The Narco News Bulletin
"The name
of our country is América"
-- Simón
Bolívar
Sunday, July 9,
2000
Democracy
Watch Exposed
Texas
GOP Political Consultant Rob Allyn Admits Covert Activity in
Mexican Presidential Campaign
"Democracy
Watch" Director Boasts to Dallas Morning News that he was
Fox's Consultant All Along
Fox
has lost all moral and legal authority to expel human rights
observers and journalists from Mexico
Rob
Allyn and Marcela Berland: Three Years of Election Fraud Admitted
The
Narco News Bulletin smelled a rat from
the moment we began watching "Democracy Watch."
This "project" run by US political
consultants, claimed to be non-partisan, to monitor the Mexican
elections through polls and exit polls to assure a clean result.
On April 15th, we called upon Texas political
consultant Rob Allyn, the director of what he said was a "non-partisan"
group of "Mexican businessmen" and members of "all
three political parties" to disclose their funding sources.
He said:
April 17, 1999
Mr. Giordano:
I read with interest your email
to me of last week.
You make some very, very good points, and I am taking them up
with our sponsors this week.
But his only
sponsor, he boasted today in the Dallas Morning News, was the
campaign of Vicente Fox.
Study his untruthful
words carefully here:
Can you and I possibly
meet during our next trip to Mexico this coming
Thursday? We will be coming down to release our first pre-election
survey.
Perhaps by then, I will
have answers to all of your questions. I will work this week
to explore whether we might be permitted to release the names
of our donors.
It was pure
show. He had no intention of seeking answers to any questions,
or exploring anything. Narco News rejected his offer to
meet in private. And it's a good thing we did. But listen to
him in the context, now, that Fox, his client of three years,
has won the election, in his April letter to Narco News:
In the meantime, I hope
you will appreciate the dilemma of our contributors, who retained
us to work for transparency in the elections process -- yet have
a justifiable concern over negative repercussions for their support
of a project which those in power will no doubt view as anti-government.
"To work
for transparency in the election process?"
Allyn and the
Fox campaign invented the phony group "Democracy Watch"
and then invented a non-existent group of "businessmen"
with a bunch of invented "concerns" about being seen
as "anti-government."
Nothing at all
transparent about that. Allyn even tried to buy us with access
and flattery:
Let's talk directly as
soon as we can. I firmly believe, having read your bulletins
in the past, that you will see that we are on the side of the
angels in this matter.
Rob Allyn
We rejected his offer cold. We knew he
was trying to manipulate our coverage. Now, in today's Dallas
Morning News, he admits it.
In an article titled "The Texans
on Fox's Team," by Alfredo Corchado with an assist from
Mexico City bureau chief Lawrence Iliff, Allyn now admits what
he hid before. And he's portraying himself as James Bond rather
than the electoral delinquent that he is.
MEXICO CITY - Oftentimes,
Rob Allyn's biggest challenge was trying to remember his covert
identity. If he slipped, he risked his role in a secret mission
to push along Mexico's first bloodless revolution.
Puzzled waiters and hotel
receptionists would stare as Mr. Allyn, a well-known Republican
political consultant in Dallas, painfully pondered the many fake
names before signing a bill. Who was he this time, José
de Murga, Francisco Gutiérrez, or Alberto Aguirre?
"Basically, for three
years I'd go home from my real job to a secret job," Mr.
Allyn said. "I led a second life for that period."
Oh, such hardship! Having to
choose between three credit cards at restaurants! While 400 foreign
journalists and international human rights observers have been
expulsed from Mexico in the past presidential term. Not one of
them had three credit cards, most didn't have one. And they ate
beans and tortillas in the jungle, while Robbie Allyn "painfully
pondered" his menus at restaurants that accept credit cards,
that is, the top one percent of Mexican restaurants!
Listen to their true confessions
in today's Dallas Morning News:
For three years, Mr. Allyn
and two of his colleagues at Allyn & Co. quietly made forays
into Mexico and played a key role in helping shape and hone the
message of "change" that maverick presidential candidate
Vicente Fox used to dethrone the 71-year-old Institutional Revolutionary
Party.
...The experiences of
the three Texans, who for the first time agreed to speak openly,
offer a rare insight into Mr. Fox's strategy leading to his landmark
victory on July 2. It also exposes for the first time the U.S.
consultants behind the Fox campaign. While the media hounded
several Washington insiders, including James Carville and Dick
Morris, as the likely candidates, it was Mr. Allyn and his team
all along.
For three years -- obviously
on tourist visas -- they worked and got paid in a partisan political
campaign in Mexico.
