Early returns

This is by no means a “finished” post (or even a slightly polished one), so consider this more notes than anything else.  I won’t have phone service until next Friday, and in the meantime, am posting while back in the old house for a couple of hours.

I’m writing this Sunday afternoon, and have no idea how the elections are going, or will go. Unlike the United States and other countries, there are no “early exit polls”, nor any reporting until the PREP figures (based on sample counts) are made available by official sources… sometime around 11 PM Sunday evening.

In the meantime, it appears as if a late wave of voter and candidate intimidation as not — possibly to the disappointment of foreign commentators — “drug related”.

A PRD candidate for the broad anti-PRI coalition in Oaxaca was gunned down on Friday.  With no ties to the “drug wars” and occuring far from the U.S. border, it received no foreign coverage.  Also in Oaxaca, and at this time, with no further information available, 38 people were arrested in Oaxaca city hotels. The out of town visitors were carrying not just a variety of electronic communications equipment, but explosives. El Mundo (Spain) claims the 38 were from Mexico City and the “explosives” were molotov cocktails (which normally are manufactured on site, and usually aren’t classified as explosives).  At any rate, a bunch of people with some nefarious purpose in mind were arrested — or maybe not, it being Oaxaca, where sometimes crimes are “discovered” after the guilty are identified.

El Mundo also reports on a caravan of armed (with machetes, bats and handguns) tooling around Veracruz, but gives very few details.

In Aguascalientes, a Federal Deputy (PAN) was arrested by State Police for driving with out-of-state plates on her car. That makes no sense, but the arrest warrant was issued by the State’s General Prosecutor (Attorney General) on some unspecified charge.

And, in Pachuca, Hidalgo, opposition coalition candidate Xochitl Galvez campaign headquarters were raided by police and computers taken after receiving an anonymous noise complaint.  I’ve never heard of a noise complaint in Mexico anywhere, and certainly not one that required the police to seize computers.  The computers were later released, by the way… but they’re staying quiet.

Finally, in Huehuetán, Chiapas (where there was a fight involving various PRI members), two unnamed men shot and killed each over while discussing the philosophical differences between coalition partners PRI and PVEM (Green Party).

Whatever weirdness is going on, it is not necessarily “drug related” as the foreign press keeps saying.  Not that the narcos aren’t a factor, but old-fashioned power politics, the resurgence of the PRI as the only organized faction left after PAN did everything in its power to destroy PRD, and was itself riven by internal dissentions, and the generally inept performance of the sitting administration are all factors to be considered.