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News Release Archive | Latin America | Accuracy.Org

Dirty Tricks Cloud Mexico’s Elections

July 5, 2012

While some media outlets are claiming that Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Enrique Peña Nieto has been confirmed the winner of the Mexican election, experts on the ground note that this betrays a lack of appreciation for the rules in Mexican elections. For example, a Reuters headline reads “Final Mexican Results Confirming Pena Nieto Win” and the New York Times ran an op-ed identifying him as “president-elect of Mexico.”

LAURA CARLSEN, carlsenster at gmail.com
Carlsen is director of the Mexico-based Americas program of the Center for International Policy. She said today: “Although President Obama and others called to congratulate Enrique Peña Nieto on his victory in Mexico’s presidential elections, election authorities have not officially declared a winner and are recounting votes in the midst of massive evidence of fraud and violations of electoral law. That’s the way the law works, even proof of violations is unlikely to revert Peña Nieto’s current lead of six points. However, the new president, if validated, will take power under the cloud of accusations that his party, the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party], is up to the same dirty tricks it employed to retain power for 71 years. …

“Although the PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto seems to have won with a relatively wide margin over his closest contender, center-left candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the process was stained by old-style PRI tactics of vote-buying, coercion, manipulation of the media and other dirty tricks that have been documented by civil society organizations and independent media. Mexico once again faces a crisis in its political system, as a large part of the population believes the elections were not fair or legal and rejects a return to a political system that blocked democracy for decades. Newly mobilized youth in the ‘I am 132′ movement, human rights organizations and the left are awaiting official results and analyzing the elections before announcing their response. Mainstream media celebration of the Mexican elections that ignores the deep popular discontent with the return of the PRI and the multiple anomalies documented before and during the elections has proved to be premature.”

IRMA ERÉNDIRA SANDOVAL, irma.erendira at gmail.com
Irma Eréndira Sandoval is professor of political science and coordinator of the Anti-Corruption Laboratory at the National Autonomous University.

JOHN MILL ACKERMAN, johnmill.ackerman at gmail.com
Professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Ackerman said today: “I’m not surprised that some media are reporting that Enrique Peña Nieto has been confirmed the winner of the election, but that’s just not correct. The Electoral Tribunal still needs to consider all the complaints and they haven’t even received them yet.

He just wrote the piece “Obama Plays Risky Game in Mexico With Embrace of Enrique Peña Nieto,” which states: “The Mexican people are more stunned than excited by Enrique Peña Nieto’s apparent victory in Sunday’s presidential election. No one has taken to the streets to celebrate the return of the old Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI). To the contrary, thousands of youth congregated at the Revolution Monument in downtown Mexico City to protest against the “imposition” of Peña Nieto through media manipulation, vote-buying, and ballot-tampering. Meanwhile, waves of people who sold their vote to the PRI on Sunday in exchange for gift cards flooded local supermarkets on Monday to cash in on their payments… It is likely that Peña Nieto’s advantage in the preliminary count, 38 percent to leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s 32 percent, will hold up once the official count is issued at the end of the week and the electoral tribunal later resolves any lawsuits. But the formal, legal recognition of Peña Nieto as Mexico’s new president will not necessarily translate into the public legitimacy he would need to govern the country effectively… It is time for U.S. diplomacy toward Mexico to branch out to include the political opposition, Congress, civil society, and the common person. Military aid also should be replaced, perhaps entirely, with support for infrastructure and the economy. Instead of helping Mexico’s old guard reestablish the ways of the past, the U.S. should help the Mexican people protect the gains of the present.”

Tagged With: Irma Erendira Sandoval, Latin America, Laura Carlsen, Mexican Elections, Mexico,

Mexican Election: Did Media “Fabricate Popularity” of Apparent Winner?

