MEXICO CITY — It’s 8:30 a.m. on July 1 and I’m at a secondary school in the La Condesa district of Mexico City. This is Election Day, and the school is one of some 143,000 polling places (casillas) throughout the country. What I observe is a voting process that seems very transparent and free of fraud, a huge task that has involved 1 million electoral workers and 2 million observers, including local volunteers, representatives of the political parties and some 690 people from other countries. In almost every casilla, there are at least three observers from each party.
I arrived the preceding Thursday and interviewed cab drivers, lawyers, shop owners, participants in a huge Gay Pride parade on Saturday, plumbers who spend their days sitting by the cathedral waiting for work, waiters and others, asking:
1. Who is your candidate and why?
2. Do you think these elections will be fair?
3. What are the major issues facing the next president?
Unlike other elections I’ve attended, few people would respond. Those who did were supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, (AMLO) the fiery leader of the PRD, the leftist party. He narrowly lost to Felipe Calderón in 2006 (about 220,000 votes), claimed fraud, refused to concede and blocked the center of Mexico City, causing much economic damage to the poor people who worked there and who allegedly were his supporters.
Second, despite the hard work of the Instituto Federal Elecciónes (IFE), the headline in La Jornada on June 30 said 71 percent felt that there was the possibility of fraud. It’s not easy to change the perception of decades of corrupt elections, but I think the IFE made a good start.
As for the major problems, there was only one answer: Security. People are simply tired of living in fear. Compare some recent statistics from Chicago and Juárez: Chicago officials are frantic about a huge increase in murders. During the first six months of 2012, there were 253. Juárez, half the size of Chicago, has experienced a dramatic drop so far this year, yet still there have been 536 murders there.
In fact, Juárez has had more murders than Chicago and New York City, even though their combined population is 10 times higher. Although Juárez is now safer, violence has erupted unpredictably and with extraordinary savagery in cities like Monterrey and Veracruz that were previously thought to be safe.
The best candidate, in my opinion, was Josefina Vázquez Mota from the PAN, the party of Felipé Calderón, the current president. Calderón courageously took on the drug cartels but poking a stick in that beehive has cost more than 50,000 lives. Mexican voters supported his goals but rejected his tactics, and Josefina, Mexico’s first female candidate for president, paid the price. Nonetheless, Peña Nieto should consider asking her to join his team.
What’s next? Will Peña Nieto bring new life to the PRI as he has promised or will it be back to the old days of the “dinosaurs?”? The pressure for results will be enormous: personal security, jobs, an end to the monopolies that have made men like Carlos Slim multibillionaires, functioning educational and judicial systems.
As for the United States, it’s time to recognize that this drug war isn’t something that just a “south of the border” problem. As recent arrests at the racetrack in Ruidoso, N.M., and in Oklahoma make clear, cartels have moved money into and set up operations in the US. It’s easy to make fun of law enforcement in Mexico, but groups like the Zetas are far more sophisticated than the vast majority of law enforcement agencies here.
Whoever is elected America’s president in November must bring new focus to issues like immigration, stopping the movement of guns to Mexico, and joint law enforcement operations. It’s time to ask whether this drug war of many decades is winnable or whether we have to begin thinking about legalization.
Peña Nieto isn’t the ideal president for Mexico, but if he is truly committed to change and if we are willing to do our share, there’s reason for hope.
Morgan Smith (Morgansmith@) is a former state representative and commissioner of agriculture from Colorado who lives in Santa Fe and writes extensively about border issues.
