The Pre-Election Mood

On October 7 of this year the electoral process in Chiapas was carried out to designate 24 local deputies of relative majority and 16 of proportional representation for integration into the State Congress; as well as the election of 118 municipal mayors. It should be remembered that until 1998 Chiapas had 111 municipalities, but the ex-Governor Roberto Albores Guillén, in his counter-insurgency plan, created 7 more municipalities in an attempt to counteract the power of the autonomous municipalities of the EZLN.

To understand the results of the recent process, it should be remembered that ex-Governor Albores, reforming various articles of the Electoral Code of Chiapas, tried to prohibit alliances between political parties and cut registration times, in the hopes of assuring that the PRI win the elections.  Due to opposition of different political parties, he only achieved the establishment of March 31 as the limit for declaring alliances between parties, but even so, in this past process 15 alliances were presented in various municipalities. He later dedicated himself to converting the State Electoral Council (CEE) into the State Electoral Institute (IEE), and in this process achieved the reduction of a series of functions and liberties to the Citizen Advisors, but the most important part for the PRI is that the president of the IEE, Gilberto Monzón Velasco, was a staunch supporter of ex-Governor Roberto Albores, who at the same time imposed district presidents of the IEE, who represent the interests of the most retrograde and repressive groups in power against the popular movement in Chiapas.

Another important aspect to consider is that after the 8^th of December of last year, when the current governor Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía took office, the PRI as losing party began to suffer a series of internal fractures, due to the fact that two people were influencing the political disputes of the PRI. On one side was the ex-governor, who before retiring from the government intended to leave the decision-making bodies of the state controlled, by imposing certain people to appointed positions.  On the other side, another faction of the PRI was inclined to support the new governor, Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía. Their confrontations took place in the central offices of the State Directive Committee of the PRI, where the group called Magisterial Campesino Solidarity (SOCAMA), (headed by Jacobo Nazar Morales as political operator and Germán Jiménez Gómez, political cacique of the Fraylesca as intellectual operator), removed Mario Carlos Culebro Velasco, supporter of Roberto Albores, by force and took possession of the offices of the PRI. The confrontations in the National Campesino Confederation (CNC) took place in the same way between the faction headed up by Jacobo Nazar and Ramiro Micelli, also a supporter of Albores Guillén, who was also removed by force from the campesino center. The disputes in the state Congress were between the 12 deputies led by Edgar de León Gallegos, who supported Pablo Salazar, and the other 14 who supported Albores Guillén, headed by Mario Carlos Culebro Velasco, who was president of the Great Commission of the state Congress. The other violent stage was the Supreme Justice Tribunal, where a group of 10 magistrates supported Jorge Clemente Pérez and another group supported Juan Roque Flores (of the PRD). The Judicial Police had to intervene to remove the group that supported Albores Guillén from the Supreme Tribunal building, as they had taken possession of these offices by force.  The outcome is that today the Supreme Justice Tribunal functions with Juan Roque Flores at the helm. The other instance where one of the final political coups against the Albores Guillén group was disputed, was in the IEE, where the president, Gilberto Monzón complained constantly of not having been handed over the total amount of the resources approved by the state Congress, and of not being able to count on the support of governor Pablo Salazar. He organized workers and employees to stage a strike because their salaries were not being paid. This activity detained the works of the IEE in the state, and in the end caused its president, Gilberto Monzón Velasco to resign at the end of October of this year.

The pre-electoral mood was permeated by a series of violent acts springing from the political disputes between the PRI groups already mentioned, but also with examples of military and paramilitary counter-insurgency moves, including 7 ambushes in the region of Bochil, Simojovel, Chamula, Larráinzar and La Trinitaria. Two were against element of the Public Security Police, one attempt was made against members of the Human Rights Center Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, another against the PRI candidate for Deputy in the district of Comalapa, and one more against the mayor of San Juan Chamula, who was robbed of money and radios used for communication.

Another type of violence that was experienced with increasing intensity just before the electoral process, and that presents a continuing problem, is that of land disputes in different zones, especially in the region of Ocosingo, between organizations that have traditionally been called leftist, and support bases of the EZLN, causing various casualties.

These and other internal political disputes in the parties, social organizations and local power groups influenced the voting results, and also the composition of the state Congress that will enter next November 16 and the election of the municipal authorities that will take power January 1 of next year.