July 2, 2012

JOHN MILL ACKERMAN, johnmill.ackerman at gmail.com
Professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Ackerman said today: “Mexico apparently has decided to turn back the clock. Widespread frustration with twelve years of uneven political progress and stunted economic growth under the right-wing PAN [Party of National Action], has led to the desperate move of calling back to power the old guard PRI [Party of the Institutional Revolution]. Meanwhile, in a repeat of the last presidential race in 2006, the left-wing PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] has once again been left in a close second place.

“[PRI candidate] Peña Nieto also owes his apparent victory to the television duopoly which has literally fabricated his popularity out of thin air. The recent exposé by The Guardian of enormous secret contracts between him and the television companies for the purpose of promoting his image, are only the tip of the iceberg. Upon arriving in office, the new president´s first priority most likely will be to pay back this invaluable support through new laws and regulatory measures. Such a deal would also inevitably involve protection for the Peña Nieto administration from uncomfortable media oversight and accountability.” See Ackerman’s interview Monday morning on Democracy Now.

IRMA ERÉNDIRA SANDOVAL, irma.erendira at gmail.com
Irma Eréndira Sandoval is professor of political science and coordinator of the Anti-Corruption Laboratory at the National Autonomous University.

She said today: “Although the initial results seem to indicate that the old Party of the Institutional Revolution may have won the election, turnout was very high and the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, received more votes (over 15 million) this time around than he did during the 2006 presidential election. In general, the majority of the anti-Felipe Calderon vote was directed towards López Obrador, and not towards the PRI. In addition, there is plenty of evidence that a great deal of the support for the PRI came from vote-buying and unfair support by the principal television stations. There does not appear to be a clear ‘mandate’ in favor of the PRI and, in order to govern, it will have to significantly modify its authoritarian tendencies and open itself up to criticisms from society, most importantly from the emerging student movement.”

Also see: “Mexican Media Scandal: Secretive Televisa Unit Promoted PRI Candidate“

Tagged With: Irma Erendira Sandoval, John Mill Ackerman, Latin America, Mexican Elections, Mexico,

“Tragic Week in Paraguay”

June 25, 2012

AP is reporting: “Ousted Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo fought back Sunday against the politicians who engineered his dismissal, setting up an alternative government and pledging to upstage Paraguay’s new leaders at an upcoming regional summit.”

KREGG HETHERINGTON, krether at gmail.com
Professor at Dalhousie University in Canada and author of Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay, Hetherington said today “The Paraguay government of President Fernando Lugo was in the forth year of a five-year mandate. It’s been in power with a strange coalition of progressives, other organizations which have never had political clout, and the Liberal Party, which has been out of power since the 1940s.

“The Colorado Party ruled Paraguay for over 60 years, much of it under military dictatorship until Lugo came to power in 2008. Since then, the Liberal Party has clearly been chomping at the bit to oust Lugo so that it could control the huge patronage apparatus in the country. Since the election was coming up, most people thought that wouldn’t happen now.

“Lugo, who many poor and disenfranchised people had high hopes in, failed to take on the critical issue of land, which is largely divided by local wealthy farmers and Brazilian capital, which is heavily invested in industrial soybean farming. Specifically, what’s happened over the decades with the Colorado Party is that the land reform agency, which is supposed to make things more egalitarian, was actually used in many instances to hand out land grants to wealthy people. This is called ‘ill-gotten land.’ Lugo did nothing on this and so campesinos grew disillusioned with the government and became more militant. They began squatting on land controlled by wealthy landowners that was apparently ‘ill-gotten’ to embarrass the government into doing something.

“On June 15, there was a massacre at one of these invasions, or squats, involving land for a wealthy senator. Several peasants were killed and several policemen where killed. This level of violence is very unusual for Paraguay.

“The ‘impeachment’ proceedings lead Lugo to resign initially, he says now, to avoid further violence. He has since rescinded his resignation. The massacre was apparently seen as a chance by the Liberal Party, whose leader Federico Franco held the vice presidency, to take power, and they joined with the Colorado Party in the impeachment vote. The Liberal Party has already started filling the patronage system with their people, something they have been waiting 60 years to do. Though peasants and progressives have been disillusioned, they have massively supported Lugo since the ouster, given that what awaits is much worse for their interests.”

