Friday, December 16, 2011

14 months late, Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) complete

It's about damn time. At last, the Chamber of deputies came to an agreement to appoint, with the required 2/3 majority, the last three IFE councilors ahead of 2012. None voted against; a handful of PT legislators abstained.

They are:
* Sergio García Ramírez, former attorney general, and judge at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

* María Marván Laborde, Ph.D from New School, now with the federal IFAI (institute for access to information and data protection)

* Lorenzo Córdova Vianello, Ph.D, law expert and researcher at UNAM.

This is excellent new, met with near unison approval from the various legislative leaders, as well as IFE president Leonardo Valdés. It's embarrassing, though, that it took the Chamber so long to get to this, and only under intense pressure from the federal electoral tribunal (TEPJF).

IFE squashes a horrid proposal from two of its councilors

Marco Antonio Baños and Alfredo Figueroa Mantuvo, IFE councilors both, proposed to IFE's general council that IFE should extend its authority to monitor opinion programs in the media to make sure the treatment of political candidates of the shows are "equitable."

Thankfully, IFE squashed the initiative, which strikes me as truly insane, and far beyond the mere practical details of deciding what is "equitable" treatment of candidtes: What on earth makes them think that IFE is entitled to decide what is "fair" treatment in the media? It is hard to think of a similar extreme and truly frightening attempt at overreach with authoritarian overtones.

While Marco Antonio Baños is known for his erratic behavior, I expected differently from Alfredo Figueroa, who I found to be a very reasonable man when I interviewed him for an hour a little while back.

Both are considered very close to the PRI, despite the nonsense of IFE councilors supposedly having no party sympathies. Yet for them to try to turn IFE into an organ exercising editorial control of political programs on television - I actually did hold that to be beneath them.