If You Can’t Beat Them, Cheat Them

“There’s something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida.” So begins Greg Palast’s article, "Mexico and Florida Have More In Common Than Heat" in today’s Guardian. He reports that that the same company, ChoicePoint, responsible for removing African-American voters names in Florida 2000, which of course led to Bush's capture of the White House, created a similar list in Mexico, quite likely at the behest of the Bush administration. Palast reports that he has been able to get hold of a memo from the FBI regarding a contract for “intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations” which relates to obtaining voter files in Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico. As Obrador has claimed, there was something suspect about the Mexican elections, where, in poorer neighbourhoods, names disappeared from voter rolls, blank ballots mysteriously appeared, and there was an excessive amount of “negative drop-off,” meaning that, in a number of districts, more votes for lower offices than for president. Enough at any rate to merit a vote by vote recount. One wonders if this is the new style of American interventionism at home and abroad? If you can’t beat them, cheat them.