MARCO CASTILLO FLORENCIO, cfmarco at gmail.com
Marco Castillo Florencio, a sociologist in Paraguay, said today: “At this moment president Lugo has called for pacific resistance with a group of his ministers. There are peaceful demonstrations at the public TV station (this channel was inaugurated during Lugo’s government). The TV station … has become the gathering point of demonstrators that denounced the impeachment as a coup d’état.”

JAVIERA RULLI, javierarulli at yahoo.com
Rulli is an Argentinian researcher who has written extensively on Paraguay. She just co-wrote the piece: “A Tragic Week in Paraguay.”

GREG GRANDIN, grandin at nyu.edu
Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and other books on Latin America. He said today: “Lugo has called it a parliamentary coup, and all the Latin American leaders have called it a travesty … a legalistic nonsense. It was a complete farce when it comes to due process. He was given 24 hours to compile his case and two hours to present it. He has the dignity of not participating in it, he didn’t show up. But they ousted him using very legalistic means, and, in some ways, very similar to what happened in Honduras three years ago in 2009 when the right gathered together and used very technical and legalistic procedures in order to oust the president that they felt was a threat.”

Tagged With: Greg Grandin, Javiera Rulli, Kregg Hetherington, Latin America, Marco Castillo Florencio, Paraguay,

U.S. “Escalating Military Presence in Honduras”

May 23, 2012


Associated Press is reporting: “Villagers say the drug bust that left four passengers of a riverboat dead after helicopters mistakenly fired on civilians continued into the predawn hours when commandos, including some they think were Americans, raided their town. … Jose Ruiz, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the U.S. military in Honduras, said there were no American troops there. ‘We can confirm there were no U.S. military personnel or U.S. military assets involved in any way. Our joint task force occasionally supports DEA, but they had no personnel or equipment in that particular mission,” Ruiz said. …

“Several villagers, however, told The Associated Press that some of the masked agents were gringos. ‘They spoke in English among themselves and on the radios,’ said Zavala, whose husband was held at gunpoint. ‘They had brought a computer and they put in the names of everyone and sought identification for everyone.’”

DANA FRANK, danafrank at ucsc.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews with larger media outlets, Frank is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of several books, including “Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America,” which examines the banana workers’ unions of Honduras. She writes in the cover article in The Nation this week: “In the early hours of the morning on May 11, a group of indigenous people traveling by canoe on a river in the northeast Mosquitia region of Honduras came under helicopter fire. When the shooting was over, at least four persons lay dead, including, by some accounts, two pregnant women. In Honduras, such grisly violence is no longer out of the ordinary. But what this incident threw into stark relief was the powerful role the United States is playing in a Honduran war.

“U.S. officials maintain that the Drug Enforcement Administration commandos on board the helicopters did not fire their weapons that morning; Honduran policemen pulled the triggers. But no one disputes that U.S. forces were heavily involved in the raid, and that the helicopters were owned by the U.S. State Department.

“The United States has, in fact, been quietly escalating its military presence in Honduras, pouring police and military funding into the regime of President Porfirio Lobo in the name of fighting drugs. The DEA is using counterinsurgency methods developed in Iraq against drug traffickers in Honduras, deploying squads of commandos with U.S. military Special Forces backgrounds to work closely with the Honduran police and military. The U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Lisa Kubiske, recently said, ‘We have an opportunity now, because the military is no longer at war in Iraq. Using the military funding that won’t be spent, we should be able to have resources to be able to work here.’”

ALEX MAIN, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net
Senior associate for international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Main said today: “The U.S. involvement in the shooting incident earlier this month on Honduras’ Patuca River, in which pregnant women and others were killed, and the subsequent commando raid on people’s homes, raises a number of troubling questions. Among these are, what are the guidelines under which U.S. DEA and other forces are operating? What kind of violence is permitted in going after drug traffickers? And is it applicable to unarmed, or just armed traffickers? And what constitutes a drug trafficker? What are the parameters for using deadly force in populated areas?

