Mexico's PRI held an internal election on February 24 to choose the party's next director. Coveted as the surefire springboard to becoming the PRI's presidential candidate in 2006, the race was fiercely contested between Roberto Madrazo, former governor of Tabasco, and Beatriz Paredes, a former governor and currently a member of Congress. Madrazo was the preferred candidate of the party's insiders while Paredes drew her support more from the grassroots. The race was widely considered to be between two mapaches, the Spanish word for Raccoons. This colorful name is used to describe a person who votes once then figuratively dons a mask and goes back to cast another ballot. The raccoon in this sense is sort of a PRI mascot.

On the day of the vote an acquaintance in Oaxaca went out to cast his ballot. I saw him later while hanging out with friends and asked how it went. He said he'd been all over but couldn't find a single open polling station. He joked saying "Murat has got all the ballots and is marking them for Madrazo," referring to Oaxaca's governor, a close friend and supporter of Madrazo. We all laughed. But that kind of fraud on a grand scale doesn't happen in today's Mexico, I figured, not even in Oaxaca.

Within two days the "cooked" election in Oaxaca was national front-page news. Turns out that many thousands more votes for Madrazo turned up on the computer than were actually cast on paper, giving Madrazo a comfortable 17-1 victory over Paredes in Oaxaca (with 65% of Oaxaca's voters supposedly participating). And there were just enough total votes to give Madrazo a slim margin of victory over Paredes overall nationally.

Paredes was livid and pointed out that if Oaxaca's fraudulent votes were annulled she would be the winner. Madrazo replied that she shouldn't be so hysterical. Not surprisingly, the PRI establishment eventually certified Madrazo as the winner. Since then, the two candidates have publicly declared their "unity," in the struggle to put the PRI back in power.

It appears that despite enormous strides toward true democracy in the last few years, both within the party and in Mexico in general, the PRI still hasn't quite got the hang of it.

Speaking of democracy-impaired regimes; the Bush administration continues to go out of its way to demonstrate the depths of its commitment to democratic institutions like freedom of speech. On March 6, Undersecretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Otto Reich gave a press conference at the US embassy in Mexico City. All the major Mexican news organizations attended, except one. La Jornada, a widely circulated left leaning national daily paper was specifically barred from the event.

"There's nothing for you people," an embassy press person told the paper's diplomatic affairs correspondent when she inquired about arrangements for the conference. When she asked why her paper was suddenly dis-invited to a US government press conference the embassy spokesperson replied, "because of your editorials."

Offering its own example of what the embassy might have been referring to, La Jornada cited this recent excerpt, "The empire of the north has a long list of real enemies--and another list, no less long, of enemies invented by Bush's paranoia, forged from decades of a foreign policy that is aggressive, interventionist, bellicose, intransigent, and destabilizing." That is to say, La Jornada committed the sin of calling it like they see it.

The paper reports that this isn't the first time the embassy has been upset by their editorial policies. Apparently the embassy has previously complained about articles by Noam Chomsky and others who have appeared in its pages.

The paper suggests that it won't be long before US media critical of the government policies will be excluded from official press conferences by "a government that with a straight face proclaims itself as the world's guardian of liberty and democracy."