The credibility of the IFE

National
We don't have credibility some in the elections
The credibility of the IFE
By: Carlos Damián July 5, 2012
The incipient Mexican democracy
México.- The four applicants to the Presidency of the Republic subscribed a “pact of civility” last Thursday (6/28/12) in the headquarters of the Electoral Federal Institute (IFE) summoned by the consultant president Leonardo Valdes Zurita (LVZ). When signing the document they committed to accept the result of the federal election of Sunday 1 of July, “be which the result is"; to give up, during the ‘electoral journey’, to all form of violence and of coercion of the vote, and to accept the sentence of the corresponding authorities. In contrast of the commitments included in that document, the subscription of the same one happens with the backdrop of the proliferation of practical illicit and antidemocrat.

In the past three months the Specialized Office for the Attention of Electoral Crimes has carried out more than 300 consignments for diverse illicit, and in the offices of that dependence they accumulate, up to now, more than half thousand of complaints and previous verifications around possible violations to the normative ones effective in the matter. The own IFE investigates a 17 complaints for presumed irregular financial operations, to those that it would be necessary to add the accusation, formulated yesterday for campaign’s representatives of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), for the supposition allotment of hundred of thousands of cards of debit of grocery stores (Supercenters) to buy the vote in favor of Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN).

Political campaigns of mud
In the social nets the pictures proliferate and videos that document the commission of serious irregularities, from the manipulation of electoral packages until purchase maneuvers, or coercion of the vote. To these facts, indicative of the dirt that affects to the electoral process under way, the flagrant waste in propaganda should be added since presumably they exceeded the stones’ cat of campaign of 22 million dollars, and even not investigated neither sanctioned up to now, as well as the repetition of the campaigns of mud, discredit, disqualification and until the opponents' libel (or enemies’ slander), which were prohibited by the electoral reformation of 2007.

In such a circumstance, the “pact of civility” that was signed in the central building of the IFE the risk runs of being in a mere simulation act, under the one which they the realization of illicit actions continues or they’re buying votes, illegal handling of the electoral matter and operatives of the corporate vote, prohibited by the law, as which carries out the leadership of the National Union of Workers of the Education (SNTE, in Spanish), in favor of EPN, already documented in this blog. For the next election it is indeed legal and neat, they are not enough the promises and the good desires of the participants; it is required, on the other hand, of real political will of the litigant forces and of the powers factic, and especially we refer to the mediatic and managerial.

The incipient not very believable democracy
The candidates would owe to stick strictly to the legal dispositions and to allow the free emission of the civic will in the polling-booths. It is necessary to point out that it is necessary that the electoral institutions behave as they were not able to, and they didn't want to make it that is to say in the dirty elections of 2006, how referees and coherent, firm and impartial electoral judges, beyond all doubt. In this way, it is lamentable the sustained meeting last Wednesday (6/27/12) among the federal Executive, Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, and LVZ president consultant: although it was formally announced as a protocol act to guarantee the certainty and the security of the electoral journey.

The encounter among these two personalities is unnecessary and unfounded, since the IFE; it is an autonomous institution, with ability and obligation of operating fully in form independent for that that in the current circumstance, this chats it feeds the rumors and susceptibilities around treatments without admitting between the participants or undue intrusion of the presidential power in the elections. It is fresh still the memory of the illegitimate subjection that the predecessor of LVZ, Luis Carlos Ugalde, played before the former president Vicente Fox in the six year-old ago cloudy elections.

The Mexican town considers 71% a possible fraud
Recent surveys show that in Mexico a “deficit exists in the disposition to complete rules", included the electoral ones. During the period of electoral campaign that began March 30, the Fepade began 555 previous verifications. In this context, the IFE and the PGR, through the Fepade, they increased the unfolding of infrastructures and of personal in the whole national territory. For these concurrent and federal elections at 15 states, the Fepade qualified as regards electoral armour to almost 220 thousand people, by means of 782 present and on-line courses. The available telephone of the Fepade is the 01.800.833.72.33 with 141 lines with service 24 hours.

If parties and electoral institutions don't correct their acting they will be condemning to the country to a new conflict pos-electoral of consequences without predicting, and in the worst in the cases, to the conformation of a second lacking of genuineness government, as which is about to conclude. In sum to some hours of the realization of the elections in those that have put special commitment so much the governors of the PRI like those of the PAN, the group of those involved should understand that in the current process they are operating in the limits of credibility of the democratic processes. Of persisting in the traditional practices of distortion of the popular will and opacity, they will end up draining such credibility and they will make, with it, a serious damage to the political development of the country, to the citizenship, to the republican institutional and themselves. (La Jornada, politica, p.p. 2-4, June 29, 2012).