<i>"The Name of Our Country is América" - Simon Bolivar</i> The Narco News Bulletin<br><small>Reporting on the War on Drugs and Democracy from Latin America
 English | Español August 15, 2018 | Issue #67


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Today We Are Presenting a Complaint to Demand the Annulment of the Presidential Election

A National Plan for the Defense of the Democracy and Dignity of Mexico


By Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Translated by Narco News

July 13, 2012

To the People of Mexico:

I begin by saying that the minority that dominates this country decided some time ago to maintain the corrupt regime that it lives off of to impose Enrique Peña Nieto as president of Mexico.

Their strategy was to use the mass media and make a market product out of the man who represents them.

Televisa, Milenio and many other media dedicated themselves to promote an image of Peña Nieto that has nothing to do with what he represents.

With that formula, going back a long time, Peña Nieto was very popular. But during the campaign things began to change. Little by little the people became aware through the social networks and other unconventional media that his candidacy was a trick and a farse.

The first debate was held on May 6 and when it wasn’t broadcast on the TV channels with higher ratings, millions of Mexicans saw how Peña Nieto lost the debate and he was laid bare as the candidate of the most corrupt group in Mexico.

Later, on May 11, Peña Nieto went to the Ibero-American University. The students confronted him and his clumsy and authoritarian response, endorsed by the politicians who flanked him, as well as the distortion in the media companies, in particular Televisa, gave birth to the #YoSoy132 movement.

Starting then, this expression by students demanding the right to honest news and to not allow the imposition of Peña Nieto began to awaken other youths throughout the country and shake the conscience of the citizenry, above all the middle class of Mexico.

After this important event the rejection of Peña Nieto began to grow and led to his free-fall in the preferences of voters. On Thursday, May 31, the daily Reforma newspaper published a poll that showed that the difference between his and my candidacy was only four percentage points. Days later, from May 31 to June 4, my campaign took another poll and it showed us two percentage points ahead.

When Peña Nieto’s sponsors saw that he was falling, they desperately sought to strengthen their media strategy and obtained the support of ex-president Vicente Fox. At the same time they began a dirty war against me, together with the media personalities that have the greatest influence in the National Action Party (PAN, in its Spanish initials).

Still, the most perverse and illegal maneuver was the recruitment of the governors of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in its Spanish initials) to take charge of buying votes without any moral scruples whatsoever.

On June 12, in Toluca, in the governor’s palace of the State of Mexico, 16 governors of the PRI party met with Peña Nieto and his campaign staff. There, they assigned quotas for how many votes each state would create for their leader.

For example, Eruviel Avila, governor of the State of Mexico, promised to obtain 2.9 million votes that – by coincidence – Peña Nieto was said to have won in that state.
The decision that came out of that governor’s meeting in Mexico State was to use state government money to buy millions of votes throughout the country.

One piece of evidence that has been very well documented was the way that the governor of Zacatecas, Miguel Alonso Reyes, operated when he assigned his key operatives, at the municipal and electoral district level – and this is documented – that in his state along he spent millions of pesos to buy voter credentials and votes.

Throughout the country suffrage was acquired with cash, with electronic cards to obtain merchandise in supermarkets, with basic food stuffs, construction materials, fertilizers and other benefits.

Beyond the innumerable economic resources from illicit funds that were deployed to buy votes we can add the billions of pesos (millions of dollars) spent on advertising, on public opinion polls tailored to whom paid for them to support this shameful plan. All of that, obviously, violated the campaign spending limits established by law.

The massive operation of vote-buying took place before and during Election Day. An emblematic case is that of the electronic payment cards of the Soriana supermarket chain, stores that were emptied of products in the State of Mexico by people who received those cards in the days prior to the election.

Although the purchase of voter credentials and votes happened all over the country, it was more intense in the regions where the poor live in Mexico, especially in rural areas. The highest voter turnout in the country was in these districts, contrary to what happened in previous presidential elections and larger than the number of people who normally vote.

For example, in the three largest rural districts of Yucatan state, the turnout was 86 percent. In Chiapas, voter turnout increased 118 percent compared to the 2006 elections and the PRI supposedly received 506,000 more votes than before.

At the same time in the urban polling places which make up 35 percent of the total, Peña supposedly beat me with 2.8 million votes which is 85 percent of the difference nationally.

The saddest and most outraging part of all this is to realize that those responsible for this disgrace for millions of Mexican citizens is that they used the victims, above all, in particular the poorest people, to ensure their economic, political and media domination of the country.

Additionally, a never-ending pile of ballots marked before Election Day made their way to the ballot boxes with votes marked for Peña Nieto.

The evidence and testimonies that we have gathered allow us to show that approximately five million votes were bought. In the States of Mexico, Veracruz and Chiapas alone around two million votes were purchased.

Because of that, and without even taking into account other flagrant violations of the Constitution and the electoral laws, we can conclude that in free elections most of these citizens would not have voted for Peña Nieto.

We have before us a completely atypical situation. It is enough to say that in the 902 special polling places (where voters away from their own precincts could vote) that were installed throughout the country where the citizens were able to vote freely the result was completely different: 27.8 percent for Josefina Vasquez Mota, 28.1 percent for Enrique Peña Nieto, 41 percent for my candidacy, 1.8 percent for Gabriel Quadri, 0.2 percent for write-in candidates, and 1.2 percent were blank ballots. In these kinds of polling places Peña only won in four out of 32 states in the Republic.

In sum, the twisted result that comes from the buying and manipulation of millions of votes does not permit any certainty in the result or the electoral process.

In strictly legal terms, Article 41 of the Constitution, which establishes that the elections must be free and authentic, was violated.

As a consequence, today, as established by law, we are presenting a complaint to demand the annulment of the presidential election.

I call on all Mexican citizens to refuse to permit that the Constitution be violated with impunity and that the democratic path has become cancelled.

To proceed by any other manner would be to resign from our fundamental rights and admit anti-democracy as a way of life and a system of government.

In the middle of next week we will make known the National Plan for the Defense of the Democracy and Dignity of Mexico.

Everything that we do will be in strict compliance with our rights as citizens consecrated in the Constitution.

In particular, I reiterate that we will act via the peaceful path. We will not give any reason for the violent ones to accuse us of being violent.

We do not accept that corruption dominates the entirety of national life. We struggle for the moral renaissance of Mexico.

– Mexico City, July 12, 2012.
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The Narco News Bulletin: Reporting on the Drug War and Democracy from Latin America