After it was announced that the US-backed right-wing candidate Felipe Calderon had won the July 2 Mexican election by a tiny margin, supporters of opposition candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador began mass demonstrations claiming the election had been "stolen" and protesting widespread fraud and electoral irregularities. The following is excerpted from a comment piece by Ignacio Ramonet, denouncing the silence of the US and other imperialist governments over the result, originally published in the Mexican daily La Jornada and republished on Rebelion.org. It was translated for Green Left Weekly by Federico Fuentes.
The international community and the habitual organisations in defence of "liberties", that we know about because they were so active after the elections in Serbia, Georgia, the Ukraine and more recently in Belarus, have remained mute in front of the electoral coup that has been committed in front of our eyes in Mexico.
Can you imagine the outcry across the planet if, on the contrary, this same election had unfolded in Venezuela, and if the winner by a difference of only 0.56% of the votes had been President Hugo Chavez?
The July 2 Mexican elections had two principal opposing candidates: Felipe Calderon, from the ruling Catholic right-wing National Action Party (PAN), declared winner (provisionally) by the Federal Electoral Institute, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, from the moderate left Party of the Democratic Revolution.
Long before the beginning of the campaign it was clear to president Vicente Fox (of PAN) and the authorities in power that Lopez Obrador, with his program of struggle against poverty, was the candidate to beat, by any means. In 2004, a manoeuvre based on clandestine video footage, spread by the Televisa and TV Azteca channels, and acquired by those in power, attempted to discredit Lopez Obrador. That manoeuvre was in vain.
The following year, with the extravagant pretext of not respecting legal norms in the construction of an access road to a hospital, Lopez Obrador was condemned, and attempts were made to jail him, taking away his right to stand in the elections. Massive mobilisations of support pressured the authorities to reject this process.
The operation of harassment and demolition continued. It reached a delirious point in the course of the electoral campaign. Even more so, as the winds of panic blew over the Latin American oligarchies (and the US administration) as the left began to win (almost) in all parts: in Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. And these new alliances did not exclude Cuba.
In this context, the victory of Lopez Obrador (the electoral tribunal will resolve this on September 6) will have very important geopolitical consequences. This is something that neither the bosses nor the Mexican mass media want, nor Washington — at any price and at the risk of sacrificing democracy. But Lopez Obrador and the Mexican people have not said their last words.