Bartlett - he of the 1988 "fall of the system" - for Senate

PRD was founded on the back of the July 6, 1988 fraud. One man greatly responsible for the election outcome was Interior Secretary Manuel Bartlett, who then also doubled as head of the commission organizing the election (if there ever was a fitting fox-guarding-the-hen house analogy, that's the one). Now, however, in an irony of ironies - I really don't know how to express this - AMLO's Morena movement is putting forth Bartlett to head its senator formula from Puebla.

That's right. The man responsible for the 1988 fraud that soon gave birth to the PRD, will now run as its candidate.

Are there no limits to how opportunistic AMLO will be in order to draw in votes? One graphic from El Economista puts a humerous spin on it:

El Economista

It is not a wholly perfect joke, though: While Bartlett his here seen putting on a PRD banner, it is, as Senator Carlos Navarrete made it very clear, AMLO's Morena that is pushing Bartlett, not the PRD.

Navarrete also said he would not move a finger to help Bartlett. Nor would anyone with a modicum of dignity on the Mexican left.


More from El Universal.

Manuel Bartlett, now with... Morena!

Manuel Bartlett, former Puebla governor, is in many ways the epitomy of the old-style prinosaurio or PRI dinosaur. Many know him from the infamous fraud in 1988, when he doubled as both head of the interior secretariat and head of the federal electoral commission arranging the elections and producing the results, which were most likely drastically altered to favor Carlos Salinas.

I am working on a book and have been re-reading up on much recent political history, and found it interesting how Bartlett, who became Puebla governor 1993-1999, nearly derailed the crucial 1996 electoral reform in Mexico. When PAN won the Huejotzingo municipality in a state election in 1995, the state electoral commission, pushed by Bartlett, annulled the PAN's victory and handed it back to PRI. Due to this outrage, PAN left national negotiations over electoral reform, with the result that President Ernesto Zedillo himself had to intervene to push Bartlett to acknowledge PAN's victory.

Fast forward to the present. We now learn that this old PRI hack is now in negotiations to become a candidate for the senate in 2012.

Yet as whose candidate?

None other than that of AMLO's Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena).
In terms of political conversions and opportunism, this one is hard to beat.

Voices on the PRI's likely return to power

Many a personality has been commenting the past days on the likely return of the PRI to the Mexican presidency in 2012.  Fox, notably, seemed resigned to the idea that the PRI will win in 2012, declaring recently, "Right now, that's what dice are saying, the dice and the facts." As might be expected, Fox' predictions were hardly well received by the PAN; big shots such as party leader César Nava and PAN Senate group leader José González Morfín rejected the statements, and instead called on Fox to involve himself more in party politics rather than criticizing it from the outside. (After some heavy twittering, he now backtracked and said he "did not predict PRI's victory," but that it was to function as a warning call.

Be that it as it may, Manuel Bartlett, former PRI interior minister and governor of Puebla, somewhat estranged from his party and on good terms with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, affirmed that PRI would return thanks to the "disenchamtment PAN, but that the PRI lacks a national project and that its triumph would only be due to "mistakes and the disaster in which the PAN has occurred in the exercise of power." It is hardly a ringing endorsement of a PRI presidential candidate. Is Bartlett throwing his weight behind López Obrador?

Finally, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, defeated 2000 PRI presidential candidate, took offense at declarations made by writer Mario Vargas Llosa to the newspaper La Jornada, in connection with being bestowed an honorary degree by UNAM, where he noted that even if the PRI returns it would hardly have the absolute power of the past "perfect dictatorship," the felicitous phrase coined by the Peruvian writer to describe the 1929-2000 priiato. Labastida dixit:

"His [Vargas Lloosa's] political sympathies overtake him, his absolute conservative ideology of the right, and this prevents him from seeing that the party [PRI] has had many different governments. Lázaro Cárdenas belonged to the tricolor, as did Carlos Salinas the Gortari. PRI has not been uniform over the years. This is the first misunderstanding of this writer. The other is to claim that for 70 years one lived through a perfect dictatorship."

Really? If Labastida can come up with a better turn, I wish he'd share it. It is perhaps even more revealing that Labastida reaches all the way back to the 1930s to find a progressive PRI politician to contrast with Salinas. One would have liked to ask the senator, where would he place Peña Nieto - with the former or the latter? AMLO has the answer ready: As part of his "loyalty tour" (loyalty to him as opposed to the PRD), he gleefully exhibits a photo of an embracing Peña Nieto and Salinas. To AMLO, a victory of Peña Nieto and the return of PRI would be akin to "the return of Santa Anna."

Yet if that is the case, why is he so adamantly attacking the PAN-PRD alliances and claiming that PRI and PAN are all the same?