Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto (Photo by Edgar Alberto Domínguez Cataño/flickr.com)

Feeding the passion of anti-Enrique Peña Nieto protesters is the widespread perception, with mounting evidence, that Mexico’s presidential election was bought and sold.

A little more than a week after Mexicans went to the polls, conflict and controversy swirl around the July 1 elections. Almost everywhere-in the halls of Congress, on the Sunday talk shows, in bars and cafes and on the streets-the results are the hot topic of conversation. And claiming fraud, a growing citizen’s movement is crossing borders and transforming the elections into an international issue.

The so-called Mexican Spring has now transitioned into the Hot Summer of 2012.

“We’re protesting how the new president of Mexico has been imposed upon us,” said a woman who would identify herself only as Michele at a weekend protest in the international resort city of Puerto Vallarta. “They are buying votes and not respecting the votes of the people.”

The young protester held a placard written in English that appealed for international solidarity.

On Sunday, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) released a final vote count in the presidential election that gave Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party/Green Party Alliance (PRI-PVEM) the big prize with 38.21 percent of the votes, followed by the Progressive Movement’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador with nearly 31.60 percent of the ballots.

Josefina Vázquez Mota of President Calderon’s National Action Party (PAN) scored 25.41 percent of the votes, while the National Alliance Party’s Gabriel Quadri trailed a distant fourth with 2.29 percent, according to the IFE. The federal electoral authority stressed that more than 50 percent of the votes had been recounted.

Of the 46,878,451 votes that were officially cast, more than 1,260,000 were tossed out because the ballots were marked for unregistered candidates or declared void due to error or intentional mutilating by voters protesting the political system.

The IFE reassured the nation: “To give an idea of the speed, transparency and efficiency of the counts, it’s precise to point out the magnitude of the work in which thousands of citizens participate including election councilors, members of the Professional Electoral Service, representatives of political parties, electoral observers and the media.”

Allegations of vote-buying and other problems

But in a preliminary report, the respected elections observation organization Civic Alliance charged that vote-buying, intimidation and infringements on the right to secret voting undermined the July 1 elections.

“Political campaign money is determinant in the election results,” the group declared. Civic Alliance deployed 500 observers in 21 states but did not witness the voting in 10 other entities, including regions where so-called narco-violence and violence against candidates and political parties was a constant during the election campaign, because of fear for the safety of observers.

Another independent group, contamos.org.mx, maintains a website with numerous reports of vote-buying, ballot stealing, irregularities in the operation of voting booths and other serious problems.

Based on accusations of vote-buying, the alleged payment to the PRI of foreign money via a Banamex (Citibank) account and other illegalities, López Obrador is expected to make an important statement on Thursday detailing how he will seek to have the presidential contest declared null and void in the election court system.

“IFE did not do its job of cleaning up the results,” López Obrador said of the partial recount at a Monday press conference. “We can’t accept the results. We have proof that we can’t go along with these results.”

The two-time presidential candidate charged that the PRI bought five million votes for Peña Nieto.

The center-right PAN is also demanding that the appropriate authorities thoroughly investigate campaign expenditures and law-breaking but is stopping short of forming a common front with López Obrador to overturn the presidential election.

Taking it to the streets

An important segment of Mexican society is taking the matter to the streets.

Unlike 2006, when López Obrador’s partisans spearheaded post-election protests against alleged fraud, the 2012 movement is attracting a broader segment of the population.  Expanding beyond the university students who launched the anti-Peña Nieto 132 Movement in May, the citizen protest now encompasses professionals, workers, housewives and older people as well as youth.

On Saturday, the movement flexed its muscles with mass protests in dozens of cities not only in Mexico, but in Canada, the United States and Europe as well. Tens of thousands marched in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Tijuana, Monterrey, Puebla, Aguascalientes, Ciudad Juárez, Acapulco and elsewhere. In Cancun, young people led a march past large hotels in “frank violation” of a local ordinance that prohibits public demonstrations in the tourist zone, according to a story in the daily El Universal newspaper.

It should be noted that the Mexican Constitution, the product of the 1910 Revolution, guarantees citizens the right to freely express their views.

In Mexico’s second-most popular foreign tourist destination, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, a fired-up crowd of hundreds marched through the streets and rallied at the downtown plaza. There speakers with megaphones led chants against Peña Nieto, the IFE and the Televisa television network accused of manipulating the election in favor of the PRI’s candidate.

A cardboard coffin placed on the nearby Malecon proclaimed “R.I.P Mexican Democracy.”

Written in both Spanish and English, colorful signs railed against the political system and denounced fraud. Posters included quotes from Emiliano Zapata, Mark Twain, Malcolm X and the assassinated 1994 PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio speaking from the grave. A university instructor and architect, Gabriel Perez, called the subdued day of July 2, when no large celebrations in favor of Peña were visible anywhere, “a day of national mourning.”

Puerto Vallarta resident Maria Chuy Villasenor said the IFE should respect its own rules and throw out the election.

“We aren’t in agreement,” Villasenor told FNS. “The IFE is corrupt. The IFE has an obligation to be straight forward. It works for the people, not the government. They receive big salaries just to let us down.”

Villasenor added that a proposal by La Jornada Jalisco columnist Salvador Cosio to require a second round of voting between the two top vote-getters in situations in which no candidate wins a 50 percent-plus majority, would probably be a good idea to put into practice.

Ironically, the PRI reportedly might contest the Puerto Vallarta municipal election, which was also held on July 1. In a big upset win, Ramon “El Mochilas” Guerrero was declared the Pacific resort city’s new mayor when voters officially tossed out the PRI after three successive municipal administrations.

Once identified with the conservative PAN, Guerrero jumped ship to become the mayoral candidate of the Citizen Movement party, an organization which was part of leftist leader López Obrador’s electoral coalition.

Mounting evidence

Feeding the passion of anti-Peña Nieto protesters is the widespread perception, with mounting evidence, that the presidential election was bought and sold.

Reports of vote-buying and other irregularities continue trickling into FNS, including accounts of how potential voters in the state of Jalisco cards were shown cards that contained check-offs for social programs dedicated to single mothers, students and other sectors of the population. Interested persons were told they could select a program and cash in once the PRI’s Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval was elected governor. The young, former Guadalajara mayor was indeed declared the victor of the July 1 state election.

Isabel Colmenares, a young mother and worker in Puerto Vallarta, was the victim of a crime that could have political implications.

In an interview, Colmenares described how she was waiting for a bus with her three-year-old daughter in a heavily-transited zone of Puerto Vallarta last June 22, when she reached for the fare only to have the wallet snatched from her hands by a young man who took off running; the theft occurred in broad daylight.

In addition to losing all the money she had saved, Colmenares realized that her voter identification card was among the items stolen along with the wallet. With the elections approaching, she then attempted to get proof of voter eligibility from the IFE but was told that officials were too busy with other tasks to help at the late date. Subsequently, Colmenares did not vote.

“It made me angry. I was never interested in politics like I was in the last few months,” she said of her experience. “I had hoped to give my vote to the person I wanted to win.”

But Colmenares soon discovered that she was not the only person who suffered the sudden loss of a voter credential. In the 15 days prior to the election, Colmenares said three women friends, one in Mexico City and two others in Puerto Vallarta, also experienced the theft of wallets containing voter identification cards.

The thwarted voter added that the type of robbery she endured in the busy heart of Puerto Vallarta is not common, and that she had not heard of any similar heists since the election.

In recent weeks, reports of people paying cash for voter identification cards that could be used to fix elections were rife across Mexico.

Irregularities

On another front, stories continue to circulate about people unable to vote and/or observing irregularities at the special precincts set up for tourists and other out-of-towners.

For instance, a regular reader of FNS, Graciela de la Rosa, wrote that she spent nearly seven hours in line before being able to cast her vote at a special precinct in Mexico City. Characterizing the scene inside the precinct as one of “total disorder and confusion,” de la Rosa said she observed people cutting in line while police from the nearby state of Mexico, the home base of Peña Nieto, were on hand. “What were (Mexico state police) doing in the Federal District?” she wrote.

A story that is getting a lot of play is a caper called Sorianagate, in reference to the huge Mexican department store chain. The modernization and digitalization of vote-buying, an electoral crime in Mexico, is the essence of Sorianagate.

López Obrador’s camp accuses the PRI of distributing more than one million Soriana gift cards to people residing in Mexico state in return for votes for Peña Nieto.

As proof, the candidate’s staff presented thousands of the gift cards to the media and publicized recorded testimony backing the story, which gained currency after Soriana stores in Mexico state were jammed with thousands of people attempting to spend the cards. FNS also heard a credible account of a similar spending stampede at a Soriana outlet in Guadalajara.

According to press versions, rumors had floated around that the PRI might cancel the cards after the elections. The air of a double fraud emerged when gift card holders complained that cards delivered as part of a highly dubious electioneering tactic actually contained far less value than they had been promised.

The PRI denies the veracity of the Sorianagate claims, contending that a sore loser, López Obrador, is puffing up the whole affair.

Jorge Carlos Nunez, vice-coordinator of the Peña Nieto campaign, was quoted in the Reforma news service calling López Obrador’s post-election posturing “political terrorism of the left” designed to get the candidate something by force that he couldn’t achieve at the ballot box.

Soriana has also disassociated itself from political uses of the gift cards, though the growing scandal has already reverberated in the Mexican stock market, where company stock plummeted by almost five points last week, according to Reforma. Meanwhile, Soriana has withdrawn from circulation in its stores the current issue of the Proceso newsweekly that has a picture of Peña Nieto with the title “Bought Election” on the front cover.

López Obrador and company will likely include Sorianagate as one element of an expected election challenge with the Federal Electoral Tribunal.

‘Surrender prohibited’

Under current election law, the Progressive Movement will have a tough time in overturning the July 1 presidential election. Many people consider Peña Nieto’s victory and eventual inauguration a done deal, and media pressure is growing for López Obrador to bow to the winds of history.

