Mexico’s political crises intensifies after Calderón is certified as presi

[tex-wyo-dem]

Mexico’s political crises intensifies after Calderón is certified as president

By Rafael Azul
11 September 2006

On Tuesday, September 5, Mexico’s Federal Judicial Elections Tribunal (TEPJF) declared Felipe Calderón Hinojosa the winner of the July 2 presidential election. The decision has only inflamed the ongoing political crisis, under conditions in which Mexican society is deeply polarized and class relations are at a breaking point. Calderón is a member of the National Action Party (PAN).

The TEPJF indicated that even though it found serious irregularities in the manner in which the elections were conducted, they were not serious enough to change the results of the vote, which it said favored Calderón over Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the nationalist populist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The reported margin of victory was just 240,000 votes out of 41 million cast, a difference of 0.56 percent.

The court was unable to give a clear and unambiguous answer to who actually won the popular vote. In a ruling that singled out the Federal Elections Institute for procedures that facilitated fraud, the seven-member TEPJF simply indicated that it did not have enough information to confirm that, absent the many irregularities, the outcome would have been different. The tribunal also singled out President Vicente Fox and Mexican corporate interests for engaging in practices that were “unjust and a source of concern” to manipulate the vote. It added, however, that it considered these practices to be “isolated events with no determining effect on the results of the vote.”

The finding was immediately welcomed by the PAN, which downplayed the TEPJF’s criticisms. Also indifferent to the TEPJF’s language were US President George Bush, Latin American leaders—including Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner and Chile’s Socialist Party President Michelle Bachelet—and Paul Wolfowitz of the World Bank. Calderón reported that he spoke at length with Bush on the issue of immigration. Wolfowitz advised the Mexican government to attend to the needs of the poor, but without taxing the rich; instead he recommended an acceleration of the neo-liberal policies that have been responsible for Mexico’s social and economic crisis.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/mexi-s11.shtml