Mexico’s Change Election

Mexico’s populist president-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly known by his initials, AMLO, swept the July 1 presidential election, winning in state after state where the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) had long dominated politics at every level.

The election, a mandate for López Obrador’s MORENA (National Regeneration Movement) party, represented a powerful public backlash against years of corruption, violence, and growing inequality in Mexico. MORENA won control of Congress and made inroads in state and local governments throughout the country. The MORENA candidate for mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, won by a large margin, and, in the biggest elections in Mexican history, with thousands of state, local, and legislative offices up for grabs, MORENA won at least four governorships, including in Chiapas, where “the AMLO effect” helped propel a MORENA ally to victory.

An adoring crowd of thousands greeted López Obrador in Mexico City’s zocalo, celebrating the election results and chanting the MORENA slogan, “Together we will make history!”

Activists who worked to bring about Sunday’s dramatic election results hope that the historic change will include an end to a climate of violence and corruption that has fed a sense of cynicism and hopelessness here.

I spent election day travelling through small towns in the state of Puebla with a team of foreign election observers, watching for signs of fraud at the polls.

Among the irregularities we witnessed were a truck with the PRI logo on the side idling outside one polling place, drawing groups of citizens aside, apparently handing out something to voters, contrary to Mexican election laws. The truck sped away when the yellow-vest-wearing election observers arrived.

At other polling places, municipal officials accompanied voters right to the voting booth, and even cast their ballots for them in voting boxes, also in violation of official protocol. As one young man took an elderly woman’s ballots from her hands and deposited them, the voter herself left the building, not bothering to look back as her votes in national, state and municipal elections were cast for her.

“Here, every single person is paid to vote,” MORENA activist Araceli Bautista Gutiérrez told us when we arrived in Santa Clara Ocoyucan, Puebla, near her hometown of San Bernardino Chalchihuapan.

Bautista Gutiérrez became politically active in 2014 after a thirteen-year-old boy in her community was killed in a clash between local protesters and state troops. Then-governor Rafael Moreno Valle sent in the troops to break up the protest by citizens who felt the state was usurping local power, using a new law that, among other measures, dissolved some municipal offices.

Bribery, intimidation, and fraud, and violence are commonplace in local elections here.

A MORENA candidate for Congress was found dead in his car in nearby Santa Clara Ocoyucan shortly before Sunday’s vote, becoming the 130th candidate murdered in Mexico in this election cycle.

A Facebook video prepared by a clean-elections group in Puebla, Mexico before the July 1 election appealed to voters who are accustomed to selling their votes, asking that, in the privacy of the voting booth, they place a large “V” for “vendido,” or “sold,” on their ballots, to show that their votes had been purchased and were not legitimate—part of an effort to track corruption in the electoral process.

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“You need the money,” the video voice-over declared. “But when you sell your vote you don’t have to sell your soul.” It showed a shady-looking man in sunglasses standing outside a polling place and offering 500 pesos (about $25) to voters, and handing out pre-marked ballots. After voters accepted the cash and cast the pre-marked ballots, they emerged from the voting booth and gave the shady-looking man their unused, blank ballots.

Voters could accept the cash, and even take a picture of their ballots, if they needed to in order to take the bribe, the video explained, showing a voter taking a cellphone photo of the ballot, and then marking it with a “V” afterwards.

Even as the PRI seemed to accept the inevitability of a López Obrador victory in the presidential election, at the local level, it was clear that the same old patterns of intimidation and fraud were deployed to ensure that those in power stayed in power.

“What they are doing at the local level will be a model for the next round of national elections,” David Alvarado, an organizer from citizens group AHORA Atlixco, told our team of international observers.

The most dramatic example of election irregularities I personally observed on Election Day was at the polling place set up inside the Emiliano Zapata public school in the town of Santa Clara Ocoyucan. There, a young mother, Rosa Gómez Cabrera, emerged from the voting booth and complained loudly to local election officials that she had not been given the ballots to vote for governor of Puebla nor for the president of the municipality. Voters were marking six separate ballots for six separate offices—at the federal, state, and local levels—and depositing them in six boxes just outside the voting booth.

The local official in charge of handing out the ballots shook her head firmly. “I gave you six,” she said.