Columnist Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez wrote that the left should count its blessings and construct a responsible political opposition to help push for “the second generation of democratic reforms in the country.”

A quick glance at the reshuffled political map after the July 1 municipal, state and federal elections shows no party with an absolute majority in Congress, the PRI with a score of governorships and the left with not only its bastion of Mexico City but now the states of Morelos and Tabasco as well. The big loser was President Calderon’s PAN party, which suffered a political debacle of historic proportions.

Sparked by the 132 Movement protests, the new citizen movement is the wild card in the emerging political scene. Whether the mass movement can maintain its momentum and translate spontaneous street protests organized by the social networks into a coherent, lasting force is the transcendental question at the moment. Proposals floating around the movement range the gamut from a boycotts of Soriana and Televisa advertisers to public intervention in the federal contracting process for two new television channels. Signs held aloof at Saturday’s Puerto Vallarta demonstration simply read: “Surrender Prohibited.”

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here.

Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto (Photo by Edgar Alberto Domínguez Cataño/flickr.com)

Despite the praise heaped on the voting by U.S. President Barack Obama and others, the 2012 elections were marred by scattered outbreaks of violence, widespread accusations of vote-buying by the different political parties, especially the PRI, and the systematic disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters.

Making a surprise appearance in a television time slot that was previously billed as an official first look at the day’s election results, Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) strode before the television cameras late in the evening on Sunday to give a victory speech even as the ballots were still being counted.

As Mexicans huddled around their sets, Peña Nieto promised to chart a new course for his troubled country. Exuding a conciliatory tone, he vowed to listen to the concerns of the young, who emerged as a new political force during the campaign, but promised to be stern with the legions of criminals that keep dishing up violence on a daily basis.

“There will be no pact or truce with organized crime,” the 45-year-old, self-proclaimed victor pledged, in an apparent response to critics in Mexico and the United States who fear the return of the PRI will mean a coddling of the drug cartels.

The former Mexico state governor’s election victory was immediately recognized by President Calderón as well as rival candidates Josefina Vázquez Mota of Calderon’s conservative National Action Party (PAN) and Gabriel Quadri of the National Alliance Party; the official runner-up, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Progressive Movement, demanded a recount.

The nation’s two dominant television networks,  Televisa and TV Azteca, which emerged as targets of protesters during the 2012 campaign for supposedly manipulating the campaign in favor of Peña Nieto, quickly fell in line and began putting pressure on López Obrador to accept the inevitable.

Politically-connected violence and other problems

Despite the praise heaped on the voting by U.S. President Barack Obama and others, the 2012 elections were marred by scattered outbreaks of violence, widespread accusations of vote-buying by the different political parties, especially the PRI, and the systematic disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters.

In the last few weeks, politically-connected violence intensified in the states of Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Chiapas, and Hidalgo.

In June, serious incidents included the murder of PAN activist Edgardo Hernandez, allegedly by Ulises Grajales, the PRI mayoral candidate for the town of Villaflores, and the June 14 assassination of Victor Hugo Genchi, a Congressional candidate for López Obrador’s Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in the Costa Chica of southern Guerrero state.

On June 30, another PRD activist was murdered in Guanajuato, while an Election Day shooting in Chiapas left three PRI supporters dead, purportedly at the trigger-happy hands of members of the ostensibly allied Mexican Green Party (PVEM).

Across Mexico, thousands of people were denied the right to vote at the special polling stations set up to serve travelers and new residents of cities who carry voter identification cards from their previous residences.

In Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, municipal police and election officials turned away hundreds of people at four special precincts because of the lack of ballots.

Interviewed while departing a special state precinct in front of the Pacific port city’s municipal government building, Patricia Zuniga and Alberto Tejada bore deeply dejected looks on their faces. The couple from Guadalajara told Frontera NorteSur that the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) should have more ballots for people in their circumstances.

In a reflection of Mexico’s divided political loyalties, Zuniga said she had hoped to cast a vote for López Obrador, while Tejada favored the PRI. In the late afternoon, dozens of other people trying to vote at the site were likewise observed being turned away by the local cops. In fact, the IFE did not even have a poll open at the downtown site, an area swamped with tourists and out-of-towners, instead placing the special precincts at the far-off bus station and other sites on the edges of town. At the downtown plaza, only voting for the state election was allowed for residents of the state of Jalisco, which includes Guadalajara.

‘I feel defrauded’

Informed of their inability to vote downtown, some people complained to personnel from the  electoral crimes division of the federal attorney general’s office (PGR) who were staffing an adjacent table but were told that no crime had been committed. A PGR official who agreed to talk on condition of anonymity said the IFE had done an inadequate job in publicizing the special precincts, but that the law stipulated the number of ballots for each special polling place was limited to 750.

The state special precinct also ran out of ballots, at approximately 12:25 p.m., according to the precinct captain. Under Jalisco law, the state special precincts are limited to 300 ballots; however, the official election results for the downtown special precinct posted during the evening of July 1 showed 301 votes cast at the site.

Mauricio Vergara and four friends from Guadalajara came to pass the weekend in Puerto Vallarta. The young man said he and his companions decided to wait until the afternoon to vote after learning of long lines in the morning. After walking over to the downtown state special precinct, the group of young people was informed that no more ballots were available.

“I feel defrauded, humiliated,” Vergara said in an interview. “I think that is why Mexico is the way it is. (Officials) want us to participate but they don’t do their part.”

Mexican media also reported ballot shortages and the mass rejection of voters at special precincts in Mazatlan, Ixtapa, Acapulco, Veracruz, Mexico City and other places. Sharp protests erupted at some of the locations, and a near-riot reportedly occurred at the Puerto Vallarta bus station, where people had waited in line for four hours or longer.

Troubles at the special precincts have not been exclusive to the 2012 elections, with similar ballot shortages and popular anger pervading the 2000 and 2006 federal elections as well. Until now, federal lawmakers have failed to increase the number of authorized ballots permitted for the precincts beyond the maximum 750.

Fever-pitch, last-minute campaigning

The July 1 election-day problems came after rounds of  intense, increasingly negative campaigning in the final days of the municipal, state and federal races.

In Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, many residents breathed an audible sigh of relief when the formal campaign closure meant a halt to the constant rounds of sound trucks, from early morning to evening, promoting the mayoral candidates with pirated lyrical beds like “Eric Fernandez (PRI mayoral candidate) me fascina,” in a merengue take on the classic Elvis Crespo song. But the final campaign rallies were also a chance to get a glimpse of the rising and falling stars of the political class, as well as to  hear a hint of the emerging, post-election conflict.

At the final rally for Zihuatanejo’s PRD mayoral hopeful, Gustavo Garcia Bello, other party candidates for the federal Congress accused the PRI of paying people to attend a similar rally held only days earlier. Congressional candidate and former Zihuatanejo Mayor Amador Campos, who was once identified with the PRI but later joined the PRD, insisted that the PRI had misgoverned Zihuatanejo during the last administration. “We can’t lose this election. We can’t allow the delinquents to keep governing,” Campos said.

Unfortunately for Garcia, Campos and the PRD, the PRI’s Eric Fernandez gained the upper-hand and eked out a win over Garcia, with the help of PRD supporters. Reaffirming the old adage that all politics is local, home-town favorite Fernandez gained the support of sectors of the PRD who considered Garcia a candidate imposed from above by the state party leadership, according to a knowledgeable insider.

Guadalajara too witnessed fever-pitch, last-minute campaigning. Campaign literature littering the streets testified to the final push, and several residents told Frontera NorteSur they had received incessant phone calls, some taped and some made by live callers, attempting to promote certain candidates, trash others and collect personal data for unknown purposes. The mysterious messages emanating from hidden call centers raised another red flag in the controversial issue of campaign spending limitations and the widely criticized but still officially uncalculated expenditures.

‘Mexico needs a rebirth’

The day before the elections, the YoSoy 132 (I am 132) Movement, which first emerged in May as a student protest against Peña Nieto and the alleged favoritism of Televisa and other big media for the PRI, held a march and cultural festival attended by several hundred people in Guadalajara.

Warned by the IFE that any reference — positive or negative — to candidates would violate the three-day ban on campaigning before the July 1 voting, the march focused on issues such as media accountability, government transparency, environmental sustainability and democratization of the University of Guadalajara. 132 organizers and supporters said they did not trust the IFE to run a fair election.

“We are tired of election fraud in Mexico, and we want people to realize that all of the governments have robbed us and fooled us,” said Claudia Perez, a young Guadalajara worker.

The overwhelmingly young marchers were captivated by an octogenarian, Don Alberto, who joined the protest. “Don Alberto! Don Alberto!” members of the crowd cried out. In return, the feisty senior led the youth in chants of “Zapata Vive! La Lucha Sigue!” Protest placards expressed the diverse ideological currents influencing the 132ers, with quotes from Gandhi, Edgar Allen Poe, Sartre and the Russian anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin. While one march contingent called out for revolution, a protest sign with a different appeal read: “Mexico needs a rebirth, not a revolution.”

Organizer Cristina Martinez earlier said that holding the event was not easy, and a permit that movement activists applied for from the PRI-run city government was never approved, even though the paperwork was submitted several days in advance. Martinez added that her group had a constitutional right to protest and would not be slowed down by unnecessary, bureaucratic foot-dragging.

“There has been a certain amount of obstruction,” Martinez maintained. “We are going to invoke our right to use public spaces. ” The Guadalajara protesters announced plans to set up a protest encampment in the city for 132 hours this week, and pledged to keep their movement alive after the elections. Explicit anti-Peña protests staged by the 132 Movement have resumed across the country.

Where the race stands

As Frontera NorteSur was going to press, the final election results were being compiled by the IFE. Denouncing the election as an inequitable, dirty affair, López Obrador said this week that he will legally challenge the results. In a blast from the past of the 2006 election, the two-time presidential candidate also demanded a vote-by-vote recount.

