MEXICO: Poor Especially Vulnerable to Electoral Fraud

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Feb 16 2006 (IPS) - The poverty that affects nearly 40 percent of Mexico’s 104 million people creates a breeding-ground for election crimes, such as deceptive threats of the suspension of social benefits.

One example of this kind of corrupt practice was recently discovered when police near the Mexican capital and in the city of Tijuana on the U.S. border found that national and municipal government officials had taken control of food and clothing that were to go to storm victims, and distributed them to others in exchange for political support.

“We have seen offers of social aid, deception, and the conditioning of social assistance on votes. They are frequent practices,” Aarón Martínez, who last year administered San Juan Mixtepec, a town of 10,000 in the southeastern state of Oaxaca, told IPS.

In the impoverished town, where most residents are indigenous people, 44 percent of the population is illiterate and 53 percent lives in homes with dirt floors, voters chose the president of their town council in late 2004.

But they were deceived by members of a small farmers’ group affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the party that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000.

The PRI sympathisers told local indigenous voters, who in the past selected the head of the town council in open community assemblies, to put a mark next to the photo of the person they did not want to win.

The majority followed these instructions, not realising that they were actually voting for that candidate.

The local indigenous people, who had also been told that their social benefits programmes could be suspended, filed complaints of fraud. As a result, the elections were held again in 2005, and the non-PRI candidate, a member of a different regional small farmers’ association, was elected.

Information is manipulated to obtain political support, said Martínez, who took charge of running the town of San Juan Mixtepec while the election dispute was settled.

Election authorities are now keeping a close eye on the possible manipulation of votes, a practice that is punishable by dismissal from a public post, fines and even prison.

But while the government of President Vicente Fox has promised to prevent such practices, they threaten to rear their ugly heads once again in the Jul. 2 presidential elections, according to a council created in November by the Ministry of Social Development and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

“We must issue an alert regarding the risk that, taking into account the levels of extreme poverty in which millions of Mexicans live and the context of the election race, conditions favourable to manipulation will be generated, despite efforts to the contrary,” Alejandro Grinspun, executive secretary of the UNDP project of protection for federal social programmes, said earlier this month.

The leading candidates running in the July elections are Andrés López Obrador, of the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), Felipe Calderón of the conservative governing National Action Party (PAN), and the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo.

Also in the race, but with no real chances of winning, according to the polls, are Patricia Mercado of the Social Democratic and Alternative Party and Roberto Campa of the New Alliance Party.

According to the Social Development secretary, the poor are the most vulnerable to the trickery and deceit that could be used in attempts to win the July elections.

To avoid such incidents, the government asked the UNDP to participate in a project aimed at ensuring that the U.N. agency-funded Oportunidades (Opportunities) programme in Mexico is not exploited for electoral purposes.

Oportunidades provides social assistance, food aid and health care services to 25 million people living in poverty, at a total cost of 9.5 million dollars a day.

In addition, campaigns have been launched through various state agencies to inform the public that no political conditions can be imposed on any aid from government social programmes, while election officials are closely monitoring any potential abuses of this kind.

The increased vigilance is based on past experience. In December, one of the representatives of the Social Development Secretariat in Tijuana, who was also one of the administrators of the Oportunidades programme, was arrested by the police on charges of withholding aid from storm victims and funnelling it to PRI supporters.

There was a similar incident in the state of Mexico, near the capital, where aid packages for storm victims were found stored in PRD offices.

In the 1990s, electoral fraud typically took the form of stealing or altering ballots, but today “the crimes are more subtle” and involve the manipulation of social assistance, deception and threats, according to María de los Ángeles Fromow, the special prosecutor for Electoral Crimes in the Federal Attorney General’s office.

Between 1994 and 2005, almost 600 public officials at the federal, state and municipal levels were charged and sentenced for electoral crimes, while there are almost 1,900 cases still open.

The special prosecutor’s office reports that the social sectors most prone to electoral pressure are beneficiaries of state-administered social programmes like Oportunidades and other initiatives that provide temporary employment, training allowances and financial aid.

Many of these programmes, which are financed with public funds, are administered by state and municipal governments and social organisations.

“Coercion to gain votes is a routine practice in the marginalised regions of the country,” declared Xóchitl Gálvez, head of the federal government’s National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples.

The proportion of the Mexican population living in extreme poverty dropped from 16.2 to 11.7 percent between 1992 and 2004.

During the same period, the overall poverty rate fell from 44.2 to 37 percent, according to studies by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The regional U.N. agency does not use the standard cut-off of one U.S. dollar a day in income as the sole indicator of extreme poverty, but rather bases its estimates on the statistics and methodology used by each government in the region.

In Mexico, extreme poverty is classified as an income of up to 52 dollars a month in rural areas and 70 dollars a month in the cities.

Overall poverty is calculated as the number of people who live on less than 96 dollars a month in the countryside and 142 dollars in urban areas.