Like Frida loved Diego, like tequila loves salt, the Mexicans love, love, love the U.S. election mess. It’s vindication and sweet revenge. The bully gets a black eye, the know-it-all flunks the quiz, and Mexico can’t stop chuckling.
Editorial cartoons have been brutal all week. One showed Uncle Sam as a hen struggling to lay a huge egg. Another shows a Mexican governor infamous for his strong-arm tactics, wearing Mickey Mouse ears and riding on the Flying Dumbos at Disney World, giving tips on election fraud to Jeb Bush. Yet another shows a Mexican governor suspected of stealing the 1988 presidential election for the ruling party through a bogus “computer failure” looking at a sweating Gore and Bush, saying, “They should have called me before counting the votes.”
That’s big yuks in Mexico, which has been enjoying a nonstop imperialist-bashing party since the elections. Many Mexicans were right there with CNN watching Judy, Bernie, and the election night gang giving Florida to Gore then taking it back, then later giving the election to Bush then taking it back. Mexico’s online political junkies spotted the venerable New York Times calling the Bush new president, then yanking it back out of cyberspace faster than you can say R. Dubya Apple Jr. All the high-tech wizardry of the U.S. media was no match for a tie in a presidential election, and Mexico loved watching America cut down to size. (Although in fairness, they also loved the big, wrong “The U.S. Decides: Bush!” headline in Wednesday morning’s Reforma newspaper, too. The only thing Mexicans love better than self-deprecating humor is gringo-deprecating humor.)
For years, the United States has been tut-tutting over election fraud in Mexico. And with good reason: Mexican elections historically have been about as clean as your average septic tank. The Institutional Revolutionary Party has been buying and stealing elections for 71 years—until, incredibly, they lost last July 2.
The elections last July were called the cleanest and fairest in history. But here’s what Kevin saw on Election Day in a little farming village in Yucatan—the kind of place where the PRI has always ruled without question. One by one the voters—mostly poor farmers—trooped into the polling station, which was in the mayor’s office. Each voter took a ballot, ignored the curtained-off voting booth, and instead walked over to a table out in the open. They marked their ballot in plain sight, so the mayor and the official PRI polling place observer could see. Then they handed their ballot to the PRI official, who checked off their name in his voter-registration book, folded their ballot, and dropped it into the ballot box. Each voter got a slap on the back from the mayor as he left, then he went next door to party headquarters for a hot breakfast and a cold orange juice. The message was clear: Anybody who voted in secret was presumed to be a traitor to the PRI, and traitors could expect to see their government fertilizer, cement, seed—maybe even their electricity—a whole lot harder to come by in the future.
Amazingly, despite such tactics, the PRI lost to opposition candidate Vicente Fox. But the message in Yucatan was clear—old ways die hard. And that has been borne out in two subsequent state elections. In Tabasco last month, the PRI candidate for governor won an incredibly narrow vote that is being challenged as another example of PRI fraud. In Jalisco this week, voting in the governor’s race was so close and so filled with irregularities that the winner may not be determined for a week. One PRI official said yesterday he’s hoping that Jalisco would avoid the “Florida effect.”