As of July 3, the preliminary IFE vote count shows the center-left political leader well behind Peña Nieto, with the PRI-PVEM candidate garnering 38.15 percent of the vote and López Obrador getting 31.64 percent.

The PAN’s Vázquez Mota is ranked in third place, with 25.4 percent of the ballots cast, while the 2.3 percent won by the National Alliance’s Quadri will allow his small party to remain an actor on the national political stage.

According to the IFE, more than 63 percent of eligible voters participated in the election for president and Congress. The coming days promise to be eventful ones in the history of Mexican politics.

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here.

Mexican expats rallied in support of the Mexican student movement "Yo Soy 132" at the Mexican Consulate in New York City on June 19. (Photo by Sunset Parkerpix/flickr.com)

Despite opposition, Mexico’s 132 Movement forges ahead and can even claim credit for unprecedented developments in the way political messaging has been delivered this election year.

The impact of a social movement can often be gauged not only by the societal reception it gets, but also by the reaction it engenders. And Mexico’s “I am 132” movement is no exception.

Born only several weeks ago as a Mexico City protest of private university students against the media imposition of presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Green Party (PVEM) electoral alliance, the movement has since spread to large cities and small towns across the country.

In the Pacific coast tourist town of Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, an estimated 250 young people and their supporters took to the streets earlier this month to demonstrate against Peña Nieto and to call for the democratization of an electronic media dominated by two networks, Televisa and TV Azteça.

“This was the first march that was done by young people in the history of the municipality,” Alondra Garcia, 132 organizer, told Frontera NorteSur. Acknowledging that members of anti-Peña political parties participated in the action, Garcia nonetheless rejected charges by Peña’s PRI party that the 132 Movement is a front for rival candidates, especially the Progressive Movement’s Andrés López Obrador.

“We are non-partisan and receive all who come,” Garcia said, adding that even dissatisfied members of the PRI have expressed support for the 132 effort. “Everyone is welcome,” she said, “and everyone from kids to older people has come out.”

Yet less than a week before the July 1 elections, the heat is being turned up in subtle and not-so-subtle ways on the 312 Movement. Media accounts report aggressions and/or cases of alleged police harassment against 132ers in the states of Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Morelos, Michoacan and Guerrero.

According to Garcia and fellow activist Victor Ruiz, a group of 40 or so young PRI members in Zihuatanejo recently held their own demonstration claiming to be 132ers that supported Peña Nieto. In the central city of Aguascalientes and other places, counter-132 groups sponsored by the PRI have similarly sprung up in the days leading up to the elections.

A video of a former 132 member spilling the beans on the López Obrador camp’s supposed hidden hand behind the movement recently received prominent play on the same television channels that are the targets of Mexico’s newest social movement.

Unprecedented developments

Despite the opposition, the 132 Movement forges ahead and can even claim credit for unprecedented developments in the way political messaging has been delivered this election year. Perhaps the movement’s greatest single success so far has been the Internet transmission of a third, previously unscheduled presidential debate on June 19.

A member of the "Yo Soy 132" movement, shown during a demonstration in Mexico City on May 23. (Photo by Marianna Fierro/flickr.com)

Inspired and organized by the 132 Movement, the event was a flowing interaction between three of the four presidential contenders and young questioners who pressed the candidates on issues that have gotten short-shrift in the campaign such as the future of Mexico’s indigenous peoples and their languages.

Candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota of the National Action Party (PAN) used the occasion to announce her choices for a possible presidential cabinet, revealing the names to the Internet audience even before telling the nominees themselves. A striking visual aspect of the production set was the empty chair reserved for Peña Nieto, who declined an invitation to attend on the grounds that the sponsors were not impartial.

Technical glitches interrupted the first minutes of the debate, reportedly because of an over-saturation of the website, but the event went forward both in cyberspace and in public plazas where 132ers set up large screens for passersby to view.

Flanking a screen in downtown Aguascalientes, a large information booth was visited by steady groups of residents who looked over photos of government atrocities like the 1995 Aguas Blancas massacre and read critical quotes about Peña Nieto from posters of intellectuals and journalists including the late Carlos Fuentes, Enrique Krauze, Lydia Cacho and Denise Dresser. Declining to give their names, an older man and a younger couple said the pictures accurately reflected the national reality.

In a comparative display, a map depicting areas governed by PRI local and state administrations was placed next to one of territories under control of drug traffickers along with the question: “Do you see a difference?”

Local and federal candidates

Alejandro Hernandez, a small businessman, said the idea of transmitting an important political event in the street was a “beautiful idea,” as well as an example of modern technological innovation. But disagreeing with the 132ers’ stance on Peña Nieto, the young man said he understood why the candidate did not participate in the debate. Concerned about tax policy and burdensome paperwork, Hernandez said he planned to vote for the PRI’s man.

Aguascalientes activists quickly moved from publicly transmitting the presidential debate to holding forums featuring local candidates for the federal Congress. An invitation to the PRI to present its candidates on June 20 was ignored, but the PAN turned out for a forum at a downtown restaurant the next day.

PAN candidates including former Aguascalientes Mayor Martin Orozco promoted free-market and right-to-work reforms, urged continued action against organized crime, called for the eradication of poverty and upheld pro-life principles. Luis Manuel Medina, candidate for the lower house of the Mexican Congress, addressed the critical issue of water use and conservation. According to Medina, agricultural producers near the town of Calvillo, Aguascalientes, were now pumping groundwater from below 1,500 of the surface. “We can’t be overexploiting water, because it will come to an end,” he warned.

Tere Jimenez, a 28-year-old running for another local seat in the Congress’ lower house, praised the new youth activism. In her presentation, Jimenez outlined how she would deal with poverty and drug addiction. “I want to transform Mexico into a place where differences in ideas are part of a different Mexico,” Jimenez said. “Mexico has to change, and we can’t return to a corrupt past in which it is like being in prison.”

Like the June 19 Internet debate, the Aguascalientes forum was a ground-breaking one in that it went beyond the typical unidirectional political messages delivered to a passive public and instead involved an interactive exchange with an aware citizenry assembled outside the structures of the political party system. Following the candidate’s prepared presentations, youthful members of the audience of several dozen people challenged the PAN on matters including the high tuition rates at the local university, prison and judicial reform, gender equality, same-sex marriage and gay adoption.

Forum co-organizer David Juarez detected lines of division between the PAN and followers of his movement, but gave the conservative party credit for making their program public and answering questions. “The party platform was presented, but it was contrary to principles of equality and sustainability,” Juarez said. “They back a minimal state, and a state that practically does not intervene while leaving everything up to the private sector.”

The flow of information

In an incredibly short period of time, the 132 Movement has carved out a significant position in national political life by directly confronting a formerly semi-taboo issue: who controls the flow of information, and to what ends.

The movement’s contention that powerful political figures, the state and private media interests are virtually interlocked is supported by a recent study conducted by the Citizen Committee for Electoral Observation. According to a story about the group’s findings by the Proceso news service, 18 congressional candidates have professional or family ties to Televisa, TV Azteca, the National Chamber of the Telecommunications Cable Industry and other media interests. The candidates studied included members of the PRI, PVEM (Green) and Citizen Movement parties.

In contemporary Mexico, the power of the boob tube cannot be underestimated. Based on the citizens’ committee survey, Mexican academic and political analyst Lorenzo Meyer noted in a recent column that 80 percent of 3,480 respondents told interviewers they got their news from television, while only 7 percent relied on radio and even less, 6 percent, on print media.

For 132 activists Alondra Garcia and Victor Ruiz, issues of media access, official manipulation and freedom of expression are both deeply political and personal questions. As young journalists in a conflictive part of Mexico, Garcia and Ruiz both said there were many stories they cannot touch without facing extremely grave consequences.

Last year, Garcia recalled going to the state capital of Chilpancingo to cover the formation of a state truth commission dedicated to clarifying the fates of more than 600 people who were forcibly disappeared by government security forces in Guerrero during the Dirty War of the 1970s. Shortly afterward, Garcia’s supervisor received an anonymous message warning the publication to back off from the story.

The students and young professionals making up the 132 Movement encounter other frustrations, Ruiz added. “We pay for years of college, leave and then there is no work,” Ruiz said. The journalism school graduate identified the spirit and goals of his movement with the long struggle of the Chilean students for affordable education, Occupy Wall Street and other manifestations of the new global youth rebellion.

“(132) been called the Mexican spring,” Ruiz said. “It was late in arriving, but it came and it will be hard to get rid of.”

‘A small group of thinking and committed citizens’

132 Movement activists plan to keep demanding government transparency, clean elections and media democracy after the July 1 elections. Prior to the vote on Sunday, they are expected to be in the streets in Mexico City and elsewhere protesting against Televisa, the Federal Electoral Institute and political manipulation and corruption in general.

Meanwhile, new messages that may or may not be the work of people influenced by the 132 Movement have begun appearing in downtown Zihuatanejo. Signed by “Street Tweet,” the short but poignant messages are hand-written on large sheets of brown paper and posted in visible public spots. Positioned across from a new bar that blasts songs speaking of gunslingers and grenade launchers and just down the street from the naval base where masked marines leave on patrol, one of the messages reads: “If there were more guitars than arms, there would be more musicians than soldiers.”

Another street tweet reads: “Never doubt that a small group of committed and thinking citizens can change the world. In fact, they are the only ones who have ever done it.”

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here.

A scene from a May 19 demonstration in opposition to Mexican Presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City. Peña Nieto's supporters have already declared him the virtual winner of the July 1 election. (Photo by Ismael Villafranco/flickr.com)

With Mexico’s elections coming up on July 1, mixed moods grip the body politic. Polls show Enrique Peña Nieta leading in the presidential race, and his supporters are declaring him the virtual winner.

