Mexico and Florida have more in common than heat-Greg Palast/The Guardian

[kpete]

Mexico and Florida have more in common than heat

There is evidence that left-leaning voters have been scrubbed from key electoral lists in Latin America

Greg Palast
Saturday July 8, 2006
The Guardian


There's something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico's first "clean" election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist.

Just before the 2000 balloting in Florida, I reported in the Guardian that its governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered the removal of tens of thousands of black citizens from the state's voter rolls. He called them "felons", but our investigation discovered their only crime was Voting While Black. And that little scrub of the voter rolls gave the White House to his brother George.

Jeb's winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business - in Mexico - at the direction of the Bush government. Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked "secret", regarding a contract for "intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations".

more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1815601,00.html

[Steelydan]

1. Narco News Coverage is Also Good

Philip Shropshire
http://www.threeriversonline.com


I love Greg Palast's work, but I think Al Giordano is doing as good if not a better job.

In Mexico, 2.5 Million Missing Votes Reappear: López Obrador Reduces Calderón’s Official Margin to 0.6 percent
IFE’s Claim that 98.5 Percent of Votes Had Been Counted Was False: Authorities Now Oppose Recount


http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article1962.html

By Al Giordano
Part I of a Special Series for The Narco News Bulletin

July 5, 2006

Today, in Mexico, begins a “recount” of votes cast in Sunday’s presidential election… in which the umpires are refusing to recount the votes.

Election authorities of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, in its Spanish initials) closed ranks on Tuesday with the National Action Party (PAN) of President Vicente Fox and candidate Felipe Calderón to oppose the actual recounting the votes. This, on the heels of Tuesday’s “discovery” of 2.5 million votes hidden by IFE since Sunday’s election, added to a growing body of evidence – and corresponding public distrust in the institutions – that a gargantuan electoral fraud has been perpetrated.

The partial “recount” began at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, in Mexico’s 300 election districts – each with an average of 400 polling places and 140,000 votes to tabulate – and sparks are already flying over the struggle to conduct an authentic count in the sunlight of public scrutiny. Attorneys and party bosses of the PAN – whose triumphalism has turned to visible panic in recent hours – have orders from headquarters to universally oppose the reopening of any ballot boxes and subsequent public accounting of the actual number of votes cast for each candidate. On the other side, representatives of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) of candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador and many outraged citizens armed with video cameras have besieged the 300 recount locales demanding an actual ballot-by-ballot recount.

This first stage of the process is likely to take days: Results from more than 11,000 precincts (the ones hidden by IFE – in most of them, López Obrador won the vote) that must be recounted, vote-by-vote, in accordance with Mexican electoral law. That is an average of almost 40 polling places per district. And with two well-organized sides battling over whether the votes will be counted aloud, combined with the stonewalling incompetence that has been IFE’s trademark, an already fragile process is coming apart at the seams.


Police cordon a Nezahuacoyotl garbage dump where ballots and ballot-boxes from three precincts won by López Obrador were discovered on Tuesday.
Photo: D.R. 2006 El Universal
One of the major problems for IFE and the Fox administration is that if they were to allow the bread-and-butter recount that the public demands, the ugly truth would come out that an unknown number of ballot boxes have “disappeared” in the past two days. The ballots from three precincts in the city of Nezahuacoyotl – a López Obrador stronghold – were discovered yesterday in the municipal garbage dump. The results from two of those precincts have been missing, since Sunday, from IFE’s vote tallies. An IFE official, ambushed by television reporters, exacerbated the crime yesterday when she blamed the Mexican military: the Armed Forces, not IFE, are supposedly guarding the ballots, she said, in defense of her bureaucracy. This, sources close to the military told Narco News, produced significant anger among the military generals and troops who – if the public does not believe or accept IFE’s final decision – will be called upon to quell the national rebellion that follows.

The Armed Forces are understandably concerned about the very real possibility that history will be repeated: that they will be turned into the scapegoats of a process-gone-awry. If, as in the 1960s and 1970s, the military is to be called upon to repress a civilian population’s protests, highway blockades, strikes and occupations of government centers – steps that are inevitable if IFE refuses to recount the votes in public – the generals will be turned into the primary recipients of the national and global repudiation that follows. Significantly, and distinct from the presidential elections six years ago, the Armed Forces have remained totally silent. Missing from the usual script are the previously obligatory statements by the military that it will unconditionally back IFE’s verdict. There is the real possibility that if President Fox decides to try to quell the social unrest, that the military will refuse to become his enforcing patsy.

