Standing Corrected

There are times when you slip up in life, and there are times when you fall flat on your face. Usually, when I do the latter, I usually tend to do it in all areas of my life at the same time. This is no exception.

I "reported" on Mexico's recent election. I've seen some bad posts, but this one takes the cake....

Somehow, in my haste and utter ignorance, I had confused the ruling PAN party with the ousted PRI who had almost surely committed voter fraud in the past. Furthermore, I was referencing the PRD when I spoke of the PRI. Anyone familiar with Mexican politics knows what a slap in the face that is to anyone associated with the PRD. My apologies.

So for the record....

PAN has never stolen any election that I know of. My charge that PAN stole this election is completely baseless and rooted in a false premise.

I deeply regret the disrespect I have show to good people like krizantah who have undoubtedly worked very hard to protect that "child in a crowded market," which I spoke of. Imagine how stupid I felt when I read this...

I was a president for a voting booth last Sunday, July 2nd. There was also a secretary and a counter (escrutador). We had at our table one person representing PAN, one from the PRI and 2 for PRD. They watched the whole process. Every citizen over 18 has an id, specifically for voting. The id has a picture, fingerprint, signature. birthdate and address. We had a list with a copy of the id´s of the people voting at our booth. Every time someone arrive to vote, we check his id, put a stamp over the copy we had, pounched his id at the date 2006. We vote the traditional way, paper and crayons, and we kept every paper. After voting averyone had his right thumb mark with a special ink. I knew a lot of the people who came to my booth, they are my neighbours. At 6 pm we closed the booth and the counting started. At our booth PAN won everything, by much. At 10:00 pm we packed all the documentation, sealed and signed everything and every party representative received a copy of the oficial papers with the final numbers. If they had any comments they could have writen them down and we should had to add them to the rest of the documents without any questioning. This didn´t ocurred. They all had cell phones and called their party headquarters to send the final numbers. At 10:30 I was at another address which was a center where the insitute gathered the documantation. We were like an army of presidents of voting booths all carrying the same white, heavy box with all the papers. We were all wet because on top of everything, it was raining. It was so much work, at 11 pm I had breakfast. I checked the numbers that we got in the internet, the IFE and the IEDF have them on their web pages and anyone can see the numbers gotten from each voting booth in the country. The numbers of my booth were correct. Ther is no place for fraud. This elections was carried out by the citizens.

I also want to thank Kvatch who writes blognonymous (which is a "must read" blog) for being the first to alert me to my grievous error.

What makes this especially painful for me is that in college, I wrote a paper on the corruption in the elections which at that point (1991) was endemic. I studied the Zapatista rebels and PRI's efforts to suppress their insurrections. I researched instances where the PRI had received 90% of the vote (in sealed boxes, 10 days late) from areas that were dominated by Zapatistas and historically had voted heavily for the PRD. These fraudulent practices were fairly obvious to any objective observer. As a result of this obvious fraud, a concerted effort in the 1990's led to Vicente Fox's historic 2000 election, and the downfall of the PRI.

Now to the explaination....

My course of study led me to break with politics and news from 1995 on, due to a severe case of disillusionment. I had literally avoided news for 6 years and even after 9/11 I tried to keep a distance from the reality of what was going on. At university I had looked the beast strait in the face and buckled under the pressure. I fled to Europe and pretended that everything was going to be just fine, even though I knew it wouldn't. Well, what could I do about it anyway? I'm nobody.

Eventually, the wall I put up came crashing down. It happened sometime between 9/11 and the invation of Iraq. (For someone who was obsessed with politics from age 10, it had to be a pretty thick wall to last 6 years). I wasn't actually "on my game" until sometime after I started this blog.

As an aside, the other day I met a Canadian girl who is studying law so that she can change the world (my original plan in life). She is committed (probably more than I ever was, hell, she's a vegan). She is dedicated to forest preservation (I had led a forest preservation program at Davis that focused on preserving the the Clayoquot Sound in Brittish Columbia. It was such a no brainer: they were literally using ancient trees from the last large stand of temperate rain-forests for pulp to make paper for phone books because most of the old trees had too much rot to be used for good lumber. The Canadian government who approved the land-use owned stock in the company that got the contract to cut the trees which would be illegal under U.S. law).

Talking with her about how the Clayoquot Sound had been saved renewed my faith in grassroots action and reminded me of Margaret Mead's classic quote....

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

The moral to the story is that one should never give up. It may be you who is the important piece of the puzzle that leads to the next great hurdle. Anyone who worked on Mexican voter reform which broke PRI's stranglehold on Mexican politics falls into this category.

Or an alternative moral: you might make a total ass out of yourself on your own blog because you were not paying attention when important things were going on..... and that is not cool. Nope, not cool at all.

Blog on everyone. It is a learning process for all of us.