As Mexico’s political campaigns wind down in preparation for the big election day on July 1, mixed moods of doubt, anger, tension, confusion, excitement, exhaustion, resignation and hope grip the body politic.

For the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the recapture of the presidency is within reach. At a June 24 campaign rally in the southern state of Guerrero, former Governor René Juárez Cisneros declared that his party’s presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, was the virtual winner.

“It can’t be that millions of compatriots across the country are mistaken or that the polls are wrong,” Juárez said to thousands of people in the Pacific coast town of Zihuatanjeo. “Peña Nieto’s triumph is irreversible.”

Although the national discussion has largely focused on the upcoming federal, state and local elections, other significant developments have grabbed public attention in recent days.

Major stories include teacher strikes, the militarized Summit of the G-20 leaders in the posh resort of Los Cabos, the June 25 shoot-out at the Mexico City airport and the earlier arrest of the supposed son of fugitive crime boss Chapo Guzman — an event that proved to be false and left egg on the face of the Calderon administration, its Washington allies and presidential candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota of President Calderon’s center-right National Action Party (PAN). Informed of the arrest of a young man who later turned out to have no relation to Guzman, Vázquez vowed to press ahead with President Calderon’s campaign against organized crime if elected to replace him.

Extreme weather has been a big story this month. While drought continues sucking life out of the north of the country, heavy rains pound the south in places like Oaxaca and Guerrero, where Hurricane Carlotta reaped a path of destruction.

The 2012 elections occur at a time when Mexico is increasingly hard-pressed by climate change. The country could be roughly divided into the “brown zone” of north-central states, where a parched landscape prevails, and a “green zone” farther south, where lush hillsides and green mountain tops exude a bonanza of rain.

The transition zone is visible in the Guanajuato-Michoacan borderlands, where dry specks of earth give way to the last surviving small corn farms of the NAFTA era, plowed by old tractors, and bursts of greenery sparkle a land nourished by the sprinklings of rolling clouds. Although farmers in the north might be on their knees praying for rain, some producers in the south say the rain can bring serious headaches.

On a recent day, fishermen in Zihuatanejo laid out their daily catch at the bayside market. A lone octopus sat motionless alongside piles of small red snapper, rock fish and other species. A 30-year veteran of the sea, Jorge Oregon told Frontera NorteSur that the rain is a double-edged sword. Last week, he said, fishermen were confined to land for several days because of Carlotta, and unable make money. “We slept all day and watched television,” Oregon said.

Oregon said weather and climate patterns have changed recently, contributing to economic problems connected to rising fuel costs and competition from new fishermen who took up the trade as other job opportunities dwindled. “The cyclones have come closer to the coast. Carlotta hit the land very quickly,” Oregon added.

Strategies and tactics

One thing in common the landscape of both the north and the south share these days is the swath of large candidate billboards that line the main thoroughfares and highways, temporarily replacing the typical marketing symbols of tequila, perfume and cell phones.

To snag the vote, the campaigns are employing many innovative strategies and tactics.

In the central city of Aguascalientes, for example, Vázquez Mota’s campaign recently advertised an event that promised raffle prizes and examinations of the old pooch by veterinarians. The Mexican Green Party, which supports Peña Nieto for president, is distributing a glossy brochure that promises four free songs in exchange for texting a number with the simple word “yes.” Texters who send in an environmental policy proposal along with the names of five friends then have a chance to enter the coveted “Green Circle” and win a 2012 Toyota Prius Hybrid.

On a more risque note, some political forces are reaching out to what was once considered the margins of proper society.

In Aguascalientes, a pair of tight-bodied male dancers scantily dressed in bikins and headdresses moved their hips to an enthralled crowd on a weekend evening, shaking a stage thumping with electronic music in front of a big rainbow banner and under the big stone statue of the Mexican eagle with a snake in its mouth. The 12th annual Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender March and Fiesta was sponsored by Peña Nieto.

Next evening, in the same spot, the rival Citizen Movement party sponsored a hard and metal rock concert geared to the head-banging crowd. The event included a photographic show displaying works with strong suggestions of bestiality and sadomasochistic sex, complete with pieces portraying gagged women, grotesque dolls and ghostly faces.

A last-minute media barrage on the airwaves, on the Internet and on the streets is climaxing the different races.

Frontera NorteSur received an e-mail that slammed the Progressive Movement’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador as a dangerous threat to the Catholic religion. According to the message, López Obrador vowed to close church parishes in comments made in Silao, Guanajuato.

“This attack joins a series of actions that assault our beliefs, our families and our values,” read the e-mail. “Remember that in the Federal District (Mexico City) the left represents the legalization of abortion, an abomination that goes against our defense of life, and approved marriage between persons of the same sex and the possibility that they could adopt children.”

Frontera NorteSur sent a reply to the author(s) of the e-mail requesting clarification of sources of information and the origins of the person or persons behind the message, but received no answer. To the best of this reporter’s knowledge, López Obrador has never made statements like the ones attributed to him by the mysterious e-mail.

Local and state elections

In Zihuatanejo, meanwhile, cars and trucks with loud sound systems blaring support for rival mayoral candidates Eric Fernandez (son of a previous mayor) and Gustavo Garcia constantly prowl the streets, adding to an audio ambience usually punctuated by yelping dogs, chatty parrots, Colombian salsa and newspaper vendors hawking the gore of the latest narco execution.

Virtually uncovered in the U.S. press and given secondary treatment in the Mexican national media, the local and state elections will have important consequences for the distribution of power during the next several years, especially considering the enhanced autonomy of municipal and state governments in relation to federal authority.

Early on the morning of June 24, workmen busily assembled a sound system and draped giant banners in the town’s beachside basketball court in anticipation of the arrival of a “mega march” promoting Peña Nieto, Eric Fernandez, city council candidates and local PRI hopefuls for the federal Congress, most of whom reflect an upward  recycling of the political class.

As the event unfolded later in the day, hundreds of people mobbed two parked trucks for free cup covers, t-shirts, student notebooks and the bingo-like lottery game, all containing messages and symbols for Peña Nieto and the PRI. Free soft drinks and bottled water complemented the hand-outs.

Appearing on a stage of politicians with his daughter, Fernandez said he was grateful for a successful campaign that drew support from sectors of nominally rival political parties. “This isn’t only a project of the PRI,” Fernandez pledged. “We’ve agreed that together we will build a better Zihuatanejo.”

Former Governor Rene Juárez assumed a more combative stance, laying into opponents he did not name for raising the specter of an imminent election fraud and attempting to buy votes with construction materials, refrigerators and stoves. The goods are purchased in Mexico City, Juárez charged without offering specific proof. “If they have to do it, they should buy them here so the money stays in the municipality instead of going to Mexico,” he added.

In 1999 Juárez’s own gubernatorial victory was marred by widespread charges of vote-buying engineered by his campaign, prompting a large protest march to Mexico City by followers of losing candidate Felix Salgado of the PRD.

Juárez’s discourse shifted to a more conciliatory tone when he expressed “solidarity” with the families of the 28 people killed and 30 injured when their bus plunged off a Guerrero cliff while headed to a rival campaign event on June 24.

The Zihuatenajo PRI event was light on political talk and heavy on cheering, applauding and dancing to the music of a large, brass-based band that belted out norteña and corrido music. The principal candidates made no mention of the precarious public safety situation locals complain about in conversations.

A Fernandez-Peña Nieto information sheet included a 2012 calendar, quotes from Winston Churchill and Octavio Paz and a recipe for a fruity, nutty dish called capirotada.

A poll taken by local barber Rigo Perez, whose hair-cutting political surveys have repeatedly exhibited an uncanny accuracy in previous elections, shows Fernandez burying rival Garcia by a landslide, and also hands the local seat of the federal Chamber of Deputies to former Zihuatanejo Mayor Alejandro Bravo of the PRI who is up against the PRD’S Silvano Blanco, another ex-mayor of the international tourist town.

Back on the boob tube, a last-minute saturation of candidate spots includes Peña Nieto jumping from scene-to-scene with superimposed pictures of polls that show him ahead, though none of the surveys surpasses a 50 percent majority.

On Corona beer’s Saturday night boxing spectacular in which upstart Josesito Lopez scored a technical knock-out against Victor Ortiz for a welterweight championship after a long and sometimes dirty slugfest, fans were treated to new ads that proclaimed Vázquez Mota as simply “the best”  in between low-angle shots of chicas Corona.

Talk of possible electoral fraud

With each passing day, talk of possible electoral fraud grows. A grab-bag of election tricks distilled during the 1929-2000 rule of the PRI has given birth to a colorful political vocabulary that describes fraudulent techniques of voter suppression, voter invention, vote-buying, ballot box stuffing and more.

Operation Tamale refers to the practice of gathering a large group of people together for breakfast and then transporting them en masse to the polls to vote in return for payments. A bit more complicated, Operation Carousel consists of having a voter deposit a blank piece of paper in the voting booth while exiting with a real ballot that is then ferried off site to be marked then dropped off in time for the count.

Last week, López Obrador demanded that the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) prohibit cell phones in voting booths. In the 2006 presidential race that López Obrador claims he was robbed of winning, the use of cell phones in vote buying was partially exposed. In this scheme, voters are asked to take a picture of their ballot and return it to a political operator in exchange for money.

In response to López Obrador’s demand, the IFE determined that it did not have the power to ban cell phones from the polling stations or “search” voters, according to an official quoted in Proceso magazine.

In a June 21 communique, the IFE said it will “realize necessary actions to guarantee the free and secret suffrage of citizens.” The federal agency added that it will post the locations of public prosecutors on its website, as well as publicize a 1-800 number citizens can call to denounce election crimes.

There is little doubt among political observers that fraudulent practices already have or will happen in the 2012 elections. The big question is whether the illegalities will be widespread and numerous enough to affect outcomes.

