Mexican elections corruption busted

[Magda Hassan]

Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto denies that his PRI party bought votes in the July 1, 2012. But on Election Night, hundreds of people gathered outside of the PRI offices to testify that they were promised up to 2,500 pesos for their voter I.D.s and votes but that the PRI took their credentials and did not pay. Here, they tell their story.
http://www.narconews.com/nntv/video.php?vid=53

[Peter Lemkin]

Everyone now seems to feel that the PRI has been caught, but that the results and election will NOT be changed. It certainly means a long and ugly period in Mexico.....nothing new there. Sad.

[Magda Hassan]

How the election was stolen in Mexico

by: TIM PELZER
july 10 2012

Evidence continues to mount that the recent "victory" by conservatives in Mexico's national elections wascompletely fraudulentand that the country's center-left coalition should have been declared the winner.
After two recounts of votes in Mexico's July 1 national elections, center left candidateAndres Manuel Lopez Obrador, called AMLO by friend and foe alike, continues to reject the official election results.
Those official tallies establish rival right wing candidate Enrique Peña Nieto of the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) as the winner.
AMLO, candidate for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Labour Party (PT) and the Citizens' Movement (formerly the Convergence Party) presents a mountain of evidence as proof of his party's assertion that the July 1 elections were "totally falsified."
First, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), after finding irregularities, conducted only partial recounts before issuing the following "final" tallies:

• For the right wing Enrique Pena Nieto (PAN) the official total was 19,226,784 or 38.2 percent.
  
• For the center left Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (PRD-PT) the tally was 15,896,999 or 31.6 percent.
  
• Josefina Vazquez Mota (Party of National Action) officially received 12,786,647 votes or 25.4 percent.
  
• Gabriel Quadri (New Alliance) officially garnered 1,150,662 votes or 2.9 percent.
  

