1 - PRI STEALS ANOTHER ELECTION
2 - REMITTANCES INCREASE IN MAY
3 - CALDERON VETOES CRIME VICTIM COMPENSATION LAW
The PRI is back, suborning Mexico’s already limited democracy with a not so subtle mixture of the most up-to-date digital vote-buying techniques and well-worn old school practices to re-install last century’s “perfect dictatorship.” Remember 1988, when a mysterious “computer malfunction” saved PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gotari from certain defeat? Salinas became perhaps the most hated man in Mexico when, in 1994, he handed a bankrupt country and the pending “tequila crisis” to another PRI President, Ernesto Zedillo. While that election may have been technically clean, the real contest was decided months earlier when populist PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, in some ways the anti-Salinas, was assassinated during a campaign stop, almost certainly the result of internal party struggles, though the case was never solved. In 2000, former Coco-Cola president Vicente Fox captured the “voto util” (useful vote), a popular response to 70 years of PRI corruption that was really a vote for “anyone else.” Then in 2006, PAN candidate Felipe Calderon called on former PRI operator extraordinaire Elba Esther Gordillo and a stacked Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) to manipulate returns and guarantee a presidency marked by six years of death – 55,000 and counting – in a failed “war on drugs.” Reload to 2012, and another parody of democracy that will likely give the PRI’s Enrique Pena Nieto, a cute but largely vacuous “new face of the party,” yet another perverted presidential victory.