“It is also disturbing that the U.S. State Department does not appear to know whether the Leahy law, which cuts off U.S. police and military assistance to known human rights abusers, is even being applied in Honduras. If there were evidence that it is, we would probably know about it. But the fact is that the U.S. government is ramping up aid to a police force that murders civilians with impunity, and that according to credible high-level officials is tainted by corruption and drug-trafficking itself.”

See Los Angeles Times editorial: “In Honduras, U.S. should tread lightly: Military assistance to Honduras may exacerbate its drug problems rather than helping solve them.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: Alex Main, Dana Frank, Latin America, military,

* Iran Talks * Bahrain Repression * Summit of Americas

April 13, 2012

GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com
American and Iranian negotiators are scheduled to meet this weekend in Istanbul regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Porter is an investigative journalist and historian specializing in U.S. national security policy. He just wrote the piece “U.S.-Israel Deal to Demand Qom Closure Threatens Nuclear Talks.”

Protesters throw Molotov cocktails at a police water cannonREEM KHALIFA, reem.khalifa at alwasatnews.com, @Reem_Khalifa
Today, AP is reporting “Formula One’s governing body says the Bahrain Grand Prix will go ahead as planned,” see: “Human Rights Abuses Aside, Formula 1 Racers Head to Bahrain.”

InterPress Service reported earlier this week “White House Expresses Growing Concern Over Bahrain.”

Khalifa is a noted independent journalist in Bahrain who has written for the AP and other outlets. Today, she reports on large protests including 10,000 people attending a funeral of a citizen journalist. She also reports that the Bahraini government is resorting to weapons they have not used since last year and protesters are denouncing the U.S. and Saudi governments as well as the Bahraini monarchy. Khalifa is scheduled to be interviewed by The Real News today.

MOHAMMAD ALI NAQUVI, alinaquvi at yahoo.com
Ali Naquvi is an attorney and activist with the American Council for Freedom in Bahrain. He said today: “The protests today show that the demands of the Bahrani people have not been met. With the courage of Mr. Abdulhadi al-Khawaja’s hunger strike, now over 60 days, the morale of the people continues to stay high. Even though the Formula One association says that they are going ahead with the race, many individual teams have expressed concern.”

ALEX MAIN, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net
Main is senior associate for international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He just wrote the piece “Obama in Cartagena: No Change, Dwindling Hope,” which states: “Whether on Cuba policy, ‘free trade,’ the ‘war on drugs’ or relations with left-wing governments in South America, the administration’s current policies are nearly indistinguishable from those of Bush. As a result, Obama’s reception in Cartagena is likely to be lukewarm at best; and the Summit of the Americas itself may well be seen as increasingly irrelevant by most of Latin America and the Caribbean.”

SANHO TREE, stree at igc.org
Director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, Tree said today: “As the violence caused by drug prohibition threatens governments throughout the region, the demand for ending prohibition will intensify. Previously, it had been only retired politicians and officials who spoke openly of their views. Now, sitting heads of state are joining the discussion.” See a recent interview here.

Tagged With: Alex Main, Arab Spring, Bahrain, Gareth Porter, Iran, Latin America, Middle East, Mohammad Ali Naquvi, Reem Khalifa, Summit of the Americas,

Another journalist killed in Honduras, the “deadliest place in the world to do journalism”

March 15, 2012

Felix Molina

CNN reported Wednesday that: “Ninety-four members of Congress signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Monday, proposing a cutoff to all military and police aid until the issue of human rights violations in Honduras are addressed.”

The latest journalist to be killed was 54-year-old Fausto Elio Hernández Arteaga of Radio Alegre in the Aguan Valley region. He was found Sunday hacked to death with 18 machete wounds, none of his personal belongings were stolen. He is the 19th journalist to be killed since Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo took power in the aftermath of a 2009 military coup. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Frank La Rue, recently declared Honduras the as “per capita, the deadliest place in the world to do journalism.”