Sergio Aguayo, longtime activist with the pioneering election observation organization Civic Alliance, contended on a Mexican television talk show that the special elections crime division of the federal attorney general’s office does not have the will or capacity to effectively combat fraud. In Aguayo’s view, the political parties in charge of the Mexican Congress, which all benefit to one degree or another from election trickery, likewise do not have the necessary commitment to clean up the political dust from the past and the present.

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here.

In Aguascalientes, Mexico, a group of young people passed out leaflets to passerby in the city’s busy downtown. A young woman wore a homemade poster that protested the murders of women in the state of Mexico, while her companions distributed leaflets that flashed a satiric image of former Mexico state governor and current presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto.

Contrasting Peña’s spending on publicity with a state debt the 2012 standard-bearer of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and Mexican Green Party reportedly left behind, the broadside also criticized Peña’s gubernatorial record for other affronts to society including increased crime rates, higher malnutrition and the 2006 state raid against protesters in the town of Atenco that resulted in international human rights complaints of police rape.

“Inform yourself well,” the leaflet appealed. “And think through your vote.”

The weekend leafleting was just one of many actions carried out by a new youth movement that’s shaken up the 2012 Mexican elections after it spontaneously erupted as a protest against an appearance by Peña this spring at Mexico City’s private Ibero-American University. Peña minimized the protest, dismissing it  as a group of 131 demonstrators.

In response, Ibero-American students gathered another large group to proclaim “I am 132.” Thus was born Mexico’s Yo Soy 132 Movement (I am 132 Movement), according to activist Guillermo Sanchez. The action captured the imagination of the nation’s young, said Sanchez, a 22-year-old student at a private university in Aguascalientes. New groups from both private and public universities adhering to a cause demanding media openess and protesting the alleged imposition of Peña as the nation’s next chief executive sprung up in Tijuana, Guadalajara, Aguascalientes and many other cities, Sanchez recalled in an interview.

“The social networks exploded and all the states exploded,” he added.

‘A sign that there is no democracy’

In Aguascalientes, an initial anti-Peña march attracted 300-400 people, according to local estimates. On June 10, a second march drew about 1,000 demonstrators. Meanwhile, tens of thousands took to the streets in Mexico City and other places across the republic.

The protests challenged stereotypes of Mexican youth as apathetic cynics, jobless slackers, party animals and heartless gunslingers in the employ of organized crime.

The 132ers quickly directed their fire against Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico’s two privately-owned television networks that form not only a duopoly of the airwaves,  but are connected with banking, gambling and other commercial interests.

The movement’s contention that Televisa had long promoted Peña in return for stratospheric sums of money was supported by stories and documents printed by the British Guardian newspaper; the Guardian’s version was in turn was backed by U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks.

“We saw the money behind (Peña’s) candidacy and that bothered us,” said Julio del Avellano, a leading 132er in Aguascalientes. “It’s a sign that there is no democracy.”

But del Avellano was quick to add that, contrary to detractors’ charges, his movement does not endorse Pena’s rivals either. “We are independent and not supporting anyone,” he affirmed.

‘A global vision’

Almost from nowhere, the 132 Movement not only succeeded in mobilizing thousands of young people in street protests against Peña and media monopolization, but recast Mexico’s elections by thrusting questions of money and politics, economic power and corruption and education and citizenship into the center of the political process.

Formed by a generation of media- and tech-savvy youth, 132 shows no signs of losing its creative knack. A new video produced for the Internet shows parents of 132ers speaking out in support of their children, while another features young people ribbing Peña for declining to appear at the presidential debate scheduled for transmission on the Internet on Tuesday evening, June 19. Peña has said the debate inspired by the 132 Movement will not be fair.

Originally scheduled solely for the Internet, the June 19 debate between three of the four candidates (Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Josefina Vázquez Mota and Gabriel Quadri) might now be broadcast on some of the smaller Mexican television channels. If the race is tightening as some polls indicate, Peña’s expected absence could prove to a grave error on his part as along as the elections proceed without major manipulation.

In its very short life so far, the 132 Movement has scored impressive victories. In addition to forcing a third presidential debate, the new generation of activists can claim credit for getting the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) to expand the number of election observers.

Cognizant of the fact that only a minority of Mexicans have regular access to the Internet, the 132 Movement employs a host of tactics in its campaign for expanded democracy. Street and bus brigades of leafletters, rock concerts, public showings of videos and mass marches are some of the ways activists reach the public. In Aguascalientes, for instance, activists planned to project a documentary on a large screen in the downtown plaza, but were temporarily thwarted when after-winds from the ironically named Hurricane Carlotta (the same name as the wife of the French-imposed, 19th century Mexican ruler Maximilian) kept blowing the screen down. No matter.

In a burst  of ingenuity, the 132ers simply beamed the video onto the nearby wall of the federal building that houses the local offices of the IFE, Interior Ministry and Foreign Relations Secretariat. Produced by movement activists, the documentary explored Peña’s relationship with a historically powerful group of Mexico state politicians, delved into the violent  repression of the 1968 and 1971 Mexican student movements, discussed the 1997 Acteal massacre of indigenous Mayans and sprinkled images of the modern world revolt, with protest scenes from Hong Kong, Oakland, Albuquerque and many other places.

In conversations, 132ers identify with a larger global uprising that spans Occupy Wall Street, the Chilean and Quebec students, Spain’s Indignados and many others. And almost as fast as the movement has grown in Mexico, so has solidarity with it abroad. Messages of support have poured in from the U.S., Canada, England, Argentina and Egypt. Returning the gesture, the 132ers held a demonstration last week outside the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City in support of Quebec’s striking university students. Also last week, Camila Vallejo, vice-president of the University of Chile Students Federation, visited Mexico to attend a university seminar and meet with the 132 Movement.

“We must have a global vision to change,” Vallejo was quoted in the Mexico City daily La Jornada as saying. “The problems of the right to education are the ones of the world neo-liberal model. It has to be confronted on a global scale, not to repeat the experiences of other countries or to export ours, but to nurture each other, to share and to learn.”

Vallejo expressed surprise that the Mexican movement initially arose at a private school, but others familiar with national peculiarities were not as puzzled.

‘It’s time to act’

Longtime Aguascalientes political activist and analyst Fernando Rivera Ibarra told Frontera NorteSur that the Ibero-American University had a role in the 1968 student revolt. “It’s understandable (132) is from the Ibero, because of its Jesuit formation of free thinking,” Rivera said. The veteran political observer noted that the ’68 movement  transformed into a broader, popular movement for democratic change before it was smashed by government security forces. A similar evolution is beginning to happen with the 132 Movement.

In recent days, the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement (MMM) and the 132 Movement linked up to protest human rights violations against Central American and other migrants passing through Mexico to the United States. “We are 132,” declared the MMM in a statement accompanying the occupation of a train that moves migrants across the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. Underscoring that 60 percent of migrants are between 15 and 30 years of age, the MMM urged solidarity with people who suffer “persecution, mistreatment, murder, sexual exploitation, kidnapping and rapes at the hands of organized crime in complicity with the police authorities of Mexico.”

132 Movement activists voice different motivations for joining  the struggle-outrage over human rights violations, the economic frustrations of an educated, stifled generation and yearings for genuine democracy. A serious young man who studied international business and recently graduated from a private university, Julio del Avellano runs a small clothing store that markets his own designs. “I’m in this because of conviction, not out of necessity,” del Avellano said. “We don’t believe in the political system or in the institutions in general. The parties are corrupt, some worse than others, but it’s all bad.”

If the 132 Movement can be said to have an ideological bent, it’s one of fusion, drawn as much from the battles of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and contemporary Zapatismo as the philosophical sparks of the post-2011 world revolt. According to a young 132er who preferred to identify himself as Alejandro, many  activists are influenced by the writings of Stephane Hessel, a 95-year-old European author, World War Two resistance fighter and Nazi concentration camp survivor. A contributor to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hessel’s more recent works have explored the inequalities of the world economy, attacks against migrants and environmental destruction.

“TV Azteca is a big show that does not reflect the reality of our country,” said Yoli Ramos, a 20-year-old university student in Aguascalientes.

“I believe society could organize to have a better quality of life,” the young woman said. “We know what is wrong and we know what does not function in the government and system… it’s time to act.”

‘A long-term movement’

For now, the 132 Movement is pushing for an informed and aware electorate, greater media democracy and government transparency. A big goal, exhibited  in protest signs that proclaim “Televisa Makes You an Idiot,”  is to get young people away from the tube and thinking critically about everyday political, economic and social issues. Both Yoli Ramos and Guillermo Sanchez said they will vote for president for the first time on July 1. Given the weight of young people in the current registration rolls, their generation could swing the election and change the course of history in Mexico if it turns out to vote in a significant way on July 1.

With less than two weeks to go before the fateful day, 132 has mapped out a hectic schedule of activities. More street brigades, public video projections of the June 19 debate, a big rock concert and a June 30 mega-march in Mexico City are on the agenda. On election day, activists plan to be stationed outside voting booths ready to immediately upload any reported irregularities onto the Internet.

“I would like to clarify that this is a long-term movement that was not born for the election, or to further a candidate,” said Aguascalientes’ Julio del Avellano. “We’re going to make demands on whovever wins, whether its Peña Nieto, Josefina Vázquez, López Obrador or Gabriel Quadri.”

The young entrepreneur and activist said the 132 Movement still has a long road ahead of it. “Not all the young people have woken up,” he added, “but the participation of young people has increased in comparison with previous elections.”

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, left, and Enrique Peña Nieto. The two are considered the leading candidates in the race.

With the presidential race coming up on July 1, the most significant development of the electoral year may be the emergence of a new youth movement demanding media and democratic reforms.

With a little more than two weeks remaining before Mexicans elect new leaders on July 1, the presidential race appears to have narrowed between Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of a three-party coalition united in the progressive movement.

If the polls and the word on the street are accurate, Mexicans will forsake the opportunity to elect the nation’s first woman president, Josefina Vázquez Mota of President Felipe Calderón’s conservative National Action Party. A fourth candidate, the National Alliance’s Gabriel Quadri, is polling in the single digits.

The last days of the 2012 races are characterized by rising tension, intense bouts of campaigning, media scandals and battles, and the unpredictable impact of a surprise element that could go down as the most significant development of the electoral year: the emergence of a new youth movement demanding media and democratic reforms.

Millions of second- and first-time voters in the 18-24 age category could be the decisive force in the 2012 elections, according to Fernando Rivera Ibarra, a former citizen councilor for the Federal Electoral Institute and a political analyst in the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes.

“Many of them are going to go out and vote,” Rivera said in an interview with Frontera NorteSur. “It is not known how many, but they have awakened through the (protest) movement. Many are going to vote consciously. It is an unstoppable movement. The parties can’t contaminate it.”

Readily visible

On and above the streets, the candidates and their supporters are readily visible. In Ciudad Juárez last weekend, as the four presidential contenders prepared for their second and final nationally televised debate, the PRI and allied PVEM (Green Party) deployed dozens of campaign workers attired in alliance t-shirts at the intersection of Francisco Villa and 16 de Septiembre in the border city’s downtown core.

Well-stocked with supplies, the workers passed out literature, bumper stickers and plastic bags promoting Peña Nieto and other PRI candidates.

Like other Mexican cities, Ciudad Juárez’s skyline has been transformed by huge political billboards, especially those supporting Peña Nieto and the PRI. For his part, Gabriel Quadri has appropriated the figure of Mahatma Gandhi, covering a Ciudad Juárez billboard with an image of the Indian and world pacifist leader along with a message for peace.

The billboards, bus posters and political trinkets, not to mention campaign staff, all cost handsome sums of money, the full expenditures of which are not clear at this point in the electoral game.

‘The principal problem in Mexico is employment’

Insisting that he is at the head of the pack, López Obrador is maintaining a grueling, two-state tour each day before June 27, when he plans on closing his campaign with a massive march and rally in Mexico City. This week, the former Mexico City mayor touched down in the drought-stricken state of Aguascalientes, where he delivered a long speech to hundreds of supporters gathered in the capital city’s main plaza.

Rural and urban residents, young and old, professionals and students, all formed an enthusiastic audience that was draped in the yellow, orange and red colors of the Progressive Movement parties and kept on its feet by the cumbia sounds of López Obrador’s Morena movement anthem.

Under a blazing, mid-day sun, López Obrador countered criticisms that he is a dangerous radical. He repeated a controversial pledge to implement an austere government by slashing the salaries of high federal officials, some of whom he claimed make about $50,000 per month and earn even more than their Brazilian counterparts, while cutting back on foreign travel by officials.

“We aren’t going to lower the salaries of the majority of government workers, who earn little. This is not the problem,” the candidate said. “It’s shameful when you ask for (an official) and are told ‘no, he’s in Brazil or at a congress in France.’”

The undisputed leader of Mexico’s electoral left, López Obrador reiterated that a frontal attack on government corruption and wasteful spending will provide the funds necessary to pay for new programs to rescue the countryside, lower energy costs, increase pensions, support students and generate jobs.

“If there is no work, it affects everyone,” he argued. “The principal problem in Mexico is employment.”

‘This movement for transformation is historic’

After listening to the presidential hopeful’s promises, Aguascalientes mother Andrea Martinez said she liked the proposals for more educational grants and state provision of school uniforms. “It’s a good thing to support students and young people so they don’t fall into delinquency,” Martinez said.

In terms of the campaign’s final stages, López Obrador warned of the intensification of negative campaigning and attempts to buy the election, specifically by means of trading budget-busting household supplies, construction materials and farm animals for votes. Expressing confidence that the progressive movement in Aguascalientes had its bases covered, López Obrador nevertheless urged his supporters to carefully monitor the voting booths on July 1.

“If we don’t take care of the polls, we leave open he possibility that the will of the people won’t be respected,” he said. Sprinkling his speech with references to revered Mexican President Benito Juárez, López Obrador almost completely refrained from attacking his opponents and only made a brief mention of Peña Nieto.

“This movement for transformation is historic,” he declared. “We have the opportunity to change the direction of this country.”

The unsuccessful 2006 presidential candidate was accompanied on stage in Aguascalientes by local candidates for the federal Congress, which turns over its membership this year, and by Labor Party founder Alberto Anaya and Citizen Movement party leader General Armando López.

An uphill battle

In Aguascalientes at least, López Obrador faces an uphill battle. Currently governed by the PRI, the state administration of Governor Carlos Lozano de la Torre has been particularly active, helping to revitalize the capital city’s downtown and presiding over the announcement of the planned opening of a second Nissan factory and its thousands of new jobs.

“They are betting everything on Nissan,” said analyst Rivera. “If another tsunami hits Japan, it will affect the whole state.”

Standing in the shade off to the side of López Obrador’s speech, two young women acknowledged that the candidate had his share of supporters. But they quickly added that the other parties had even more people on their sides. Both said they would vote for Peña Nieto.

Local resident Erika Rosales cited Peña Nieto’s positions on senior pensions, computer education for children and insecurity. “I like his proposals and his ideas,” Rosales said.

Winner ‘will have to be a great negotiator’

The day after López Obrador spoke in Aguascalientes, the PAN’S Josefina Vázquez assembled thousands of supporters in the same city, according to media estimates.

López Obrador’s opponents are taking his challenge very seriously. Only hours after he departed Aguascalientes for the neighboring state of San Luis Potosi, a woman dashed into a popular downtown restaurant and distributed free copies of a glossy newspaper splashed with expensive color print.

Usually going for four pesos, the weekly tabloid Ahi contained gaudy print attacking López Obrador and comparing him with the late popular comedian Cantinflas. The same publication included positive pieces about Peña Nieto, featuring a centerfold of the young-looking candidate with his soap opera star wife Angelica Rivera and press chief David López.

Yet López Obrador has managed to shift the bulk of media attention to his campaign – for better or worse. In an often-critical manner, the networks are focused on proposals emanating from the standard-bearer of the center-left, but the discussion is undoubtedly getting the candidate’s platform out to the public.

And in a possible media coup, the López Obrador campaign is running an unprecedented television spot that has popular Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard pledging to bring “serenity” to the country when he becomes López Obrador’s interior minister.

Fernando Rivera predicted a very close race to the finish between López Obrador and Peña Nieto. Yet the victorious candidate is unlikely to have either a 50 percent-plus ballot majority or control of the new Congress, he added.

“Whoever wins will have to be a great negotiator and have a good team of lobbyists,” Rivera said.

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here.

Albuquerque’s May Day march ended with people lighting candles and students sharing their dreams for a prosperous New Mexico. Santa Fe College student LuzHilda Campos said, “We represent our parents’ American Dream, and we are working hard to make sure that their sacrifices haven’t been made in vane.” (Photo courtesy El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos)

If anything captured the essence of the 2012 May Day celebrations, it was the convergence of issues popularized by Occupy Wall Street-influenced movements with demands for justice long pushed by immigrant community organizations.

Photo courtesy a friend of NMPolitics.net who attended the march

Revived in the United States on a mass scale by the immigrant rights movement six years ago, the annual commemoration of International Workers’ Day is fast becoming an established tradition across the country. And if anything captured the essence of the 2012 celebrations, it was the convergence of issues popularized by Occupy Wall Street-influenced movements with demands for justice long pushed by immigrant community organizations.

Held on a balmy spring day, a rally and march in Albuquerque gave a glimpse of movements that could continue to reshape U.S. and world politics in future years.

As the late afternoon sun continued to beat down on a hot New Mexican land on Tuesday, hundreds of people began gathering in a park near Albuquerque’s downtown. Mobilized by Enlace Comunitario, El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos, the Albuquerque Partnership, La Raza Unida Party and many other organizations, young and old alike assembled to demand respect for immigrants and fundamental changes in labor, immigration and economic policies.

Proclaimed a sampling of the signs: “No a la SB 1070,” “Todos Somos un Nuevo Mexico” and “Se quiebran corazones cuando separan familias,” or “Hearts are broken when families separate.”

“It’s important to remember New Mexico is not Alabama, is not Arizona,” New Mexico State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, told an enthusiastic crowd. “Here in New Mexico we want to say to the immigrants only one word – welcome!”

‘Put yourself in my shoes’

Taking time to talk to FNS before the event moved into high gear, pro-immigrant activist Ramon Dorado stressed the importance of immigrants in New Mexico’s biggest city. The longtime resident pointed to a man tending a small handcart draped with churros for sale. The vendor, Dorado insisted, is not taking a job from anyone but in fact creating one that spreads money around.

“Where does he spend it?” Dorado asked. “Here in Albuquerque, and this is good for the economy.”

His voice rising with emotion, Dorado said the last four years have been tough times for immigrants locally.

“It’s very difficult for struggling immigrants to get their families ahead,” he said, adding that many people have lost jobs because of the introduction of the federal government’s E-verify system in small businesses, and families are increasingly divided with one or more members deported while others linger in the United States.

According to Dorado, his own son was deported to Mexico while just two weeks shy of completing a professional program at the local community college. After spending practically all of his life in the United States, the young man was stopped by a local cop and then turned over to “the migra,” Dorado said. Once a leader in his church’s youth group and a top-notch student, Dorado’s son is now trying to get by in a country south of the border in which he is a stranger while the rest of his family is stuck in anguish north of the border.

“Put yourself in my shoes, in the shoes of my wife,” Dorado pleaded.