The Electoral Results and Irregularities

On October 7 the voting process was carried out to elect 24 deputies of relative majority and 16 deputies of proportional representation as well as 118 municipal mayors, through the installation of 414 voting booths throughout the state. Eight political parties of national recognition participated: PAN, PRI, PRD, PT, PVEM, PCD, PAS, PSN; one local state party: PAC (Party of Citizen Advancement); and 4 alliances were formed in diverse municipalities, among them: PT-PRD, PT-PVEM, PRD-PVEM, PRD-PT-PCD-PVEM. The PAN did not appear in any alliance because from the beginning of the selection of candidates, it defined itself by saying that it would not participate in any alliance, wrongly believing that with Vicente Fox as President of the Republic, the correlation of power was favorable enough to tip the scales in their favor. What the PAN did not take into account is that Fox has deceived the Mexican populace and his popularity has dipped by 16%, along with the fact that his government is revealed more and more to be rightist and non-democratic, a government subject to the neoliberal power of the United States, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

When 100% of the voting booths were counted by the State Electoral Institute, the results of the elections for municipal mayors were as follows:  PAN won 12, PRI won 72, PRD 20, PT 2, PVEM 4, PCD 0, PSN 0, PAS 2, PAC 1, Alliance PRD-PT 5, Alliance PT-PVEM 0, Alliance PRD-PVEM 1, and the Alliance PRD-PT-PVEM-PCD 1. (For further information and physical and geographic location of the municipalities won by the different parties, consult the map “Elections in 2001 in Chiapas” on the webpage of CIEPAC: http://wwww.ciepac.org).

The results of the elections for local deputies were as follows: the PAN won District II of west Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the PRD won Districts XIV of Cintalapa and XX of Las Margaritas, while Districts I (east Tuxtla Gutiérrez), III (Chiapas de Corzo), IV (Venustiano Carranza), V (San Cristóbal de Las Casas), VI (Comitán), VII (Ocosingo), VIII (Yajalón), IX (Palenque), X (Bochil), XI (Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacán), XII (Pichucalco), XIII (Copainalá), XV (Tonalá), VXI (Huixtla), XVII (Motozintla), XVIII (Tapachula Norte), XIX (Tapachula Sur), XXI (Tenejapa), XXII (Chamula), XXIII (Villaflores) and XXIV (Cacahoatán) were won by PRI. (For more information see maps on the web pages of CIEPAC.)

In 14 municipal mayoral results and in some districts, conflicts and post-electoral disputes were registered. The State Electoral Tribunal has resolved some, but the final verdict of the Federal Electoral Tribunal is not known. There is a deadline of 30 November in the case of the mayors and 15 November in the case of the deputies.

This electoral process, as always, was scarred by a series of irregularities, because the structures and political culture that maintained the PRI during 70 years have not been modified. The press release from the Civic Alliance of San Cristobal, dated October 8, reports that a “lack of training for the booth attendants, the buying and coercion of votes, new fraudulent mechanisms, low voter participation that reached almost 50% abstention, an abundant choice of party options that fragmented the vote, the impossibility of counting on the electoral option of coalitions, as a result of electoral reform that put locks on the integration of coalitions” characterized the recent electoral exercise.

The practices of threat, intimidation, buying and coercion of votes, the programs of Procampo, Progresa, Coescafé, Procede, the delivery of construction materials, chickens, productive projects, etc., continued being the pressure tactics used to obtain votes for the candidates of the different parties, including some that say they were “opposition” parties.

The bulletin of the Civic Alliance continues saying that “campaigning outside of the legal time boundaries was part of the irregularities that the majority of the parties practiced as an inheritance from the past. On the day of the elections some voters were forcibly transported to the voting booths in the municipalities of Pantelhó and Altamirano…”

“In several booths in Chenalhó, Huixtán and Oxchuc ballots were noted missing during the counting and verification, a practice which seems to be the current fraud. The theft of ballets from the material delivered at the beginning of the voting process, points to the orchestration of a chain mechanism to assure that marked ballots replace clean, folioed ballots, as a strategy to favor some political party. This chain assures the sale of the right of decision of the voters.

An irregularity that would cast doubt on the results of some booths, was that during the closing of voting, upon counting the voided votes, some of them were blank because the civil servants did not invalidate them, allowing the possibility of marking them in favor of a particular party.

Election Day was characterized by a lack of training for the servants in charge of the booths, as a result of budget cuts by the State Electoral Institute that affected the optimum work in that organization that oversees electoral process. The 40% cut in training personnel as a result of the financial crisis that the Institute suffered, provoked that in some regions the personnel that worked the booths never received the necessary training, which influenced also the interest in and execution of their responsibilities. For example, there were some that did not have voters complete the registration, nor did they deliver correctly the electoral package. The low quality of training received by booth attendants had repercussions when the installation and close of the booths was carried out, during the tallying and computing of the votes, and in the delivery of the electoral package to voters. The various procedures were complicated and gave rise to irregularities.

