A Narco News Five
Star Chile Alert 
The Narco News Bulletin
"The name
of our country is América"
-- Simón
Bolívar
Hidden
Agendas by Electoral Delinquents:
By Refusing to
Reveal their Funders, US Pollsters and Political Consultants Stan
Greenberg, Rob Allyn, Doug Schoen and Marcela Berland...
1. Violate
Mexican Law
2. Violate
the Ethics Code of the American Association of Public Opinion
Research (AAPOR)
Exhibit A:
Stanley
Greenberg with the PRI
White
House Pollster Stan Greenberg
The involvement
of White House political consultants Stanley Greenberg and James
Carville in the Mexican presidential campaign was documented
earlier this spring by The Narco News Bulletin.
Specifically,
Carville and Greenberg have been consultants to ruling party
candidate Francisco Labastida of the PRI.
The Narco News Bulletin, on the 16th memorial of the assassination
of Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía, publishes an English
translation of today's column by Carlos Ramírez, Mexico's
most widely-read newspaper columnist, that calls to re-open the
investigation of the 1984 narco-assassination.
Ramírez explores
the allegations that a key member of Mexico's ruling party, Manuel
Bartlett, was responsible for the crime and its cover-up.
The Narco News Bulletin adds commentary and analysis aimed
at Washington:
1. Why the silence by US Ambassador Jeffrey
Davidow on the Bartlett matter today? When
Bartlett was a political rival of PRI presidential candidate
Francisco Labastida, Davidow attacked him. Now that Bartlett
is on the team of the PRI candidate -- who enjoyed a closed-door audience last Saturday with
Davidow in Mexico City -- the narco-ambassador has fallen silent.
2. It is time for US political consultants Stanley
Greenberg and James Carville
to clarify their roles
with the Labastida campaign that is now run by Bartlett: Are they in or are they out? And
if they have left the campaign, why the silence about what happened?
(Full disclosure: Carville and the publisher of The Narco News
Bulletin are old friends.)
-- from Narco
News, May 30, 2000
His
Wife Mary Matalin (who is not meddling in the Mexican elections)
calls the Ragin' Cajun by the affectionate name of Serpenthead:
James Carville
On June 23rd, the last
day under Mexican law that polls on the July 2nd election could
be published, Stanley Greenberg (who, like Carville, has been
in hiding on the Labastida question ever since the "dinosaur"
wing of the PRI reassumed control, last Spring, over the campaign)
reared his head again.
According to the June
24th edition of El
Universal:
"In Washington the
Greenberg firm indicated that the PRI candidate was at the head
of the preferences in the election....
"In the case of Cuauhtémoc
Cárdenas of the PRD, in the fourth and last poll by the
US daily Dallas Morning News, reached his highest level so far
with 25 percent.... The organization Greenberg Quinlan Research
indicated that Cárdenas would receive 13 percent of the
vote.
"This last polling
firm would not say who financed the poll, although it is widely
known that at least until a short time ago it worked for the
campaign of Labastida. Stanley Greenberg, one of the principal
partners in the business, was the pollster of the first election
of President William Clinton...."
Narco News Commentary:
Because the PRI could lose the July 2nd election, and must resort
to widespread election fraud in these final days, Greenberg and
Carville have been hiding. Greenberg's lastest act of meddling
-- releasing a poll without disclosing who paid him to do it
-- demonstrates that he is still involved on behalf of Labastida.
Furthermore,
The Narco News Bulletin has learned that James Carville has maintained
a full-time staff in Mexico City and is still active on Labastida's
behalf.
The photo below,
from the cover of the respected Mexican news weekly, La Crisis,
demonstrates the kind of campaign that Carville and Greenberg
directed in the November 7, 1999 PRI primary:
"How
Labastida's Fraud Happened"
"The
Big Finger for Labastida: The representative of Francisco Labastida
in a Chiapas polling place violates the secrecy of the vote and
signals to a farmer with her finger to mark the ballot over the
photo of Labastida."
--
From La
Crisis, November
13, 1999
In the November
7th primary between Labastida and Tabasco Governor Roberto Madrazo,
a massive operation of voter fraud was carried out. Labastida
"won" overwhelmingly by the PRI's official result.
The PRI also claimed, loudly, that 10 million voters participated
in the primary, when that, simply, was not true. In fact it was
a huge distortion.
The ballot boxes, as they
say in Mexico, were "pregnant," that is, the number
of votes grew between the closing of the polls and the reporting
of the results. This is why, in the analysis by Subcomandante Marcos published
this week on Narco News, the Zapatista spokesman wrote: "good health to you, and see if there are
some birth control pills. There is more than one ballot box that
needs them urgently."
