Outcry over Mexican elections falling on deaf ears [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

Outcry over Mexican elections falling on deaf ears
Mark Almond - The Guardian
Tuesday 15th August, 2006

A couple of years ago television, radio and print media in the west just couldn't get enough of 'people power'.

In quick succession, from Georgia's rose revolution in November 2003, via Ukraine's orange revolution a year later, to the tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the cedar revolution in Lebanon, 24-hour news channels kept us up to date with democracy on a roll.

Triggered by allegations of election fraud, the dominoes toppled. The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was happy with the trend: 'They're doing it in many different corners of the world, places as varied as Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and, on the other hand, Lebanon ... And so this is a hopeful time.'

But when a million Mexicans try to jump on the people-power bandwagon, crying foul about the July 2 presidential elections, when protesters stage a vigil in the centre of the capital that continues to this day, they meet a deafening silence in the global media. Despite Mexico's long tradition of electoral fraud and polls suggesting that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador - a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) - was ahead, the media accepted the wafer-thin majority gained by the ruling party nominee, Harvard graduate Felipe Calderon.
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http://story.irishsun.com/p.x/ct/9/id/5cfcd1f178d45eba/cid/45d771c7290844e9/