Also, the lack of pay to the personnel that remained in the Institute and the general lack of resources influenced the work carried out. The payment programmed for the booth attendants was the lowest of the most recent voting in the state. For this reason, there were some that did not even show up, and were replaced by people that were waiting in line to vote, without having ever received training. For this reason, some booth were attended by as few as three persons (when there should be five), as was the case in some booth in San Cristóbal de Las Casas.

The elections and the re-composition of power groups in Chiapas

After the loss of power by the PRI on a national level and in Chiapas, the already existing contradictions became sharper not only in the PRI but also in some social organizations and non-governmental organizations, political parties and other sectors. Some opportunistically said that it is the best time to influence, that the government is different and that advantage should be taken of the opportunities to change things. Others look toward the new government with distrust because it is more of the same just in a different style, commercial plans are still being implemented that do not benefit the people, as is the case of the Plan Puebla Panamá, paramilitaries have not been detained, there is no real desire to resolve the causes that gave rise to armed conflict, militarization continues to be imposed as a possible solution to the armed conflict in Chiapas, and the military has invaded a series of civil instances and spaces, as for example the naming of new delegates of the National Migration Institute in Chiapas that come from the Army, among other things.

In this context of re-composition of power groups, one political group inside the PRI opted to side with the governor Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía and to displace the traditional group that was headed by the ex-governor Roberto Albores Guillén. Various of these people ended up as municipal mayors and deputies that will assume their roles on November 16 and January 1, respectively. The new civil servants of the government are well known in the history of Chiapas for managing with a democratic profile but in fact have been responsible for the massacre of campesinos and for serving the groups in power in the government, the most recent being to the ex-governor Patrocinio González Garrido. In this political group, the intellectual leader is Grmán Jiménez Gómez and as operator of a series of actions is Jacobo Nazar Morales, very well known in the history of Chiapas for heading up the 1986 movement of the corn growers of Fraylesca and with them tried to upset the government of General Absalón Castellanos Domínguez. Seven of their leaders were put in jail for two years (the “Group of Seven” : Germán and Rubén Jiménez Gómez, Jacobo and Julián Nazar Morales, Jesús López Constantino, Manuel Hernández Gómez and Jorge Enrique Hernández Aguilar – who was accused of being one of the brains behind the Acteal massacre). When Patroncinio González Garrido arrived as governor they were liberated and received economic support with positions of power in the magisterial union and in the campesino sector through the program of SOCAMA.

On the other hand, according to a denouncement made by Concepción Villafuerte, wife of the ex-governor in Rebellion, Amado Avendaño Figueroa, Germán Jiménez Gómez is one of the presumed intellectual authors of the assassination attempt made against Avendaño Figueroa in his vehicle on the bridge known as “Siete Cigarros” between Tonalá and Arriaga on July 25, 1995. Among other elected deputies that will take power on November 16 and that Concepción Villafuerte denounces as being involved in this case are: Alberto Cruz Chirino, Augusto del Pino Estrada, Arturo Becerra Martínez and others (Catorcenal Sur Proceso, October 27, 2001).

Others that can be added to this group of power are Jesús Alejo Orantes Ruiz, known cacique in Venustiano Carranza, whom the PRD of the region denounced as having arrived armed and with gunmen during his campaign. Another from the Orantes clan that will be a new deputy in Chiapas is Jesús Orantes Ruiz, who was imprisoned in Cerro Hueco, accused of stockpiling prohibited arms and who was released two years later (ibidem). All maintain a profile of being aligned with the most needy, but the facts prove the opposite.

As a result of this group having aligned itself with the governor Pablo Salazar, the post-electoral conflict became sharper, to such a degree that 17 deputies of the PRI of the current legislature have been removed by the National Executive Committee of that party, for having accepted the disappearance of the Great Commission of the State Congress, that was presided over by a president coming from a party that had a majority in Congress, in this case the PRI.  In its place they formed the Commission of Internal Regimen, that will be presided over in rotating fashion by the deputies of the different parties that have a presence in the state Congress. These contradictions have touched even the National Executive Committee of the PRI, that has confronted a cacique group in Chiapas. The group of caciques has been winning the confrontations, and the governor will be obligated to negotiate with them to be able to govern without problems. If the PRI resolves its internal conflicts like this, how do they expect to resolve the conflicts and necessities that the people of Chiapas have – that they say they represent?

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