Relationships with (Un)Occupy, unions

Roused to marching by the sounds of a Mexican banda, Aztec dancers and matachines, the pro-immigrant crowd welcomed a contingent of several dozen people from the (Un)Occupy Albuquerque movement that marched from the University of New Mexico. On the park stage, an emcee welcomed “the 99 percent.” Signs carried by the reinforcements supported labor rights, single payer health care, no war against Iran and justice for murdered Florida teen Trayvon Martin, among other demands. Read one bilingual placard: “Abuelas (Grandmothers) United: Against Corporate Greed, Against Citizens United….”

While demonstrators in Albuquerque were marching in the streets, sister activists an hour north in the state capital of Santa Fe were inaugurating a new worker center. Founded by the immigrant and labor advocacy organization Somos un Pueblo Unido, the new center is a “dream that the workers committee had,” said Somos organizer Alma Castro.

Although pricey Santa Fe has the highest minimum wage in the nation at $10.29 per hour, Castro said worker complaints related to wage theft and other abuses that are not always thoroughly investigated helped prompt the opening of a space specifically dedicated to labor issues. According to Castro, the new center will be a place where workers can go to get advice, know-your-rights training and helpful computer resources. A part-time staff attorney will also be available, she told FNS.

Castro estimated that about 250 people showed up for the center’s May 1 inauguration, where mariachi music and food were enjoyed by the celebrants. The participation of organized labor was important in the center’s creation, she noted, and for the second year in a row unions joined together with Somos to recreate May Day as worker’s day in the United States like the rest of the world.

“We’ve always had May Day events,” Castro said. “It’s interesting to see an organization like Somos have relationships with unions.”

‘We are here to stay’

From Los Angeles to El Paso to New York and elsewhere, the fusion of immigrant and Occupy movement demands was evident in 2012. Although the overall number of participants in more than 125 U.S. cities chalking up May Day events, according to the website occupytogether.org, was less than the historic turnout of 2006, the breadth of issues raised was expanded and the shift toward a multi-issue movement rooted in working-class demands was notable.

Photo courtesy El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos

With few exceptions, however, mainstream media did not explore the issues raised by May Day demonstrators and instead zeroed in clashes between police and protesters or isolated incidents of window-smashing in some places. An Associated Press story minimized the turnouts in comparison with those of 2006.

But a chant heard for blocks away in the streets of Albuquerque was impossible for any passerby to ignore: “Aqui estamos y no nos vamos,” or “We are here to stay.”

Building for the big day, Occupy El Paso’s Facebook page resembled a bilingual, encyclopedia-like repository splashed with images, slogans and historical tidbits of social movements that ranged from Black liberation to the eight-hour day. In perhaps the classic style of “El Chuco,” (El Paso), the page contained references to Cesar Chavez’s birthday, a miniaturized poster of murdered Black Panther Lil’ Bobby Hutton, remembrances of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination and the 1992 L.A. Uprising, a shot of a German building that supposedly plays music when it rains, and a warning not to “Mess with Texas Nurses.”

On the Gulf Coast, the New Orleans Workers’ Center launched Stand Up 2012, a campaign to demand that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano “follow her agency’s own directive, and stop deporting those who stand up to defend their civil, labor, and human rights.”

In a press release, the pro-labor group charged that 32 leaders from the Congress of Day Laborers face retaliatory deportation because they stood up for worker and civil rights. The labor group called on the Immigration and Customers Enforcement agency to use “…discretion to grant dignity, stability and economic security to the Southern 32.”

Summed up the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights: “Today, immigrant workers continue fighting for living wages and know that an injury to one is an injury to all. May Day is also the day when working class immigrant communities across the country will say a booming NO to punitive enforcement and the criminalization of immigrant workers. As the November presidential election nears, we also raise our voices for a fair and just legalization that respects labor and civil rights.”

Immigrants ‘don’t believe in the candidates’

Looking beyond May Day, the possible impact of the immigrant rights and Occupy movements on the 2012 elections is one of the year’s big questions, especially in the event of close races. While 2006’s mobilization of millions of immigrants for a path to legalization arguably strengthened the Democrats and contributed greatly to the presidential election of Barack Obama, who captured the Latino vote amid promises of an immigration reform, different dynamics are at play this year.

And while Occupy has undoubtedly shifted the parameters of political debate and popularized the notion of the 99 percent, the diverse movement is proudly non-partisan and quite often very critical of the Democrats.

Ramon Dorado said many immigrants feel betrayed by the Obama administration, which has deported record numbers of immigrants since taking office. Immigrants with voting rights, he said, are questioning why they should support people who will only end up deporting members of their community.

“Romney won’t get the immigrant vote,” Dorado asserted. “But Obama has lied to us…(Immigrants) don’t believe in the candidates.”

The Duke City activist criticized divisions between Democrats and Republicans that have impeded immigration reform, and blasted private prisons that profit from the incarceration of people for civil violations. And in a broad commentary, Dorado homed in on the irony of border walls and such in an economically globalized world.

“How can we put barriers on the border when there is free trade?” he questioned. “This is incredible.”

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here.

The fence and watchtower Pedro Zaragoza Fuentes built around a portion of Lomas de Poleo in 2003 when he claimed the land as his own. (Photo by Juan Carlos Martínez)

Around 1970, Lomas de Poleo’s settlers recreated the world of the small but vanishing Mexican ranch. If a new border crossing proposed for Anapra-Sunland Park ever materializes, the dusty landscape of Lomas de Poleo will likely transform.

LOMAS DE POLEO, west of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico – Descending down the long road that curves down from the heights of Lomas de Poleo, a panoramic view of the borderland dazzles the eyes.

Below the now-paved Anapra highway sits the town of Sunland Park, New Mexico, with its big border landfill, racetrack and casino, El Paso Electric plant and scandal-ridden politics. In the background, barren but striking mountains rise up in a hot April sky that begs for action from the rain gods.

If a new border crossing proposed for Anapra-Sunland Park ever materializes, the dusty landscape of Lomas de Poleo will likely transform into a ritzy patchwork of new businesses, frenzied real estate transactions and magnificent views from trendy subdivisions.

Jose Antonio Espino, 48, has lived in Lomas de Poleo for four decades. His father was among the settlers who arrived around 1970. Erecting their homes on the outskirts of an industrializing Ciudad Juárez, Lomas de Poleo’s settlers recreated the world of the small but vanishing Mexican ranch. The new inhabitants planted fruit trees, raised chickens and eggs and tended small herds of cattle, sheep and other animals.

Then in 2003, their world changed forever.

‘We haven’t surrendered’

That was the year when Pedro Zaragoza Fuentes, scion of a prominent Ciudad Juárez business family, fenced off a section of Lomas de Poleo he claimed was his own. A land battle ensued, eventually garnering international attention.

First making a splash in the dairy industry, the Zaragozas have since branched out to the sporting/entertainment industry and running 80 gasoline stations in Ciudad Juárez. The Pedro Zaragoza Vizcarra Foundation increasingly practices high-profile philanthropy, recently funding a breakfast program for needy children while assisting “the most vulnerable families,” including some currently residing in the section of Lomas de Poleo outside the zone in dispute.

At one time, 250 families or more inhabited the disputed upper mesa of Lomas de Poleo, but after years of sometimes violent conflict, only eight families remain on the land, according to residents.

“We haven’t surrendered. This is our land. It’s for our children, but we can’t fight the government and we have to find a way to economically support the people who fight for justice,” Espino told FNS. “The majority of the people left because they were afraid.”

On a recent day, Espino and other residents sketched out a war of attrition that was unleashed against the land resisters. They blamed Zaragoza and his men for electricity cut-offs, bulldozed homes, fires, poisoned dogs and other forms of intimidation designed to force them off the land.

In 2005, one resident, Luis Guerrero, was beaten to death by a group of 20-30 men. In another incident, two young children burned to death in a blaze of mysterious origin. Most recently, the bodies of two young men not from the locality were dumped on land presumably monitored by Zaragoza’s security detail, according to one resident.

‘I have a lot of anger’

Former resident Alfredo Pinon Valenzuela witnessed the fire that claimed the lives of the children but said he was unable to help them escape in time. The 76-year-old man also recalled the day in 2008 when Mexican soldiers arrived to his home and began searching for drugs and weapons. Pinon said the soldiers took his cell phone and .22 caliber rifle, even though Article 10 of the Mexican Constitution permits citizens to have non-military grade guns in their home for personal defense.

The soldiers then turned the elderly man over to federal police officers, who unceremoniously dumped him off without shoes in the desert outside of Ciudad Juárez, according to Pinon.

As he was being threatened with execution, Pinon said he told the officers to go right ahead and do it.

“You have a lot of balls,” Pinon recalled an officer saying. Indignant at his treatment, Pinon filed a human rights complaint with the state agency responsible for investigating violations. But on the very day and at the very time he was ratifying the complaint in Ciudad Juárez, neighbors observed Zaragoza’s men arriving to Pinon’s Lomas de Poleo home, where they began hauling off his furniture before demolishing the residence, Pinon charged.

He then outlined how he lost everything – rabbits, chickens, pigs and sheep.

“It was a small farm with a few fruit trees,” Pinon lamented. “I struggled a lot so it would grow because water is scarce.”

Pinon’s property had been appraised as worth about $22,000. The one-time small rancher said he once dismissed a purchase offer by a Zaragoza lawyer for $2,000 as a “joke.” Standing near his old home this month, Pinon summed up bitter sentiments. “I have a lot of anger,” Pinon quipped, admitting he once considered shooting his persecutors but that as a Catholic he could not bring himself to killing.

“But sometimes there are moments,” Pinon trailed off.

Turning to NM for help

By the middle of the last decade, the simmering conflict in Lomas de Poleo had become an international issue. Father Bill Morton, a Catholic priest who lived in Ciudad Juárez before he was ordered expelled from Mexico by the National Migration Institute in 2006 over the Lomas de Poleo battle, mobilized foreign solidarity with the land resisters.

