Informant38

se cayo el sistema:

In 1988, Lopez Obrador was a leading organizer in the presidential campaign of leftist candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Early on election night, Mexico's own electoral system showed Cardenas with a substantial lead over PRI candidate Carlos Salinas. Then there was a mysterious computer crash, and the country woke up the next morning to an announcement that Salinas was the victor. Lopez Obrador led a voter rights movement in protest, with marches, sit-ins, civil disobedience and road blockades in his home state of Tabasco. He persisted in his protests, and in 1991 led a voter rights protest march from Tabasco to Mexico City.
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Election officials say Calderon beat Lopez Obrador by less than 244,000 votes out of 41 million ballots - or a margin of about 0.6 percent.
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As many as 4 million voters, or about 1 in 20 of those registered, have been paid to vote for a candidate, Alianza Civica said in its report, which was released last week. Much of the coercion, it concluded, is applied by local and state officials who control health, welfare and farm aid programs. The group's director, Silvia Alonso, also faulted Fox's government for not taking a more aggressive stand against coercive practices.
"It's sad," she said. "We're still in the process of transitioning to democracy."
The authors of both studies acknowledged that Mexico had come a long way from the heyday of the PRI era, when soldiers and police often harassed voters and vote-counting fraud was common. As recently as 1988, independent observers have said, the PRI blatantly stole a presidential election by staging a fake computer crash.
"Certainly things are better now than in the past -- in the past, the president and the PRI controlled everything: the media, the electoral authority, the electoral process," Aguayo said. "But things are still not as they should be."
Half of the 4,400 voters interviewed by Alianza Civica said social programs in their areas were being used to benefit supporters of political parties. The study's findings indicate that vote-buying and coercion are likely to increase this week, in the final days before the election.
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"...so respected it provides training for electoral officials in Iraq..."