Carville and
Greenberg, thus, are complicit in the massive election fraud
that is being constructed for July 2nd, 2000 in Mexico.
In spite of the fact that
saying so probably means that the Narco News publisher
won't be receiving any more invitations to dine and drink with
Carville in The Palms restaurant in Washington DC, we must voice
our profound disappointment with ol' Serpenthead in particular:
Inside the United States, Carville offers a colorful democratic
discourse. We suggest, fraternally, that James read the latest communique from
Marcos, who has
proven himself with this essay to be the greater Jeffersonian
democrat than our disgraced operator from Louisiana.
The arrogance
and impunity of US consultants James Carville and Stanley Greenberg,
and their colonial attitude against democracy in Mexico, however,
has been exceeded by the extremely bizarre behavior in recent
days by three other US consultants who have appeared on the Election
Fraud 2000 radar screen....
Exhibit B:
Allyn,
Schoen and Berland: Unethical Behavior to Benefit Fox
An Open
Letter to Rob Allyn, Doug Schoen and Marcela Berland from the
Publisher of Narco News:
To: Rob Allyn, Director,
"Democracy Watch"
Allyn and Company
Dallas, Texas
roallyn@aol.com
Doug Schoen
Penn, Schoen and Berland
New York, New York
dschoen@ps-b.com
Marcela Berland
Penn, Schoen and Berland
Washington, DC
mberland@ps-b.com
June 25, 2000
Dear Sirs and Madam,
On this day when our 200,000th reader has joined the ranks of the better-informed
public at The Narco News Bulletin, we have some very serious
questions for you.
We first wrote to you
on June 15th asking that you disclose what financial interests
are behind your "Democracy Watch" project. In that letter we cited the Statement of Principles
of the American Society of Daily Newspaper Editors as well as
the Declaration of Principles of the Canadian Association of
Daily Newspapers which declares that, "conflicts of interest,
real or apparent, must be revealed."
On April 17th, we received
a letter
of response from
Rob Allyn in Dallas in which he wrote:
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.
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. 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.
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
There, we have published
it in full, without censorship, once again.
We replied to Rob stating
that whether your project is "on the side of the angels"
will be determined by your deeds more than your words, and that
the sina qua non of a project that claims to support democracy
and transparency on the Mexican election process is to be transparent
yourselves.
Perhaps because we declined
to put our own credibility at risk by agreeing to the private
meeting that Rob requested, you chose not to respond to that
last letter. Nor did you invite us to your press conference in
Mexico City on June 22nd. So much for your commitment to openness
and transparency. You wanted to fix our coverage in private,
and once that could not be done, you tried to escape from our
scrutiny.
However, The Narco
News Bulletin, being a global project of authentic journalism
with strong participation by our readers, has received copies
of correspondence that Rob wrote in those days to one of our
readers in New Zealand.
That's correct, New Zealand.
There is no longer a corner of this earth upon which you can
hide.
Apparently Rob thought
the New Zealand correspondence might be from the press, and he
tried to deceive that writer too.
Rob wrote:
We're planning the largest exit poll in the history of Mexico,
with about 1,000 fieldworkers at 500 sample points, spread out
throughout the country to balance urban and rural, geographic
differences, etc. to produce a sample of at least 10,000 interviews
(may go as high as 40K, depending on turnout).
Our fieldworkers
will use a closed-box system where exiting voters mark a card
to indicate how they voted and insert it into a closed box to
guard their privacy, so they don't have to verbally discuss their
vote with anyone.
This helps get
a more honest and accurate picture and has been proven by prior
experience in latin america and in other emerging democracies
to greatly enhance the number of voters willing to participate.
Margin of error should be less than 1 to one and one-half percent
on such a large and balanced sample size.
Our team has polled presidential elections for President Clinton
in the US, served both the Democratic and Republican Parties
in the US, as well as both the ruling PRI and the opposition
PAN in Mexico. Our experts have worked in emerging democracies
throughout Latin America, the middle East and Eastern Europe,
including polling for heads of state of Ecuador, Venezuela, Costa
Rica, Bolivia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Greece, Israel and
Turkey.
We've all done
democracy work for our respective International Republican Instititue
and National Democratic Institute, both of which will be on hand
together with the Carter Center for Peace Studies as election
observers.
Hope this addresses your questions. I'm curious to know, are
you with the media or is this a matter of personal interest?
Either way, we welcome your interest, and wish you best of luck
in all you do.
Rob Allyn
Democracy Watch
In recent days, your project
has triggered various reactions:
Widespread rejection by the Mexican public and press, including
an editorial
in El Universal,
Mexico's most widely-read daily, which we have translated for
the benefit of our readers.