Although many and vast, the various federal police agencies do not count with the numbers to successfully contain a national revolt. The events of June 14 in Oaxaca, when 15,000 striking teachers repelled the dawn attack by 3,000 riot cops, is still fresh in the collective memory. With mere sticks and stones they beat back the batons, shields, teargas bazookas, and real bullets from real guns, of the invading police, sent them running in retreat, and took back 56 blocks of the city’s downtown. The Mexico from below is more organized, united, and sophisticated than ever before. And, perhaps ironically, it is precisely in the states traveled in recent months by the Zapatista anti-electoral Other Campaign and its Subcomandante Marcos where the electorate voted most heavily for López Obrador and where the conditions most evidently exist to defend that vote in the streets and on the highways if need be.

[Tuesday_Morning]

7. thanks

and welcome to DU

[nashville_brook]

2. k n r -- palast is out in front of this story

[Joanne98]

3. Why do the documents have 3 different dates?

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=160125892&size=o&context=set-72157594152838701

Does anybody know?

[Joanne98]

4. International Republican Institute....

Venezuela and Haiti....
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1481

Overview

The International Republican Institute (IRI), which was initially known as the National Republican Institute for International Affairs, receives government funding for international democratization programs, principally from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Founded in 1983, it is “dedicated to advancing democracy, freedom, self-government, and the rule of law worldwide.” IRI states that it is an independent, nonprofit institute that is not affiliated with the Republican Party, and “is guided by the fundamental American principles of individual liberty, the rule of law, and the entrepreneurial spirit.” (1)

The IRI is the indirect product of a democratic globalism effort spearheaded in the late 1970s by neoconservatives and their allies in the AFL-CIO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and in the two main U.S. political parties. This project, which aimed to create a quasi-governmental instrument for U.S. political aid, came to fruition in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan proposed a new organization to promote free-market democracies around the world, the National Endowment for Democracy. In 1983 Congress approved the creation of NED, which was funded primarily through the U.S. Information Agency and secondarily through USAID. Designed as a bipartisan institution, NED channels U.S. government funding through four core grantees: IRI, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the Free Trade Union Institute (FTUI)—the AFL-CIO’s international operations institute that is currently known as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS).

Like NED and the other core grantees, the early focus of IRI was Central America and the Caribbean—a region that in the 1980s was the cutting edge of the Reagan administration’s revival of counterinsurgency and counter-revolutionary operations. After the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate in 1989, IRI says it “broadened its reach to support democracy around the globe.” (2) IRI has channeled U.S. political aid to partners—which like itself are often creations of U.S. funding—in 75 countries, and it currently has operations in 50 countries. Most recently, it has expanded its operations into Central Asia, having opened offices in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. In Latin America, IRI has offices in Guatemala, Peru, and Haiti. In Africa, IRI has offices in Kenya, Nigeria, and Angola. IRI’s offices in Asia are found in Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, and Mongolia. In Central and Eastern Europe, IRI has offices in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Turkey. There is also an IRI office in Moscow. (3)

The principals of IRI span the center right-far right spectrum of the internationalists in the Republican Party. Most of its staff and board have links to right-wing think tanks, foundations, and policy institutes, while many also represent major financial, oil, and defense corporations. George A. Folsom, IRI’s president and CEO, was a member of the Bush-Cheney Transition Team, serving on the Treasury Department task force. An international investment banker, Folsom was a leading member of the Scowcroft Group, an international advisory firm headed by Brent Scowcroft. An adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Folsom is a frequent guest at forums and strategy sessions hosted by the Heritage Foundation, National Defense University, American Enterprise Institute, and Washington Institute for Near East Policy. IRI’s vice president of strategic planning and Latin America expert is Georges Fauriol, the former director of the Americas program at CSIS, where he cochaired with Ambassador Otto Reich the Americas Forum, a hemispheric network of like-minded policy professionals. Among Fauriol’s other affiliations are his work with the right-wing Foreign Policy Research Institute and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Since the early 1980s Fauriol has worked closely with right-wing Cuban Americans such as Otto Reich and is a member of the Center for a Free Cuba. Among the corporations represented on the IRI’s board are Lockheed Martin (Alison Fortier), Chevron Texaco (Michael Kostiw), AOL Time Warner (Robert Kimmitt), and Ford (Janet Mullins Grissom). Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is IRI’s chair. Michael Grebe, the president and CEO of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and former general counsel to the Republican National Committee, sits on IRI’s board. Other prominent IRI board members include: J. William Middendorf, Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., and Brent Scowcroft. (4)

The Attempted Coup in Venezuela

After the April 2002 aborted coup against Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, many observers accused Washington of having been behind the attempted ouster. The Bush administration denied any U.S. involvement in the affair. However, one relatively clear connection has emerged between the U.S. government and the anti-Chávez movement: millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money were channeled through the IRI and other U.S. organizations, including CIPE and ACLIS, to groups that opposed Chávez during the years preceding the April coup.

