Friday, January 21, 2011

Joaquín López-Dóriga: Taking sides or sloppy reporting?

As has been well covered in the media, the PRD has complained about two seemingly blatant breaches of electoral - and penal - law in Guerrero: One is the interception of a semi trailer packed with food handouts bearing the imprint of the Mexico State social agency DIF; the other is the fake edition of the newspaper La Jornada that proclaimed that the PRD candidate had lost the gubernatorial debate.

Yet reading Joaquín López-Dóriga's column today in Milenio is like looking into a distorted parallel universe: He gets it completely backwards. To quote the veteran reporter,
"This is how it is going to be? The dirty campaigns in Guerrero at the limits. Some are making fake handouts from the DIF in Mexico State, and others are publishing an apocryphal edition of the newspaper La Jornada - Guerrero with a front page that says the PRD candidate won the debate."
Is this really how it went, López-Dóriga? On what grounds to you claim the handouts were faked? And why do you write that the fake newspaper gave the victory to the PRD candidate, when it actually said that the PRD candidate lost the debate, and thus obviously was made by the PRI and not the PRD?

Sloppy reporting - or has Joaquín López-Dóriga now simply thrown his lot openly with the PRI?

AMLO and democracy: So much for listening to the "people."

Milenio reports that AMLO has instructed Encinas to reject an alliance with PAN even if the scheduled poll conducted among party members support it.

I'll let AMLO's attitudes toward democracy, respect for Encinas and the decisions of his party, as well as that of the party base, speak for themselves.

"One can see that you are from Queretaro," "the laziness of campesinos"

A throwback to the language of an era that presumably had passed a long time ago, yet seemingly not.

Eduardo Tomás Nava Bolaños is a national senator from PAN, representing Queretaro state.
In a meeting held in the senate with Francisco Mayorga Castañeda, the secretary of agriculture, where Mayorga discussed some setbacks in the PROCAMPO agricultural program, Senator Nava Bolaños shared his intimate knowledge of the Mexican countryside by arguing that the campesinos are struggling not because of lack of resources, but because they are, quote, "lazy." Nava Bolaños dixit:

"Head out to the ejidos, to the zones of production, and see the abundance of land, yet the señor is sitting in his house and no one is working on the plot. Don't blame the federal government for the laziness of the campesinos."

That's right, senator - nevermind that in some estimates 60 percent of migrants who made it to the United States are campesinos who have fled the countryside because they can not survive on the income they get from working their land - they really are just lazy!

The best reply came from Senator Francisco Javier Berganza, of Convergencia:
"Oh senator, one notes that you are from Queretaro."