By disqualifying INE, AMLO disqualifies his 2018 victory

As is his custom, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador yesterday criticized, attacked and slandered the National Electoral Institute (INE).

Among what he said, this caught my attention: “Aren’t they the ones who allow the stuffing of ballot boxes, the falsification of minutes? Are not the electoral authorities the ones that steal the packages (…) the ones that allow the purchase of the vote? Aren’t these the ones who gave registration to candidates for the Presidency who did not meet the requirements by slogan, because the president of that time asked them to do so?

The foregoing was said when commenting on the INE’s intention to resort to all legal instances to challenge its so-called “plan b” of the electoral reform because, according to the electoral advisers, it threatens democracy.

Whether or not “plan b” puts the incipient Mexican democracy at risk will be determined by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), which is also constantly vilified by Andrés Manuel.

Now, is what the president said about the INE true?

1. Yes, if you were referring to the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) which from its creation in 1990 to 1996 had as its presidents the five PRI members who were Secretaries of the Interior during those six years —Gutiérrez Barrios, González Garrido, Carpizo, Moctezuma and Chuayffet—who did little to stop their party from stuffing ballot boxes, falsifying ballot papers, stealing electoral packages, buying votes, and running ineligible candidates for various elected offices.

2. No, if he was referring to the IFE, which became an autonomous body in 1996 and the National Electoral Institute (INE) that replaced it in 2014. During 14 of those years, the IFE was chaired consecutively by Woldenberg, Ugalde, Albo, Valdés and Lorenzo Córdova, who was the last president of that body and the first of the INE since April 2014.

The foregoing does not mean that starting in 1996, as if by magic, political parties and many officials did not commit or try to commit tricks to win their candidates for any elective office, but it is a fact that from that Every year the electoral processes, especially the federal ones, were increasingly better organized and supervised, reducing cheating and fraud more and more. A good example of the anomalies that AMLO denounced yesterday is his own candidacy for head of government of the DF, in 2000, when without satisfying the residence requirement of at least 5 years, he was approved as a PRD candidate by the Electoral Institute of the DF.

Andrés Manuel’s undisguised hatred against the nation’s highest electoral body dates back to 2006, when he narrowly lost the presidential election to Felipe Calderón; He is convinced that the IFE hid hundreds of thousands of votes cast in his favor and that then-President Vicente Fox maneuvered so that he did not win. So convinced is he of his victory that he even proclaimed himself legitimate president in November of that year.

By disqualifying the INE, he disqualifies his own electoral victory in 2018 and the victories of all the Morenistas who won that year and subsequent ones in elections organized, supervised, and endorsed by the INE.

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