Or will he take the whole lot with him and on Monday what will AMLO say ? Does this mean everyone else will also go down? I kind of doubt it.
~ From AP:
Mexico To Hold Referendum On Accountability of Ex-Presidents
"MEXICO CITY (AP) — A referendum in Mexico on Sunday is going to cost Mexico about $25 million, few like the poorly written, yes-or-no question on the ballot, and the vote is being held in the middle of a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
To top it off, critics say the referendum question is so obvious that it’s offensive to submit it to a vote.
So why is Mexico holding a nationwide referendum on whether ex-presidents should be tried for any illegal acts they may have committed? Mexico has no formal amnesty for former leaders, and there is nothing in current law saying they can’t be brought to justice if there is evidence they have committed a crime.
As opponents say in a slogan, “The law must be applied, not put up for a vote.”
To comprehend the exercise, one has to understand President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who pushed for the referendum. A populist, he likes large crowds, and the pandemic has prevented him from holding the kind of mass rallies of hundreds of thousands of people he used to have regularly in Mexico City’s main plaza when he was a candidate.
He needs 40% of registered voters to participate — about 37 million people — to participate Sunday or the referendum won’t be binding. While the president is unlikely to get that many out to vote, he has to draw at least several million, and he has pulled out the stops to mobilize voters.
“The people want participative democracy, not just representative democracy,” López Obrador said last week. “You have to have faith in the people, you have to have confidence in the people and their free choice, not be afraid of the people.”
José Antonio Crespo, a political analyst at Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Training, called the referendum “strictly an exercise in politics and media exposure,” noting the outcome of the ballot question isn’t in doubt.
“The question isn’t whether the “yes” option will win, we know that 90% or more will vote yes,” said Crespo. “The question is, how many people will go out to vote? A lot of us don’t want to be used in a manipulation. It will be an indicator of how many people still support López Obrador, of how much capacity he has to mobilize people.”
After two unsuccessful runs for the presidency — which he says he was cheated out of — López Obrador won on the third try in 2018, promising “revenge is not my strong suit” and forging a cordial transition with former president Enrique Peña Nieto.
Crespo, like many Mexicans, believes López Obrador struck a non-aggression pact with Peña Nieto, agreeing not to go after him in return for promises of a clean presidential race in 2018.
But the whole thing, while perhaps necessary, left López Obrador short on his main promise, to eradicate corruption; three years into his term he has few high-profile convictions to show for it. The corruption allegations made by the former head of the country’s state-owned oil company against Peña Nieto and top officials of the previous administration have proved hard to bring to trial.
So López Obrador is seeking the blessing of the public to change course and go after ex-presidents, two of whom — Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and Vicente Fox (2000 to 2006) — have been among his harshest critics.
In all, Mexico has six living ex-presidents, the oldest of whom is 99. The statute of limitations has expired on many of the abuses they are accused of committing, most involving massive corruption, kickbacks, wasting government money and criminal economic mismanagement.
Peña Nieto has kept quiet, but many believe that, if directly provoked, he may have damaging information on López Obrador. Two of the president’s brothers were caught on tape accepting packets of cash while López Obrador was a perennial candidate from 2006 to 2018, which might help explain the president’s decision to throw the choice to the people.
In a way, it looks somewhat like history repeating itself. Fox became the first opposition candidate to peacefully win the presidency in Mexico’s history in 2000, raising hopes with promises to clean the “vermin and black snakes” out of government. He didn’t keep that promise.
López Obrador likes referendums, even though his past, less formal votes on specific projects have drawn few voters. Moreover, he needs some mass effort to rally supporters whose enthusiasm may be lagging after a tough first three years marked by continued drug cartel violence and a pandemic that has left a crushingly high death toll estimated to be around 360,000.
But if the bet was to inspire people with the referendum, it has fallen flat. Electoral regulators rewrote the referendum question into mush, purportedly to prevent the impression that the ex-presidents were being pre-judged.
In the end, the question came to read like a wet noodle: “Do you agree or not that, within the constitutional and legal framework, actions should be carried out to clear up the political decisions made by politicians in the past, with the aim of guaranteeing justice and the rights of potential victims?”
“Not only does it require a pause to take a breath to finish reading it, it requires rereading it two or three times to understand what it says,” wrote columnist Maite Azuela in the newspaper El Universal."
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Here is another reaction....
~ From Proceso:
Vicente Fox Propone Nueva Pregunta Para La Consulta Popular
Instead of asking the public whether or not they agree to try the former presidents, the former president said that the deficiencies of the López Obrador government should be questioned.
MEXICO CITY (apro) .- Former President Vicente Fox once again censured the holding of the popular consultation to be held next Sunday, August 1.
Instead of asking the public if they agree or not to try the former presidents, Fox proposes that another be held on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the deficiencies of his government.
"The question for the consultation:
"This government has been ignorant, ignorant and guilty of hundreds of thousands of deaths, ranking 4th in the world when we are # 13 in population?