Repudiation by the original group "Democracy Watch"
in Canada and its harsh criticism of your decision to keep your
financial sources secret.
Criticism of your project's covert and dishonest nature by Mexican
presidential candidates Cárdenas (PRD), Labastida (PRI),
Camacho (PCD) and Rincón Gallardo (PDS).
An interesting silence regarding your project's colonial nature
by PAN candidate Vicente Fox, who, it has now been revealed, has illegally laundered foreign
money through US banks into his campaign.
An announcement by the Federal Elections Institute (IFE) that
you are required to disclose your funding sources, which you
refused to do at your June 22nd press conference in Mexico City.
June
22nd Press Conference by Rob Allyn and Marcela Berland in Mexico
City (photo: El Universal)
The Narco News Bulletin considers this matter so important
that we now have an investigator on the ground in Dallas-Fort
Worth, as well as collaboration by ace researchers in Washington,
DC.
We respectfully submit
to each of you, Rob, Doug and Marcela, the following questions:
1. What contact have any
of you had recently with Fox campaign political consultant Dick
Morris?
2. Please confirm or deny
that it was precisely Dick Morris who brought the firm of Penn,
Shoen and Berland into the White House polling operations in
1996.
3. A question for Rob
Allyn: have you had any contact recently with Texas businessman
Sam Wyly, the Bush campaign contributor who paid for the attack
ads against Arizona Senator John McCain in the New York GOP primary?
4. You don't deny having
produced those ads for Mr. Wyly, do you?
5. Has Mr. Wyly shared
with you just how much his electricity business will profit if
Mexican candidate Vicente Fox wins the election and succeeds
in privatizing the Mexican electric industry?
6. Is Mr. Wyly, a US citizen,
one of the covert funders of "Democracy Watch"?
7. In recent days many
documents have come to public light that demonstrate a wide international
network of money-laundering by the Fox campaign. Among the US
and Mexican businesses implicated in this scheme are: Fox Brothers,
Citibank, and The Bank of the West in El Paso, Texas.
Also, on June 19th, the
US Department of Treasury informed that Juan Pablo and Cristóbal
Fox -- brothers of the candidate Fox -- "conducted between August 1997 and May of
this year, financial transfers that could be related to banking
crimes in Mexico, of $1,958,963.62 US dollars."
The US Treasury Department
also wrote that "it
is not discounted that (these money transfers) are connected
to political fundraising."
Are any of these interests funding your "Democracy Watch"
project?
8. US officials revealed,
according to La Jornada on June 24, 2000, that US authorities
"sent to the (Mexican)
Secretary of Treasury information related to the investigations
that US agencies are conducting regarding the financial transfers
that the brothers Juan Pablo and Cristóbal Fox conducted,
without this meaning that the investigations have already terminated,
as it is already estimated that the triangulations of money could
reach near to $30 million US dollars."
Are any of the companies
of the Fox brothers -- including Consultoría Internacional
Casa de Cambio, Vegetales Frescos or Congelados Don José
-- among of the funders of your project?
9. Are any officials of
banks or financial institutions that benefited from the $80 billion
FOBAPROA bank bailout among the funders of your project?
10. Are any of your funders
also contributors to "Amigos de Fox," the National
Action Party (PAN) or other parties or groups supporting the
Fox campaign?
11. Are you prepared to
turn over to Narco News the complete methodology of your
recent poll that declares Vicente Fox the winner of the July
2 elections?
12. What steps have you
taken in your project to assure that none of these secret donors
are connected with drug money laundering, the FOBAPROA scandal
or the Fox campaign?
Vale, there are a dozen questions that
if you truly believe in transparency in the election process
you will answer truthfully and with the supporting documentation.
We understand that to
answer these questions honestly, you must reveal the full list
of funders of your project. Furthermore, to be believed after
you have so fracased your public relations in Mexico, you must
have that information certified by a public accounting firm that
has access to all contracts and bank records.
You have already been
called upon to reveal this information to the Federal Electoral
Institute (IFE) in Mexico and until you do so you are acting
outside the law as international electoral delinquents.
This behavior on your
part is quite far from what Rob Allyn cynically calls "democracy
work."
In years past, US political
consultants could work abroad with little or no scrutiny among
the English-language press. We serve notice that this old practice
is hereby defeated, and that your continued actions in violation
of both Mexican law and the ethical standards declared by the
American Association of Public Opinion Research and of every
major journalistic association, will be subject to continued
investigation and scrutiny throughout Mexico, the United States,
and the world.
May the Aztec sun continue
to disinfect the dirty practices of US political consultants
in Mexico.
Sincerely,
Al Giordano
Publisher, The Narco News
Bulletin
There's
no hidin' place 'round here