Since Mexico has no runoff elections, the right wing Nieto becomes the winner if those are the actual totals.
AMLO, at a July 9 press conference in Mexico City, claimed that Nieto won only because the PRI engaged in a massive vote-buying operation that bought five million votes from the country's poor.
Sixteen PRI state governors played a big role in distributing pre-paid gift cards for Soriana, (a new department store chain that sells food and household goods) cash, farm supplies, tax forgiveness and other items in exchange for casting a ballot for PRI candidates.
AMLO said some people who initially accepted the Soriana cards and then afterwards felt "regret" delivered the cards unused to his PRD-PT coalition. Pasted on the walls in his Mexico City headquarters where he gives daily press conferences are hundreds of the vouchers given to the bribed voters.
AMLO and Ricardo Monreal Avila, the PRD-PT's campaign coordinator, revealed that PRI governors funneled public, private and illicit money, including funds from the U.S., amounting to billions of pesos, to PRI operatives at the local level and that those operatives used the funds to buy the votes.
A power point presentation showed financial documents and checks that implicate the PRI governor, his cabinet and political operatives in Zacatecas state.
Peña Nieto met with the 16 PRI governors on June 12 to plan the massive vote-buying operation, claim the two PRD leaders. For political parties to buy votes is illegal in Mexico. The website of Mexico's daily leftwing newspaper La Jornada has posted videos of people being interviewed by hidden camera who admit they accepted Soriana vouchers in exchange for voting for the PRI.
The student movement "I am #132," which campaigned against Peña Nieto and refuses to recognize the election results, has shown similar video footage of bribed voters accepting Soriana vouchers.
To demonstrate links between the PRI and Soriana, La Jornada's front cover on July 7 showed a picture of Peña Nieto at a publicity event for Soriana in Mexico state wearing a green Soriana T-shirt.
AMLO said that there were also irregularities in at least 113,855 polling stations out of 143,132 across the country. In some cases, more votes were counted than those who actually voted or vice versa. The final vote tallies that were counted in front of all party representatives in the polling stations were not always correctly reported by IFE's PREP (rapid vote count) and votes were removed for some candidates (AMLO) or increased for others (Peña Nieto).
In other places, voters were denied the right to vote because there were not enough paper ballots.
AMLO said his coalition will be going to the Federal Electoral Institute's electoral court to overturn the election results in the coming days. He wants IFE to reopen the ballot boxes and recount all the votes.
AMLO also says that the second vote recount by IFE was inadequate and that the federal electoral agency had failed to ensure a fair election. "IFE did not do its job of keeping the elections clean," he declared.
Lopez Obrador supporters are circulating via Facebook copies of hand written polling station vote tallies side by side with IFE's vote tally to show examples of how IFE officials altered vote counts to favor the PRI.
Polling station 0389 in Tabasco reported that 111 votes were cast for Lopez Obrador but IFE only listed 11; the polling station in Nezahualcolyotl, Mexico State reported Lopez Obrador received 81 votes but IFE only mentioned 56; in Zaragoza, Mexico state, IFE disqualified Lopez Obrador's 81 votes for being ineligible even though the handwritten vote tally document from the polling station clearly states 81 votes; In Tultitlan, Mexico state Peña Nieto got 81 votes but IFI reported 801.
Other pictures on Facebook are of young men, faces blackened with paint to conceal their identities, burning ballot boxes. In another, scorched, frayed ballots from people who voted for the PAN are strewn on the desert floor.
Lopez Obrador supporters are also distributing videos through YOUTUBE demonstrating voter suppression. One shows a group of voters in the Federal District, led by an outspoken older woman, demanding the right to vote at a polling station after they are told by an election official he had run out of paper ballots.
The Internet hacking group Anonymous is circulating pictures from the IFE website showing Lopez Obrador as the presidential winner, easily overtaking his PRI and PAN rivals, before the results were changed to show Peña Nieto as winner.
The PRI's Peña Nieto denied that his party bought millions of votes with the Soriana pre-paid cards and other payments and has submitted a complaint to the Special Investigator for Electoral Crimes to investigate where the Lopez Obrador campaign obtained the Soriana vouchers. Peña Nieto claimed his party won the elections fair and square, the elections were transparent and clean, and Lopez Obrador cannot accept that he lost the presidential elections a second time. Nieto also accused PRD-PT supporters of dressing in PRI T-shirts and handing out the gift cards.
Despite Nieto's denials, Soriana posted a letter at its stores announcing that it would no longer "accept the pre-paid cards in our stores due to the fact " that the PRI withdrew funding for the cards that it's supporters distributed.
PAN leader Gustavo Madero admitted that the PRI always wins elections through "money and deception." He questioned the legitimacy of Peña Nieto's victory given the PRI's illegal massive vote buying effort during the elections. He stated it would be difficult to annul the elections but one cannot reject this possibility. The PAN would respect any decisions that electoral authorities make on the elections, stated the PAN leader.
In Durango state PAN, PRD and PT leaders formed an alliance to annul the July 1 elections. The three parties will submit evidence documenting how the state's PRI government used taxpayer money to buy votes. For instance, the Secretary of Social Development sent a truck of cement to the Mayor of Santiago Papassquiaro that instead arrived at the home of the state PRI leader who distributed the cement to supporters to assure a vote for the PRI.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people marched through the Mexico on July 7 to protest election fraud. The biggest protests took place in the capital Mexico City where tens of thousands protested.
Photo: Demonstrators gather at the Zocalo Plaza in Mexico City, July 7. Tens of thousands marched. They believe the PRI engaged in vote-buying that illegally tainted millions of votes. Marco Ugarte/AP
http://peoplesworld.org/how-the-election...in-mexico/

[Magda Hassan]