But Allyn and his assistants
are STILL deceiving the people on both sides of the border:
...they worked mostly
for free, getting paid only for campaign commercials produced
for Mr. Fox....
When a political consultant
"gets paid for campaign commercials" he receives 15-percent
of the money spent on buying ads on TV, radio and in newspapers.
On TV alone, Vicente Fox spent $60 million US dollars. Do the
math: The buyers made $9 million US dollars on television ads
alone. Any radio or newspaper or magazine ads were simply gravy.
But Allyn is still strutting around as if he worked "mostly
for free."
And the Dallas Morning News,
if it doesn't immediately fire every reporter and editor that
touched this poor excuse for a news story, will never have an
ounce of journalistic credibility covering Mexico again. To not
even ask Allyn about "Democracy Watch" is an ethical
crime of journalism.
Listen to the hardships that
Robbie Allyn and Company endured:
The campaign over, the
media savvy strategists talked of once drinking brandy - Mexico's
Presidente label - with the future president of Mexico in the
back of a bullet-proof Suburban and of the many safe houses,
which always included an empty swimming pool.
Ah, yes, brags Allyn. Such contact
with the Mexican people! Servants came to clean the swimming
pool each day!
But the financial benefits for
Allyn -- as explored by The Narco News Bulletin in our
Open Letter for an Open Process
to Allyn and the Democratic firm of Penn, Schoen and Berland
who participated in this election fraud -- go way beyond the
TV ads:
Mr. Allyn created a series
of controversial spots for Dallas billionaire Sam Wyly during
the Republican primaries. The ads defended Gov. George W. Bush's
environmental policies while questioning Arizona Sen. John McCain's
environmental record in Congress.
The "Dallas Billionaire"
is in the electricity business. And thus, will benefit from Fox's
plan to privatize the electric industry in Mexico. Were Allyn's
spring contracts with Sam Wyly -- also mentioned in our letter
to Allyn (we were right about these electoral delinquents) --
padded to include getting Fox elected in Mexico?
Also helping Mr. Allyn
in Mr. Fox's campaign was his assistant, Mari Woodlief, 31....
Blond and blue-eyed, she traveled under the assumed name of La
Señora Hernández. Another Allyn assistant, Michael
Portman....
"Whenever I rode
around in Vicente's bullet-proof Suburban the kid inside of me
was going wild, playing 007," recalled Mr. Portman, 25,
who has since left Texas for Hollywood where he's working on
a screenplay. "It was total Tom Clancy's Patriot Games,
or Hunt for Red October, the shoot 'em up fantasy with no guns.
It was cool, very cool."
But all their cloak-and-dagger
crap was to feed their own big egos and hide from the Mexican
people the "transparency" that they claimed to enforce:
Although Mr. Fox never
asked Mr. Allyn to keep his role secret, the Dallas political
consultant said he didn't want to be the center of attention
or become a political liability in nationalistic Mexico.
So he and his colleagues
used fake names...
No mention here, by the Dallas
Morning News, of Allyn's other motive for remaining "yuppie
clandestine." The secrecy was meant to allow Allyn to front
for the fraudulent "Democracy Watch" project.
The Dallas Morning News
has lost its credibility in covering Mexico with this story.
They write:
Mr. Allyn's romantic tale
of an American witnessing history unfold in Mexico is hardly
unique. During the 1910 Mexican Revolution, journalists like
John Reed... played key roles in documenting the events that
shaped Mexico in the 20th century.
Mr. Reed later went on
to cover the Russian Revolution, penning Ten Days that Shook
The World.
The Narco News Bulletin doubts that Allyn or the Dallas Morning
News reporters have ever read a word by John Reed. They have
certainly never walked with revolutionaries. They are simulators,
enemies of democracy, and now that we soon won't have the disgraced
NY Times bureau to report on much longer, Narco News
will be offering special vigilance to the games of the Dallas
Morning News.
A Message
to Vicente Fox
Today's revelations
in the Dallas Morning News, Mr. President-elect, are that:
For three years you used
foreigners -- and were used by them -- to participate in Mexican
politics without disclosing that fact.
During these three years
you said nothing in defense of the hundreds of foreign human
rights observers and journalists expelled from the country under
Article 33 of the Mexican constitution (prohibiting direct involvement
in Mexican political affairs, but not, legally speaking, journalism
or human rights observance).
That your foreign campaign
operatives created a phony human rights group, "Democracy
Watch," to "monitor" the elections.
Therefore, when you arrive
December 1st to the presidency, you will have already lost all
legal and moral credibility to continue the policy of expelling
and deporting foreign journalists and human rights observers
from Chiapas, Guerrero or any other part of Mexico.
And you can thank Rob
Allyn for that. We know we do.
¡
BASTA!