[Mb-civic] Democracy on the ropes in Mexico...and the Law of Silence

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

2 more from Ed P--about the frontrunner for Mexican presidency being 
"removed" by current President Vicente Fox...and John Pilger on the 
collusion of media with British & American propaganda....


Americas Program, International Relations Center - April 8, 2005
http://www.americaspolicy.org/commentary/2005/0504obrador_body.html

Government Removes Popular Presidential Hopeful

Failing Democratic Transition in Mexico

By Laura Carlsen

When Vicente Fox ended the 71-year reign of Mexico 's Institutional
Revolutionary Party in the 2000 presidential elections, many observers
heralded it as the beginning of a long-overdue transition to democracy.
Now President Fox, in a concerted effort with members of the former ruling
party, has closed the door on that transition.

By orchestrating a pseudo-legal offensive against Mexico City's
popular mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Fox has not only dashed
the hopes of Mexicans for a real democracy, but has also destroyed the
political capital he gained back in 2000.

Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Mexico City 's central
square to protest Congress's decision to strip López Obrador of
immunity to prosecution granted elected officials. The mayor will now
stand trial for allegedly failing to follow a court order to halt work on
an access road to a local hospital. According to the federal attorney
general's office, the government will likely put López Obrador behind
bars, as a "preventive measure," before the trial even starts.

According to the vast majority of Mexicans, the government really aims to
prevent López Obrador from becoming an official candidate in the 2006
electoral contest. He currently holds a 15% advantage in preference polls.

Although Fox claims that his government's decision to prosecute is
based on legal grounds and that "no-one should be above the law,"
the specifics of the case have left few doubts that the prosecution is
politically motivated. There is evidence indicating that the Mexico City
government was not at fault. Even if it were, it is highly unusual to
indict a mayor for infractions by city government officials--much less
impeach him based on a minor charge.

In his speech to followers before defending himself in Congress, López
Obrador formally declared that he will seek the candidacy of his party,
the Party of the Democratic Revolution "from wherever I am." With his
announcement, it became official that the legal persecution of the mayor
not only removes a popularly elected official from office but also serves
to sideline the opposition frontrunner on a technicality.

The mayor announced the formation of a "broad movement for
transformation" to promote not only his defense but also his
alternative platform. That platform directly criticizes the
government's economic policies and calls for more social spending
and political reforms. López Obrador's platform of reducing economic
inequality--with "First, the Poor" as his slogan--resonates amply in
this nation of billionaires and beggars.

He also announced plans to appeal to international human rights groups to
fight what he called this "huge step backward for Mexican democracy."
Among the protest crowd in Mexico City 's central plaza, the sense of
betrayal by a government elected to usher in the transition to democracy
was palpable. Effigies of the president drew boos and whistles. Comments
and hand-painted signs supporting Lopez Obrador reflected an unusual
mixture of indignation and idolatry, with emotions running high.

It could easily be a volatile mixture. But the mayor's message to his
supporters was to maintain calm and avoid being provoked to violence. "We
are the majority," he told the crowd. "Only those who are in the wrong
resort to force."

What happens next is anyone's guess. Even the legal implications of
the vote are unclear.

What is clear is that President Fox and the country's ruling
parties--PAN and PRI--have plunged the country into political crisis
for their own gain. The elections of 2000 offered a promise to
consolidate democratic institutions after one-party rule. Some
progress had been made. But if the democratic process is manipulated
for political ends by those in power, then the promise of transition
is betrayed.

Wall Street firms and financial experts had warned Mexican politicians
against prosecution of the mayor. No friends of what they see as a
populist politician, the main fear is that the maneuver will backfire.

Famed for his austerity and personal integrity, the mantle of
political martyr is one that sits well on López Obrador's shoulders.
>From prison, his case could burgeon into a symbol of all that's wrong
with Mexico today, greatly enhancing his popularity and his prospects for
the presidency.

In a best-case scenario, a real grassroots movement to defend
democracy and popular will could lead to long-needed political reforms in
Mexico . This will depend on the capacity of the opposition movement to
preserve peaceful and democratic means--and on the response of a
government whose most recent actions demonstrate irresponsibility and a
profound lack of statesmanship.

[Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program of the International
Relations Center (IRC).]

Published by the Americas Program at the International Relations
Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org). ©2005. All rights
reserved.

***

John Pilger : Reject the Law of Silence

>From the BBC's capitulation to the Israeli government, to the rush to
eulogise a deeply reactionary Pope, pressure on the media is leading to
insidious new state propaganda.

 "New Statesman" - -04/06/05

Can you imagine the BBC apologising to a rogue regime that practises
racism and ethnic cleansing; that has "effectively legalised the use of
torture" (Amnesty); that holds international law in contempt, having
defied hundreds of UN resolutions and built an apartheid wall in defiance
of the International Court of Justice; that has demolished thousands of
people's homes and given its soldiers the right to assassinate; and whose
leader was judged "personally responsible" for the massacre of more than
2,000 people?

Can you imagine the BBC saying sorry to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or other
official demons, for broadcasting an uncensored interview with a
courageous dissident of that country, a man who spent 19 years in prison,
mostly in solitary confinement? Of course not.