Mexico's Peña Nieto hires US propaganda firm

Posted by Bill Conroy - July 22, 2012 at 12:18 amCLSA is same media-spin company used by Honduran coup regime
The de facto president-elect of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto has hired Washington, DC-based public relations firm Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter & Associates to help him spread positive propaganda during the transition period prior to his official swearing-in as the majordomo of Mexico on Dec. 1 of this year.
Pena Nieto's choice of CLSA is interesting in light of current allegations of vote buying and money laundering that have been leveled against him and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in its Spanish initials) by the opposition partiesin Mexico.
CLSA is the same US image-building firmthat was retained in the fall of 2009 by the Honduran regime led by "de facto" President Roberto Micheletti in the wake of its coup d'état in that Central American nation.
CLSA's Foreign Agents Registration Act filingwith the Department of Justice described its mission in Honduras as promoting Honduran President and Usurper Roberto Micheletti's dictatorship as a democracy "through the use of media outreach, policy maker contacts and events, and public dissemination of information to government staff of government officials, news media and non-government groups" all with the goal of advancing "the level of communication, awareness and attention about the political situation in Honduras."
The mission outlined in the July 6 FARA filing made by CLSA on behalf of Peña Nieto contains strikingly similar language, describing the objectives as providing "communications counsel and assistance to the transition team [of Peña Nieto] including dissemination of news/announcements from the transition team, monitoring of news and policy developments related to Mexico-U.S. interests."
Foreign entities, including political parties, that conduct lobbying or propaganda campaigns in the US are required to register with the US Department of Justice under the FARA.
PRI candidate Pena Nieto emerged as the leading vote getter in Mexico's July 1 presidential election, winning a fraction more than 38 percent of the vote, according to Mexican media reports. However, the election was marred by accusations of corruption and media manipulation on the part Peña Nieto and the PRI often dubbed the dinosaur of Mexican politics given it ruled Mexico for some 71 years prior to 2000. During that reign, the PRI assured its grip on power through an engrained system of patronage, propaganda and corruption that included quid-pro-quo relationships with narco-traffickers.
But CLSA is used to massaging the credentials of illegitimate world leaders, particularly those in Latin America. It's Honduran client in 2009, the Micheletti regime, grabbed power in June of that year after using the military to force the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, from power under the pretext that he had violated the nation's constitution.

Zedillo/Uribe Connections

In addition to the Micheletti putsch regime, CLSA's past clients have included former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, who ruled Mexico from 1994 to 2000 as a member of the PRI and now lives in the US and teaches at Yale University. Zedillo is the target of a pending lawsuit in US federal court that accuses him of committing crimes against humanity for his alleged complicity in the butchering of 45 people as part of the 1997 Acteal Massacre in Mexico. Zedillo's attorneys have asserted he is entitled to "head-of-state" immunity in the lawsuit and contend that the Mexican government supports that immunity claim.
The judge in the case has asked the US government to file a "statement of interest" in the case," with respect to its position on Zedillo's immunity claim.
Another of CLSA's past clients is Álvaro Uribe, who served as president of Colombia form 2002-2010. Six associates of CLSA have so far registered under FARA indicating they will be providing propaganda services to Pena Nieto and his transition team. Among them is CLSA partner Shannon Hunt, who, in a bio posted on the firm's Website, claims credit for playing a role in orchestrating Uribe's "landside presidential victory" in 2002 while serving as his advisor at that time.
Coincidentally, Peña Nieto has tapped Uribe's now retired national police chief, General Oscar Naranjo, to serve as his security advisor in Mexico's war on drugs. Though Naranjo is deemed a "super cop" by the US political establishment for his past successes in the fight against Colombia's narco-traffickers, he is not without his critics.
Former CIA asset Baruch Vega, who has done work for multiple U.S. law enforcement agencies over the years in major undercover operations targeting narco-traffickers in Colombia, contends Naranjo is part of the problem.
"[He] is part of the corruption," Vega told Narco News in a past interview. "All the traffickers that were surrendering and talking to the U.S. government [at the time Vega was working as a U.S. government asset] spoke of … CNP [Colombian National Police] corruption especially Colonels Danilo Gonzalez [who was assassinated in 2004 in Colombia after being indicted in the US on narco-trafficking charges], and Oscar Naranjo [then head of intelligence for the CNP]."
Naranjo denies the allegations and, according to a US State Department cablesurfaced by WikiLeaks, claims that Vega is a "drug trafficker."

