I don’t know much about Mexican politics, but I’m puzzled by the PRI’s big win in yesterday’s elections. They won five of the six governorships up for grabs (the state of Sonora is still in dispute), and they now control the Chamber of Deputies, which is the lower house of Mexican Congress.
Does anyone else think this is weird?
The PRI ruled Mexico with an iron grip for 70 years. To keep themselves in power, they did some pretty atrocious things: stuff ballot boxes, create fake voter lists, ignore complaints from opposition parties… not to mention they were the party in power during the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco, in which armed soldiers killed hundreds of innocent people. Well, actually, no one knows the real number of people who were killed, because the PRI government at the time refused to release any numbers. And PRI-controlled newspapers refused to report the true story.
This is the party that, in 1988, pretty much stole the presidential election from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and unplugged computers from the wall to prevent opposition parties from seeing the true election results, before the PRI had fiddled with them. How do I know all this? I’m reading Opening Mexico, a fascinating/depressing look at 20th century Mexican politics. It’s written by two Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporters who were former correspondents in Mexico City.
Really: How can this party have any type of majority power again? The NYT and BBC say the Mexican people were fed up with the drug war and shrinking economy and wanted a change. Maybe voters really believed the PRI’s new slogan — “The PRI of Today: Proven Experience. New attitude.”
On a sad note — sad in my opinion — nearly six percent of voters across the country cast a “null” vote, meaning they didn’t vote for anyone at all, in protest of Mexico’s political machine. In Mexico City, this figure was as high was 11 percent. This strikes me as crazy. In a country where the first true democratic election happened in 2000, people are now refusing to exercise their democratic right and choose a leader?
No entiendo.