Morton and his allies turned their attention to N.M. Governor Bill Richardson, who was promoting the development of the nearby San Jeronimo-Santa Teresa border crossing in concert with the New Mexico-Chihuahua Commission, a binational organization established by Richardson and Patricio Martinez, the former Chihuahua governor who is now running for the Mexican Senate in this year’s elections. Pedro Zaragoza was one of the first members named to the commission.

Morton remembered a “call-in” day in 2005 when “thousands of people” in the Columban Order network from across the globe jammed Richardson’s phone lines in support of Lomas de Poleo’s resisters.

In early 2008, an international delegation made up of Amnesty International, La Raza Centro Legal, the International Civil Commission for the Observation of Human Rights and other advocates arrived to investigate and document residents’ complaints against Zaragoza and the Mexican government they accused of supporting and protecting him.

Four years ago, the Lomas de Poleo issue likewise attracted the attention of New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman and the Doña Ana County Commission, which heard testimony from Lomas de Poleo residents as well a lawyer for Pedro Zaragoza, who insisted to commissioners that the wealthy Mexican businessman had the rightful title to the land, and that the nature of the conflict was not as “serious” as was being reported.

The commissioners approved a resolution conditioning future border development on respect for human rights and a just resolution of the Lomas de Poleo land dispute.

Father Bill Morton assessed the resistance of the remaining residents as “pretty amazing” considering the time and tribulations that have passed. He credited outside support for staving off a worse situation. “We feel like we’ve been able to diminish the violence,” Morton said. “The more light that was publicly shone on it, the more behaved (Zaragoza and the government) became.”

‘Here we are’

After 2008, other events overshadowed the drama in Lomas de Poleo. The eruption of the so-called drug war in the heart of Ciudad Juárez now dominated the headlines, and the conflict on the mesa faded to the background. Litigation related to the dispute bogged down in the Mexican legal system.

And little by little, development occurred on the mesa top. Many former settlers’ homes disappeared, and a new technical high school dedicated to training personnel for the maquiladora industry opened up inside the land fenced off by Zaragoza. A nicely-paved road wound by the few remaining houses and corrals in upper Lomas de Poleo and headed to the new, giant Foxconn factory just up the highway.

For years, the local children attended a small elementary school near their homes. But last year, citing dwindling enrollment, Chihuahua state educational authorities decided against renewing a teacher’s assignment to the school. Parents and children staged a lengthy demonstration at state educational offices for a new teacher, but to no avail.

Nowadays, sixth-grader Karen Angela Ramos and a handful of neighboring children attend another, distant school that opened its doors as an act of solidarity. The young girl said she enjoyed her new school, but still experienced a loss. “I felt sad, because I had been there since kindergarten,” Ramos said.

As economic pressures mount, Lomas de Poleo’s hold-outs have banded together in a last-ditch effort to maintain a financial base for their struggle or, in the worst case scenario, at least scrape up the resources necessary to relocate if circumstances dictate.

Recently, residents and a small group of their supporters kicked off the Lomas de Poleo Cooperative. The guests were treated to a meal of homemade, oven-baked Italian pizza served up fresh. Coop member Lucila Carrillo said the new business is initially searching for both local and U.S. markets to distribute its pizzas and hot, bottled salsa. Other product lines, Carrillo said, are on the drawing board.

“We’re forming a cooperative so we can get ahead and pay expenses, because sometimes we don’t work since we have to be here taking care of a home or a piece of property,” Carrillo said.

After years of confrontations, court battles and international campaigns, some residents are determined to stick it out and fight Pedro Zaragoza’s claim. Juan Ramos said it was “unfair” that he had to lose his family’s patrimony because of the power of a millionaire. “The situation is very difficult,” Ramos said. “I don’t know how far (Zaragoza) will go against us, but here we are.”

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here.

Sunland Park Mayor-elect Javier Perea talking with KRWG-TV in Las Cruces. Watch the station’s full report below. (Screen shot from KRWG’s website)

Javier Perea says he welcomes state takeover of the city’s finances and pledges open and responsible government dedicated to economic development.

In a stunning political development, the often-fractious Sunland Park City Council took action Wednesday by a vote of 3-2, with one abstention, to install 24-year-old New Mexico State University graduate Javier Perea as mayor.

Appearing before a packed house at the Sunland Park Senior Citizens Center, the finely-dressed and carefully-groomed young man vowed to pursue an open, responsible government dedicated to economic development for an impoverished U.S.-Mexico border town submerged in political scandals, state and federal criminal investigations and state financial probes of the municipal government.

“I’m not here to create hostility. I’m not here to create division,” Perea pledged. “Without economic development here, we cannot help our people.”

The selection of Perea for the embattled town’s top job came as a surprise, since he was not among three competing candidates in the disputed March 6 election. The official winner of the mayoral election, 28-year-old Daniel Salinas, remains in the Doña Ana County Detention Center facing multiple felony counts related to extortion, bribery and fraud charges.

In comments to the city council and to reporters afterward, Perea said he had considered running for an office in the last election but that employment issues prevented him from launching a campaign. The son of a woman with a work history in the Sunland Park Police Department, Perea told FNS he claimed no political party affiliation and was an “independent.” (A check by NMPolitics.net of the county voter rolls reveals that Perea is a Democrat and has been since he registered to vote in January 2008.)

Politically inexperienced, Perea has not been publicly linked to either of the two major factions that contested the March 6 election. His approval by the city council to lead a community in crisis could be viewed as an attempt to rise above the polarization that’s dominated local politics and move ahead on a number of pressing economic, environmental and social fronts.

Perea holds a degree in business administration, and most recently has worked as a salesman for a diamond company. He said he was considering pursuing a master’s degree in business administration at NMSU or at neighboring UTEP in El Paso.

Asked by FNS how he would react to a possible state takeover of Sunland Park’s municipal finances, Perea responded that he would have no problem with intervention from Santa Fe. “If they come to take over, let it happen,” Perea said. “Why would I fight that?”

An emotionally charged meeting

Perea was voted mayor after a motion to name to the post Gerardo Hernandez, the number two vote-getter in the March 6 contest, was rejected 4-2 by the city council. The Perea vote came amid another emotionally charged meeting attended by a 150-person capacity crowd as well as others who did not arrive early and were forced to wait outside the building.

Sunland Park police and members of the New Mexico State Police guarded the meeting, directing the borderland television and print media outlets that turned out in force to a taped-off area inside the center.

A beefy local cop stood before the lively crowd to review the “house rules” before the meeting formally began. “Respect the person in front of you and behind you,” he instructed. Speaking in both Spanish and English, a parade of residents took to the microphone to demand clean government and long overdue changes. Allegations of nepotism and incompetence in local government were frequently voiced complaints.

Partisans of both Daniel Salinas and Gerardo Hernandez were similarly quite visible and vocal during the public comment portion of the meeting. A group of women held up handmade messages that expressed support for Daniel Salinas on one side and Mayor Pro-Tem Isabel Santos on the other side of the same cardboard signs.

Some speakers lashed out against Santos, questioning her for formerly supporting Hernandez but then abandoning ship, or for supposedly wanting to become mayor herself. Listening intently, Santos denied she wanted the mayor’s position.

Lawyer says Salinas is a victim

In an unusual appearance, Salinas lawyer Joshua Spencer strode up to the microphone and addressed the boisterous crowd. Spencer said he had attempted to prevent the political polarization evident at the meeting by making sure the people’s choice was respected and Salinas sworn in as mayor. In a last-ditch appeal, Spencer failed to convince the New Mexico Supreme Court that it should override a lower court’s restrictions on Salinas, which prevented the former city councilor from taking office.

Among the legal accusations against Salinas was that he unsuccessfully plotted to force Gerardo Hernandez into dropping out of the race through the threatened release of a secretly-filmed video which showed Hernandez getting a lap dance from a still-unidentified, topless woman.

Spencer asserted that Salinas was the victim of “the governor and state powers” that were after Sunland Park’s water by means of the new Camino Real Regional Utility Authority. “The people have spoken and voted for Salinas,” the New Mexico attorney declared.

But Gerardo Hernandez later insisted that Salinas’ election was fraudulent, and that his opponent counted on 174 illegal votes which were cast by people residing in El Paso just across the state line.

Hernandez has a legal challenge to the election pending in the state’s Third Judicial District, but has not yet had a hearing on the matter, he told FNS. Since Hernandez officially lost by a small margin of several dozen votes, he could ultimately become mayor if his legal case prospers.

Hernandez added that a state take-over of municipal finances could be positive for his city. “There is a lot of attention,” the former candidate said of the outside scrutiny on Sunland Park, “because we are cleaning house and when you clean house you are going to find a lot of dirt.”

A matter likely at the heart of the recent fuss

This week’s special city council meeting did not consider a scheduled update on a matter that is likely at the heart of all the recent fuss in Sunland Park: a new border crossing with Mexico. Salinas and others stand accused of illegally spending a portion of a $12 million fund donated to Sunland Park by Stan Fulton, owner of the Sunland Park Racetrack and Casino.

City Councilors Sergio Reyes Carrillo and Carmen Rodriguez told FNS that they did not know the status of the remaining balance of the fund, and would have to wait for information from the city department responsible for administering the money.

Meantime, Javier Perea awaits swearing-in as Sunland Park’s new mayor. Reportedly, two other mayoral hopefuls who showed up at the meeting to request the position were not allowed inside because of their late arrivals. The city government and mass media widely announced the meeting for 6 p.m., but police officers prevented people who did not work for the news media from entering the building after 5:30 p.m., because all the seats were already taken by residents eager to voice their opinions.

Prior to the meeting, several people waiting outside complained to FNS about not being permitted to enter an important public gathering that was set to begin 30 minutes later.

Frontera NorteSur is a U.S.-Mexico border news service run by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University. Find it online here. Frontera NorteSur’s special coverage of the southern New Mexico borderland is made possible in part by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation. This article has been updated to make clear that Perea is a registered Democrat.