More Players

Another CLSA partner assigned to the Peña Nieto contract is Juan Cortiñas Garcia, who describes his role as that of a "consultant" providing "public relations, communications and media relations" services to Peña Nieto's transition team, FARA records show.
Cortiñas Garcia, besides his new work for Peña Nieto (who has promised to explore privatization opportunities for Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex), also haslent his PR expertise to a group of U.S. and Latin American companies that have a stake in the Camisea gas pipeline in Peru.
From Amazonwatch.org:

… The Camisea Project is owned by two consortia of small companies with poor environmental records led by Hunt Oil a Dallas-based company with close ties to the [former] Bush administration. Chief Executive Ray L. Hunt contributed to President Bush's presidential campaign and also sits on the board of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Hunt Oil, by the way, shows up on CLSA's Web site in a listing of "clients."
One of the founding partners of CLSA and the resident Latin American guru for the Inside-the-Beltway firm is Peter Schechter. He knows how to sell political fiction and has "counseled political parties and candidates" in the past for "every Latin American country save Costa Rica and Panama," according to his CLSA bio. Schechter also is a published fiction writer as well as a regular commentator on the Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo. That is a comfortable connection for Peña Nieto, given his wife, Angelica Rivera, is major telenovela star for Mexico's Televisa network, which has business linkages with Univision and Telemundo and has been accused of selling favorable election coverage to Peña Nieto.

Bad Press

CLSA's main contact on Peña Nieto's transition team, the FARA filing shows, is Diego Gomez, head of international press for the de facto president-elect. Though Gomez is not named in a recent lawsuit accusing members of Pena Nieto's presidential campaign of corruption, other members of Pena Nieto's communications team are embroiled in that litigation.
The lawsuit, filed in US federal court against several Mexican companies and three of Peña Nieto's top campaign officials, alleges the parties engaged in a conspiracy to convert campaign funds derived from narco-traffickers to their own persona use by employing a scheme to defraud a US media company supposedly hired to promote Pena Nieto in the US press.
US-based Frontera Television Network filed the lawsuit on June 7 in the US District Court of Central California against the alleged front companies plus three high officials in the presidential campaign of Enrique Peña Nieto: Erwin Lino, the candidate's personal secretary, David López, the candidate's communications director and Roberto Calleja, spokesman for the PRI.
What is not mentioned in the litigation is FARA, the US law requiring agents representing foreign entities (such as political parties like the PRI and its candidates) to register with and make specific disclosures to the US Department of Justice.
Narco News checked the online filing database for FARA registrants and also contacted the DOJ FARA office to determine whether any of the parties central to the Frontera lawsuit had registered under the act. The online database check revealed no such filings and a spokesman for the FARA office indicated he also was unaware of the litigation and even asked for the case number for the Frontera lawsuit.
Based on a reading of the FARA statute, it would appear a case could be made that, at a minimum, Frontera Television Network, as well as the companies alleged to have links to Pena Nieto's presidential campaign and who were signatories to the media propaganda contract inked with Frontera (included as an exhibit in the lawsuit) should have registered under FARA assuming the allegations in the court pleadings are truthful.
But CLSA's mission for Peña Nieto, at least until he assumes the presidency of Mexico officially, is to massage or otherwise discredit all this negative press in exchange for money, the grease that lubricates the wheels of disinformation.
The principal aim of CLSA, via the Peña Nieto contract, is to conduct "monitoring/outreach to US audiences re: Pena Nieto," the FARA filing states.
More from CLSA's recent FARA filing:

The nature of the performance of the above indicated agreement is monitoring, advice and counsel related to Mexico-U.S. relations during the presidential transition period. The method of performance will be through the preparation of information in written and other related forms. The information will be disseminated, as needed, in meetings, events, speeches, interviews or other related forms. This work shall be performed on a month-to-month basis beginning July 1, 2012 for a monthly retainer of $50k. Incidental expenses to be billed only if incurred.

Stay tuned ….

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/noteboo...ganda-firm