"Yes yes, well yes ...
Yes no, well no ..
"There is the detail," Fox proposes.
On several occasions the former PAN president has criticized and negatively qualified President López Obrador with whom he has had strong differences since 2006, when he acted so that he was not a presidential candidate from Tabasco. "
~~~~~
Update/edit: We have some early updates...keep an eye on the sources for current developments:
~ From Zeta:
Consulta Popular en BCS: Baja Afluencia en Casillas; Gobernador Electo Acuba Trabas del INE
Destacadas BCS - Gilberto Santiesteban - domingo, 1 agosto, 2021 1:10 PM
Baja California Sur:
The polls opened from 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, August 1, however, there is little influx of citizens at the voting points of the consultation to prosecute former presidents
"The Popular Consultation session is advancing in Baja California Sur, which aims to define whether or not to open investigations against political actors from past administrations. After reporting a low influx in the polls, the elected governor of the entity, Víctor Castro Cosío, accused a series of obstacles on the part of the National Electoral Institute (INE).
He denounced that there has been a bad organization on the part of the instance, since in the city of La Paz "few" Reception Tables were placed. The governor-elect testified that he had to go to another neighborhood to cast the vote.
It showed that in towns like El Triunfo, citizens were forced to move to other communities.
“I want to give testimony of the series of obstacles, the INE sent people from Triumph to Santiago to vote. They are not interested in strengthening democracy, there is a test. Let's tell the truth to the people, they were obstacles upon obstacles, ”he said.
However, Castro Cosío reiterated that the Popular Consultation is a historical event. He exhorted the inhabitants of Baja California Sur to go out and vote against impunity to strengthen democracy.
On the other hand, the elected mayor of La Paz, Milena Quiroga Romero, responded that it is important that the decisions of public servants are based on citizen exercises such as the Popular Consultation.
“I definitely agree that we have to go against impunity and, above all, that citizen participation improves democracy. We all want to live in a democratic country and we all want our participation to be taken into account and for that it is very important that we cast our vote ”, he said.
According to the INE registry, in Baja California Sur around 562 thousand citizens can participate.
On the ballot, you must answer the following question with a "yes" or "no": "Do you agree or not that the pertinent actions are carried out in accordance with the constitutional and legal framework, to undertake a process of clarification of the political decisions taken in the past years by political actors, aimed at guaranteeing justice and the rights of possible victims ”.
~~~~
~ From Proceso:
Los Derechos Humanos, Mas Alla de la Consulta y de los Expresidentes
Relatives of disappeared persons and groups that accompany them want to take advantage of the consultation this Sunday the 1st to push, in principle, truth commissions on human rights violations.
MEXICO CITY (Process) .– Mentioned in the question that will be submitted to the first popular consultation in Mexico, this Sunday 1, the victims of serious human rights violations remain expectant about the results of the exercise that has generated an intense debate.
In separate interviews, Alicia de los Ríos, from the Committee of Mothers of the Political Disappeared of Chihuahua; Nadín Reyes Maldonado, coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of Detained and Disappeared Until They are Found; and Grace Fernández Morán, from the National Movement for Our Disappeared in Mexico, recognize the relevance of the popular consultation as a long-standing demand of the victims, despite the fact that the wording of the question is ambiguous.
They agree that the movement of victims has its own path and does not depend on the result of this first experience, in which it is called to consider it pertinent or not to "undertake a process of clarification of the political decisions" of past six-year terms, "aimed at guaranteeing justice and the rights of possible victims ”, as the question reformulated by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation says.
In the days prior to the consultation, groups of human rights defenders established positions that are not in conflict with the exercise, but made it clear that the merits must be related to the creation of truth commissions and not to the prosecution of former presidents, as promoted by the President López Obrador and his party.
In separate letters, groups of relatives of the disappeared from Guanajuato, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Veracruz, Querétaro, Jalisco, Morelos, Coahuila, Baja California Sur and Tamaulipas, as well as civil organizations that accompany victims, demanded that the consultation materialize in the creation truth commissions and effective justice mechanisms.
Collectives such as the Fray Juan de Larios Human Rights Center, from Coahuila, and the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, from Chiapas, separately recalled the ominous balances that remain unanswered:
“The official recognition of 89 thousand 488 records of people who are still missing as of July 2021”, of which 21 thousand 546 people disappeared during the current six-year term; 1,749 clandestine graves from which 3 thousand 25 bodies have been recovered, of which only "822 have been returned home," according to data from the National Search Commission.
Similarly, in the country's prosecutors' offices there would be at least 38,000 unidentified bodies until 2019; 340 thousand people displaced “due to different types of violence”, to which 3 thousand 873 were added from January to June of this year; while in the first six months of 2021, 543 femicides were officially registered."
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We'll see how it goes.
end edit.
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Well...at least this time around as far as "elections" go down here, none of the "candidates" I guess you could call them have been shot yet.
I'll be back with the stats manana. No es bueno amigos.
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