It's the season of party purges. A mere days after Luis Armando Reynoso Femat was kicked out of the PAN - Manuel Espino may follow soon - PRI announced that it has started the process of expelling José Murat Casab from the party.
Murat is also a former governor - he was the PRI governor of Oaxaca 1998-2004 - and is now accused of having assisted, or not having done anything to prevent, Gabino Cué from winning the governorship of Oaxaca this July. Despite having been a national senator and four-time national deputy for the PRI, as well as a range of other offices within the party, Murat has become somewhat of a loose cannon the last couple of years. In a book released in 2008, “La Agonía de la Democracia Mexicana," he attacked his own party for having kept a "complicit silence" during the "scandalous election" in 2006, which he openly rejected as a "fraud." (See an El Universal review of the book here). Murat Casab (of Iraqi origin) also condemned the TEPJF, the highest electoral court in Mexico, as accomplices in the operation - though it should be noted that he hardly produces any hard evidence for either this or the "fraud" in general in his book.
Incidentally, another soon-to-be ex-governor will possibly added to the list of party expulsions: Zeferino Torreblanca of Guerrero. Zeferino recently launched an angry tirade against the PRD when he failed to impose his own candidate to succeed him as governor.
He has since continued his criticism, declaring to a group of municipal mayors - all from PRI -
"Out of convenience, some politicians eat shit. I'm not going to eat shit from nowhere, I promised not to get rich from the government and not go around lying; I will work to promote democracy in the [upcoming] vote; it's up to you... why don't they explain why they handed over Guerrero, let's see what they'll tell the lower PRD members; here the PRD was the strongest"
Strong and quite peculiar words, in particular as Torreblanca has been strongly criticized for riding roughshod over the PRD and almost completely shutting it out of his own government.
Now the kicker: The Guerrero branch of the PRD revealed that Torreblanca will not be able to compete on any PRD label in the near future as he has not paid his own membership dues since mid-2009; since 2005 he has moreover only paid a fraction of the peso amount party regulations state that an executive should contribute to the party.
Even AMLO has paid his.
The question remains: For whom will Torreblanca campaign in 2011?
It was not the first time and I'll bet a Herradura Reposado that it will not be last time that the contested 2006 election will be subject of academic panels and conferences.
Yet academic José Woldenberg's take on the 2006 elections are nonetheless significant. Woldenberg is a man who throughout his career has always been placed squarely on the political left; he was even a PRD member for couple of years, though he left it in 1991. Notably, he was also the first IFE president (1997-2003), and the UNAM professor remains a man of very high credibility to many - to the point where not a few people, including many perredistas, have toyed around with the idea of "Woldenberg Presidente!" for 2012.
(which probably would make him the first Jewish presidential candidate in Mexican history, though I'll defer to Mexfiles' expertise on that subject).
Regardless: Woldenberg in a recent conference on the democratic transition in Mexico noted that nobody has presented any evidence that Calderón's victory was artificially engineered: The IFE commited mistakes" - "I emphasize, mistakes, not fraud" - Woldenberg dixit.
The mistakes were, according to Woldenberg, a badly designed PREP, the Preliminary Electoral Results Program, and to only declare that the results were "close" but not giving any figures from the quick count that night.
(Actually, Luis Carlos Ugalde, the much maligned IFE president, dealt with this as well in his Así lo viví, now out in cheap bolsillo edition, , which is very much worth a read. Here Ugalde relates that he still wonders if this was a mistake, yet points out that giving out preliminary numbers that favored on of the candidates, where the difference was still within margin of error, might very well have led to the candidate apparently in the lead simply declaring victory.)
Yet here I agree more with Virgilio Andrade, who in my opinion is one of the brightest stars to have served on the IFE. Andrade accepts that the PREP was not clear, but that the real problem was the IFE had not explained properly in advanced that deals had been made in advance with the parties that no winner were to be declared if the preliminary results of the quick count (not to be confused with the PREP) did not give a clear winner.
Regardless, Woldenberg is hardly likely to score any points with the AMLO camp for his recent reaffirmation that while the elections were polarized and dirty, there was no fraud in 2006.
