Mexico promises clean and fair election

JAKARTA (JP): Improving relations, signing agreements and exchanging views on issues are one part of an ambassador's job.

The other part, according to Mexican Ambassador Jorge Palacios Trevino, is "introducing your country to the people of the country where you are assigned".

This is exactly what Palacios did when he started to explain to The Jakarta Post about the upcoming presidential and legislative elections in his country Aug. 21.

"We are making a big effort to make it a clean and credible election so there won't be any claims of fraud from opposition parties," he said.

"This year's elections will be the best-ever prepared in the history of Mexico."

To achieve this goal, he said, the country has made a giant step towards amending electoral legislation, as many as three times over the last five years.

The amendments were made to improve the institutions in charge of the elections, increase the autonomy of electoral authorities, create new surveillance bodies and adopt new ways to certify the elections, he said.

As a result, it was decided that the elections would be prepared, organized, conducted, observed and certified by an independent institution. "I expect the elections will be transparent and clean, since the government will not be organizing or judging them," Palacios said.

Another crucial point are the public debates transmitted nation-wide on TV screens and radios.

"For the first time in the political history of Mexico, there was a public debate between candidates for the presidency... and the rating of the debate was very high: more than 30 million Mexicans watched it on TV," he said.

Their efforts even went as far as involving experts from the United Nations to assist in the technical aspects of the elections. "We have invited them to acknowledge whether we are conducting our elections correctly or not... Not to judge us from a political point of view, because the elections, of course, are something exclusively for the Mexicans," he said.

Even funding for presidential campaigns is limited to US$42 million per candidate.

So far, nine political parties have officially registered their respective candidates, making it the most contested presidential election in the history of Mexico.

A certain amount of government resources are provided to support the activities of the parties and additional income can be obtained from various sources provided they do not exceed the limit regulated by the law.

But why are the Mexicans willing to go through all this pain?

Apparently, it is for no surprising reason and came as a result of a long process.

"People have become more and more politically interested... They are interested in the elections and no longer want to just vote or listen. They want to participate," Palacios pointed out.

To prove his point, he said that out of the 47 million citizens eligible to vote (52.2 percent of the country's 90 million-population), more than 44 million have registered and currently possess new identification cards.

These cards, which according to him were "very modern and impossible to counterfeit" were specially designed for the voters.

"People are interested in the elections now. That's why we simply have to do the best," Palacios concluded. (pwn)