FELIX MOLINA, lvargas at sjc-cjs.org
Molina is host and producer of the nightly news and analysis program for Radio Globo, a chain of 17 stations across Honduras. Radio Globo has been shut down by the military on two occasions since the 2009 coup, and Molina says he receives regular death threats by way of text message. He is currently in Ottawa to denounce the Canadian government’s recent signing of a free-trade agreement with the Lobo regime.

Regarding the killing of Fausto Elio Hernández Arteaga, Molina says: “Another journalist killed in a post-coup situation where none of the previous 18 assassinations have been investigated, much less solved. The responsibility for that impunity lies with the regime that took power by force. It’s also significant that this newest killing took place in the Aguán Valley, the region of the country that has seen the highest degree of political violence since the coup. In the two years since Lobo took power, more than 50 landless farmers have been killed in this one valley, simply for demanding their right to land.”

JESSE FREESTON, jfreeston at gmail.com
Freeston is a video-journalist and filmmaker. He released a 25-minute documentary on journalism in Honduras for The Real News Network in late 2011. He is currently finishing a feature documentary, Resistencia, on the land conflict in the Aguán Valley, where Fausto Elio Hernández Arteaga was killed. (see trailer at www.resistenciathefilm.com)

Freeston says: “We still don’t have the details on the most recent death, but the last journalist that was killed in the Aguán, Nahúm Palacios, was shot dead just one week after doing a TV report sympathetic to the landless farmer movement in the valley. Most international coverage of the journalist deaths neglects to mention that at least 17 of the 19 murdered journalists had been critical of the coup regime, and zero of the 19 worked for any of Honduras’ major media conglomerates that backed the coup (conglomerates that are, by far, the largest employers of journalists). In other words, what we’re seeing is a cleansing of journalists critical of what many Hondurans call the ‘ongoing coup’.”

Tagged With: Felix Monlina, Honduras, Jesse Freeston, Latin America,

Honduras Fire: Government Complicity?

February 15, 2012

ADRIENNE PINE, pine at american.edu
Pine is an assistant professor at American University who has been researching violence in Honduras for 15 years. She is the author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras.

She said today: “The fire that killed over 300 prisoners early Wednesday morning in the Honduran city of Comayagua occurs in a context of police militarization which has been posited by the post-coup government and U.S. State Department as a solution to ‘security’ problems in Honduras, despite strong opposition from Honduran citizens. Honduras is currently the most dangerous country in the world, with a murder rate of 82 per 100,000 residents, a position to which it plunged following the unresolved 2009 military coup. Prisoners trapped by this morning’s fire were killed when firefighters were unable to rescue them, although the fire occurred close to the U.S. military base Soto Cano, which houses a large, fully-equipped firefighting squad.”

OSCAR ESTRADA, oscarlestrada at gmail.com
Estrada is a Honduran journalist, lawyer, and documentary filmmaker. His film “El Porvenir” traces the murder of 69 gang members in a prison in the city of Ceiba. He said today: “Today’s prison fire also appears to share many characteristics with the Honduran prison fires of 2003 and 2004, which killed 69 and 104 prisoners, respectively. In previous fires, police complicity was proven to be a primary cause of prisoners’ death; prisoners interviewed today have stated that rather than opening the gates, police shot into them. Numerous Honduran media have also reported that police and military have fired bullets and tear gas into a crowd of grieving family members outside the Comayagua prison. Overcrowding, a problem President Lobo resolved to fix in 2004 as president of Congress following the two fires, was also a factor: 900 prisoners were housed in the prison, which had a capacity of 400. This fire can be seen as a reinvigorated post-coup effort at social cleansing; the killing off the most vulnerable members of society in the context of a weak, undemocratic state with an increasingly powerful and unchecked military.”

Tagged With: Adrienne Pine, Honduras, Latin America, Oscar Estrada,