Yet last month, the BBC apologised "confidentially" to a regime with such
a record, so that its correspondent would be allowed back, having promised
to abide by a system of censorship that continues to gag the dissident.
The regime is Ariel Sharon's in Israel, whose war crimes, appalling human
rights record and enduring lawlessness continue to be granted a
certificate of exemption not only by the US-dominated west but by
respectable journalism. The Blair government's collusion with the Sharon
gang is reflected in the BBC's "balanced" coverage of a repression
described by Nelson Mandela as "the greatest moral issue of the age".
Simon Wilson, the correspondent made to apologise for a proper, important
and long-overdue interview with Mordechai Vanunu, will know better in
future.

That is hardly new. Pressure applied to the BBC by the Israel "lobby" has
been so successful that, as a Glasgow University study revealed, many
viewers of television news in Britain believe the Jewish "settlers", whose
illegal and often violent squatting on Palestinian land has undermined
hopes of real peace, are actually Palestinians. What is new is the extent
to which insidious state propaganda has penetrated sections of the media
whose independence has been, until recently, accepted by much of the
public.

To appreciate this, one applies the Law of Opposites and the Law of
Silence. The Law of Opposites can be applied to almost any news broadcast
these days. The long-awaited death of the Pope is a case in point. By
reversing the river of drivel about him - "the people's Pope" (almost
universal), "the

man who changed history" (Bush), "a shining example . . . revered across
all faiths and none" (Blair) - you have the truth. This deeply reactionary
man held back history and destroyed lives all over the world with his
fanatical opposition to basic decencies such as birth control. He called
this "abominable", spitting the word out, and so condemned millions, from
starving infants to babies born with Aids. In Latin America, he publicly
humiliated courageous priests whose "preference for the poor" dared to
cross the medieval hierarchy he upheld. The claim that he "brought down
communism" is also the opposite of the truth. As I learned when I reported
his papal return to his native Poland in 1979, the Catholic Church in that
country, whose conservatism he embodied, was a scheming bedfellow of the
Stalinist regime until the wind changed.

The Law of Opposites can be applied to the current government/media
fashion for saving Africa known as the Year of Africa. The BBC has hosted
a special conference about this, just as Blair will host the G8 summit in
July with "eradicating Africa's poverty" as its theme. This is "Britain's
big chance," wrote Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, "to engage the rich with
debt relief, aid, fair trade, carbon emissions and Aids-crippled Africa"
She added: "On debt and trade, Labour has done well."

The opposite is true. Like the rest of the impoverished world, African
countries qualify for Gordon Brown's enlightenment only if they agree to
impose on their people the deadly strictures of the World Trade
Organisation, the IMF and the World Bank - such as the destruction of
tariffs protecting sustainable economies and the privatising of water and
other natural resources. At the same time, they are "encouraged" to buy
weapons from British arms companies, especially if they have a civil war
under way or there is a tension with a neighbour.

The Law of Silence is applied to crimes committed not by official demons -
Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic et al - but by western governments. An
Australian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent, Eric Campbell, recently
promoting a book of his adventures, described the broadcast "coverage" of
the war in Iraq. "Live satellite is a travesty," he said. "Basically, if
[the reporters] are on satellite, they haven't seen anything. The
correspondent is read the stories from the wire and told that is what they
have to say on air - that's in the majority of cases."

That may help to explain why the horror of the American attack on Fallujah
has yet to be reported by all the major broadcasters. By contrast,
independent journalists such as Dahr Jamail have reported doctors
describing the slaughter by US marines of civilians carrying white flags.
This slaughter was videotaped, including the killing of most of a family
of 12.  One witness described how his mother had been shot in the head and
his father through the heart, and how a six-year-old boy standing over his
dead parents, crying, was shot dead. None of this has appeared on British
television. When asked, a BBC spokesperson said: "The conduct of coalition
forces has been examined at length by BBC programmes." That is
demonstrably untrue.

Similarly, the Law of Silence applies to the likely American attack on
Iran. Scott Ritter, the UN weapons inspector who in 1999 disclosed that
Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was thereafter
virtually blackballed, has recently revealed that, according to a Pentagon
official, Iran will be attacked in June. Again, Ritter has been ignored by
most of the media. As Bush's and Blair's "democracy is on the march in the
Middle East" propaganda is reported uncritically, the Law of Silence
applies to the Bush regime's campaign to subvert and overthrow Hugo Chavez
in Venezuela. President Chavez is arguably the most democratically elected
leader in Latin America, if not the world (nine elections), and his own
"preference for the poor" has diverted the proceeds of the world's
fourth-biggest oil supplier to the majority of Venezuelans.

Last year, I did a long interview with Jeremy Bowen, a BBC reporter I
admire, for a programme about war correspondents. Although I guessed that
what was really wanted were my tales of journalistic derring-do on the
front line, I set about describing how journalists often produced veiled
propaganda for western power - by accepting "our" version or by omitting
the unpalatable, such as the atrocities of western state terrorism: a
major taboo. I emphasised that this censorship was not conspiratorial, but
often unconscious, even subliminal; such was our training and grooming. My
contribution did not appear.

John Pilger's film Stealing a Nation, about the expulsion of the people of
Diego Garcia, has won the Royal Television Society's award for best
documentary on British television in 2004-2005 This article first appeared
in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs
subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.

----


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