Mike Cesar, an analyst for the IRC’s Americas Program, reported that in an April 12, 2002 fax sent to news media, IRI President George A. Folsom rejoiced over Chávez’ removal from power. “The Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country,” he wrote. “Venezuelans were provoked into action as a result of systematic repression by the government of Hugo Chávez.” (5) With NED funding, IRI had been sponsoring political party-building workshops and other anti-Chávez activities in Venezuela. “IRI evidently began opposing Chávez even before his 1998 election,” wrote Cesar. “Prior to that year’s congressional and presidential elections, the IRI worked with Venezuelan organizations critical of Chávez to run newspaper ads, TV, and radio spots that several observers characterize as anti-Chávez.” Furthermore, “The IRI has … flown groups of Chávez opponents to Washington to meet with U.S. officials. In March 2002, a month before Chávez’s brief ouster, one such group of politicians, union leaders, and activists traveled to DC to meet with U.S. officials, including members of Congress and State Department staff. The trip came at the time that several military officers were calling for Chávez’ resignation and talk of a possible coup was widespread.” One opposition figure who benefited from IRI support said that bringing varied government opponents together in Washington accelerated the unification of the opposition. “The democratic opposition began to become cohesive,” he said. “We began to become a team.” (6) (7)

The Coup in Haiti

In the first year of the Bush administration, IRI received funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for a new “Party Building Project.” IRI, which in 1987 began working “with the Haitian people in their quest for democracy,” has sponsored various projects in election-monitoring, polling, party-building, and civil society support since 1990. Its latest USAID-funded party-building project has focused on working with the political opposition living outside Haiti. By creating a website ( www.haitigetinvolved.com ) and a listserv, IRI states that it is using U.S. political aid funding that allows “political parties, civil society, the Haitian Diaspora, Caribbean constituencies, and representatives of the international community to explore solutions to Haiti’s democracy and governance obstacles.” (8) (9) (10) (11)

According to Robert Maguire, director of the Haiti Program at Trinity College in Washington, DC, “NED and USAID are important, but actually the main actor is the International Republican Institute (IRI), which has been very active in Haiti for many years but particularly in the past three years. IRI has been working with the opposition groups. IRI insisted, through the administration, that USAID give it funding for its work in Haiti. And USAID has done so but kicking and screaming all the way. IRI has worked exclusively with the Democratic Convergence groups in its party-building exercises and support. The IRI point person is Stanley Lucas who historically has had close ties with the Haitian military. All of the IRI sponsored meetings with the opposition have occurred outside Haiti, either in the DR or in the United States. The IRI ran afoul with Aristide right from the beginning since it has only worked with opposition groups that have challenged legitimacy of the Aristide government. Mr. Lucas is a lightning rod of the IRI in Haiti. The United States could not have chosen a more problematic character through which to channel its aid.” (12)

Funding

IRI states: “IRI is federally funded through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The Institute also receives grants and donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations.”


Right Web connections

Individuals

Georges A. Fauriol (IRI Bio)
George A. Folsom (IRI Bio)
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Otto Reich
Randy Scheunemann
Organizations

American Enterprise Institute
Bradley Foundation
Empower America
National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Contact Information

International Republican Institute (IRI)
1225 Eye Street, NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Website: http://www.iri.org /

[Melissa G]

5. k-n-r! thanks kpete! n/t

[Nothing Without Hope]

6. Here are threads on the previous two Greg Palast Guardian articles on

Mexican election fraud:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=437351
thread title (6-30-06): STEALING MEXICO - by Greg Palast

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1556158
thread title (7-3-06): Dispatch from Mexico City: Stealing it in Front of Your Eyes - Greg Palast

Thanks, kpete! K & R :hi:

[Kurovski]

8. Kick.

:kick: