reinforce our security measures," he wrote. "We live in dangerous times."

Dear BBB, please don't ask me to comment about that. I wrote a book about the 1988 elections. Can write even more about it right now, but i am certain that fellow a2kers do not hold the same interest in that small part of modern history.