Mexico's Elections 2012 - Why I'm NOT Voting, and a Note about the PRI

Founder of PRI, responsible for the death of 90,000 Mexicans

Mexico's presidential elections are coming up this Sunday, the same day as Canada Day.  I'm a Mexican citizen, and have the right to vote in these elections.  Unfortunately, I won't be voting.  Here's why:

I left Mexico for Canada in April of this year.  Some time after arrival, my wife investigated how to register to vote from abroad.  As it turned out, we had to apply at Mexico's embassy in Toronto in January 2012 at the latest.  At the time she found the info, the applications which were received were being evaluated for possible approval.  Essentially, unless we had made a special trip to Toronto in January just to register, it would've been impossible.  Alternatively, we could make a special trip to Mexico on July 1st just to vote.  Since my wife is pregnant with twins (and getting really close to delivery) and Mexico can be little unruly at election time, we had to rule this possibility out.  (The budget was also a factor.)

This was a great disappointment.  We had been talking about the candidates and trying to choose the best one to vote for.  A friend of mine made a comment something like this on Facebook: "Not voting is one of the most cowardly actions to take at election time."  I agree. And I'm sad that I can't vote.  I believe it's not only our right to vote when we can, but our obligation.

Now, a note about the candidates.  While I'll refrain from saying which candidate I would have voted, I will say who I definitely wouldn't have voted for.  Although Enrique Pena Nieto is young and hansom, and claims to have distanced himself from his party's past, I still don't think a president from his party would be a good idea; his party is the PRI - the Institutional Revolution Party, which I wrote about before (The Institutionalized Revolution & Mexican Bureaucracy.)  Besides being the engineers of the bureaucratic mess that defines most of Mexico's government organizations, they also have a track record of hanging on to power and the presidency in an oligarchy style, and of violent repression of opposition.

Many people like to talk about the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in which somewhere between 30 and 300 civilians (mostly student protesters) where shot.  I agree that this event was horrible. However, it seems that little is being said about the very origins of the PRI;  the party was created by president Plutarco Elías Calles, who was also the instigator of the Cristero War, in which over 90,000 people were killed in less than 3 years. (That's double of even the biggest estimates of President Calderon's 6 year war on drugs - this is also a problem, but at the very least, this is an war against illegal - and often inhuman - activity, while the Cristeros War, which killed twice as many people in half the time, was a war against people's religious freedom.)  So, about 1968, what could you expect from a party which was born from so much bloodshed?

"The bodies often remained on the poles until the... town renounced public religious practice." (Wikipedia)

Both are horrible tragedies. It also speaks very poorly of the party that the government documents about the 1968 event were kept continually secret and not released until a president from a different party was finally elected (Vicente Fox, 2000) and ordered the release.  As for the Cristeros War, children in schools run by states governed by the PRI (which is the majority) still don't learn about that war as a part of Mexico's history. A party that has not yet taken responsibility for their past, and continues to try to hide its past atrocities is ready to take the presidency again.