Mexico's Electoral Tribunal Begins its Work (Translation)

They are providing information that Saturday morning they will beat the deadline so that they present all the calculation documentation and lawsuits of non-compliance of the presidential and federal deputy³ elections.

A little more than 50% of the official electoral computation reports of the presidential and federal deputy elections are already esconced in the home office of the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF), the constitutional body responsible for presidential certification.

TEPJF officials provided information that as of 3:00 p.m. they would have registered 165 of 300 [electoral] district computation files.

Furthermore, they have received 153 lawsuits impugning results referring to the election of the President of the Republic and federal deputies.

They provided information that Saturday morning they should beat the deadline so that they present all the calculation documentation and lawsuits of non-compliance of the presidential and federal deputy elections.

This Sunday, the deadline for the [submission of the] district calculation documentation for the election of Senators of the Republic will pass.

The home office of the TEPJF can be found in the southeast of the Federal District, where public security personnel are guarding the immediate vicinity of this federal body.

The district computation documentation, like the lawsuits of non-compliance, are turned over to the seven magistrates in alphabetical order, which is to say, the first cases will have to be taken care of by the President Magistrate Leonel Castillo González.

In the meantime, the lower judges under the Magistrate Eloy Fuentes Cerda [are] . . . José Alejandro Luna Ramos, Alfonsina Bertha Navarro, Fernando Ojesto Martínez-Porcayo, José de Jesús Orozco Enríquez and Mauro Miguel Reyes Zapata.

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Translator's Notes:

¹Acronym for the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federacion (Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation), the electoral tribunal which will certify the election results under Mexican law.

²"Offical Electoral Reports" refers to the Actas, which are either the summary reports from each precinct (Actas de Casilla) sent to the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) or the official computation of the votes in those precincts (Actas de Cómputo).

³"Federal deputy elections" refers to the election of "Deputies" to the lower house of the Mexican national congress.

Alright, this is probably the most significant piece of news coming out of Mexico today on the post-election controversy because it emphasizes that the Electoral Tribunal, the TEPJF, is proceeding according to its normal funtioning pattern, by which I mean that they are not stopping everything to go back and recount the ballots which have been sealed in the casillas, which are the electoral packets Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his PRD want opened. To put this a different way, AMLO and the PRD want the casillas to be the focus of the TEPJF's work while Felipe Calderon and the PAN want the TEPJF to stay within the normal confines of the law and deal with the Actas (the official reports prepared for the IFE and the TEPJF) and right now things are going the way Calderon and the PAN would wish.

To summarize some other news items from the day, let me briefly mention the following:

--The PRI Party is continuing its national meetings and they are very much in disarray. They have purged some very prominent members of the party, including its former Secretary Esther Gordillo, for not supporting the candidacy of Roberto Madrazo for President in the recent election. I only saw an incomplete list of those purged and the comments I read suggested that they are purging both PRD and PAN sympathizers, though Gordillo -- their most prominent member purged -- was ousted for her role in assisting Lopez Obrador and the PRD in last Sunday's demonstrations in Mexico City. The PRI have also made some public statements asking for respect for Mexican electoral law which are clearly aimed at AMLO and, when coupled with the public statements of many current PRI Governors and other newly-elected officials, make clear that the PRI are backing Calderon's election.

--Lopez Obrador has taken a somewhat dangerous step in organizing "camps" of his followers in the vicinity of every one of the 300 electoral districts in the country. These are the sites where the ballots sealed within the casillas are housed under guard by the Mexican military. There were near riots earlier this week in the states of Tabasco and Puebla near electoral district offices containing these ballots and this may portend for dangerous scenarios in the future if AMLO and the PRD decide to simply "seize" the electoral district offices, as they apparently either did or came close to doing in Tabasco and Puebla, to either force a recount of the ballots or perhaps even to conduct one themselves. The article in Spanish containing this news item is at http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/362402.html

--President Vicente Fox has publicly requested the unions to cease their inflammatory rhetoric and to publicly promise to remain "subject to the law" of the country. I do not have information as to exactly what Fox was responding to, but I think we can all guess. This may be worth keeping an eye on in the upcoming days and weeks.

--The TEPJF has begun its work and it appears to be "clearing the deck" to dispose of everything not related to the presidential election. It dealt with some minor elections and, perhaps most notably, ordered one of the parties that forms part of Lopez Obrador's "For the Good of All" coalition, the Convergencia (Convergence), to democratize its internal practices since, in the TEPJF's ruling, the party was not permitting lower level activists from fully participating in its policy formulation. This article in Spanish is at http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/362414.html. The TEPJF specifically stated that lower level activists were not able to fully participate in decision-making. I'm wondering if this may be a prelude to a coming judgement that Lopez Obrador and his coalition were not formed "democratically." I'm going to watch out for this possibility.

And I will finally add that Calderon has made a public statement that he wants to see a lot of Mexican citizens now in the U.S. to return to help build Mexico. He used the phrase "Migration in Reverse." This article in Spanish is at: http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/362362.html

Those are the main items from today.

Hey I just checked in on the Mexican web sites and there is a major sideshow developing nationally that might help to discredit Lopez Obrador.

It seems that the National Miner's and Metallurgical Workers Union (they've got a very long actual name) lauched a major strike back in March and President Fox tried to have the head of the labor union, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, removed so that they could conduct negotiations. Lopez Obrador made a big deal of this and many of the miners went on strike and a lot of them deserted their traditional alliance with the PRI and went over to AMLO.

Well guess what? It seems that Napoleón Gómez Urrutia and several of his associates have just fled the country after apparently embezzling $55 million (that's dollars, not pesos) worth of union funds. Supposedly he's in Canada and Fox has asked Interpol and the Canadian government to arrest him.

Here's a link to a page in English:

http://www.mexiconews.com.mx/18561.html

AMLO supported this strike and helped to make a name for himself outside of his traditional bastion of support backing it. I wonder if this will have any fallout in the presidencial election?

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