An Election Intervened?

The central message of President Calderon and his circle this election season is in line with that of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) director and other U.S. security agencies. Both highlight the U.S.’ intervention in the presidential succession process in Mexico.

Mexican law prohibits advertising the flaws of those aspiring to electoral seats, as it is considered denigrating. But the law permits the president, his administration, his party and its presidential hopefuls to develop not only a seriously denigrating message but also an interventionist one, whereby organized crime could capture state institutions through the electoral process.

The more ominous thing connected to this discourse is Washington’s decision-making sphere, given that Mexican cartels are labeled a part of international terrorism. This would include Mexico among U.S. national security issues, which in turn, by U.S. logic, authorizes its security forces to openly intervene in our country.

DEA Director Jack Riley* insisted on Monday that Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is not only capable of influencing the 2012 elections but he also has the power to politically destabilize Mexico. He came back to inscribe Mexican crime within international terrorism, in the scheme of the cross-border pursuit with which Washington confronts this phenomenon. After the death of Osama bin Laden, Riley stated again in Chicago that El Chapo had become the most feared, sought-out criminal in the world, “with an insurmountable power to influence, corrupt and kill.”

Escape Route

Using this same approach, Luis Vargas Valdez, special prosecutor for electoral crimes in Mexico, expressed in Washington that there is also concern in Mexico about the possibility of state capture by criminal gangs in the current electoral period: variations of the presidential discourse since the triumph of PRI in Michoacan, shared also by PAN presidential candidates.

It would thus be a dangerous game, beginning with an electoral message designed to create suspicion that the party leader’s success was a result of the cartels. He would become the biggest danger for Mexico, as Lopez Obrador said in 2006. But this time, there’s an escape route in case the PRI advantage does not play out this way; one would be able to void the election to avoid the supposed capture of political power by the cartels.

This, according to the PAN government’s discourse. But there’s also a threat of U.S. mobilization, ready to prevent, according to the discourse from Washington, the threat to its national security — meaning the alleged capture of power by Mexican cartels, which are supposedly part of international terrorism.

Patriotic and Unpatriotic Fraud

“Clear as mud,” Leon Garcia Soler often writes, citing Norbert Guterman, the famous editor of the Monthly Review who popularized, with Henry Lefebvre, Marxist notions of alienation and mystification. Curiously, until a quarter century ago, with the ironic phrase “patriotic fraud” in face of mystification, the deception of the PRI regime’s discourse justified electoral theft to PAN with a danger that would involve giving power to the party of foreign intervention.

But today, with its alienation from U.S. strategy, the PAN government seems to aim not only to check the danger of antidemocratic discourse that warns of the PRI of the past but also to prevent — in a similarly undemocratic way — PRI’s triumph today, with the kind of unpatriotic fraud that proclaims the supposed danger of state capture by the cartels … if PAN loses power in the polls.

*Note: Jack Riley is the Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration.