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Letters to Artvoice

Mexico, Home of the Free

Mexico’s recent presidential election, hailed as free and fair by the Bush administration, is revealing a Pandora’s black box of vote manipulation tactics like massive “vote spoiling” and “vote suppression” in districts favoring left-wing candidate, Lopez Obrador. The ruling PAN party even placed an opposition (PRI) leader, an ex-president, under house arrest during the election to intimidate voters. While Republicans haven’t resorted to this extreme yet, investigations by journalists like Greg Palast, as featured in a recent Artvoice article, have revealed an assortment of dirty tricks and theft used by Republicans to steal votes in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Sadly, it took a recent cover story in Rolling Stone magazine, by no less a celebrity than Bobby Kennedy Jr., to draw a national bead on this vital issue. Palast and his ilk were deemed bad news bears by a mainstream media too preoccupied with good looks and bad behavior to waste time and space on distractions like stolen national elections.

No doubt, Louis Obrador’s challenges are being soft-pedaled in Mexico’s media as well, but due to his bold, public challenge of the official election results and allegations of widespread election fraud, the Mexican media cannot ignore them altogether, as our media has done to charges of election fraud in 2000 and 2004. Had Al Gore questioned the Supreme Court’s controversial intervention halting the partial recount in Florida and perhaps encouraged peaceful demonstrations, we might now be doing a countdown to his final 1,000 days in office now rather than Bush’s. At minimum, perhaps, we wouldn’t have had to wait one and a half years for a Bobby Kennedy Jr. to pry open our padlocked closet doors to let the sun shine on the electoral skeletons hidden there.

Likewise, if John Kerry had heeded the advice of his officers and troops in Ohio, who urged him to demand a recount there after witnessing widespread vote suppression there targeting minority, student and other pro-Democrat polling places, he might now be in the second half of his first term. As an election monitor in Ohio in 2004, I was dismayed that Kerry, the courageous soldier, was AWOL the day after the election and thereafter.

The same voices we heard urging Kerry to concede on election night in 2004—so that the nation could “move on” to four more years of failed policies and a wholesale assault on civil liberties, here and abroad—are now demanding that Obrador do the same in Mexico. Fortunately for Mexican democracy, Obrador is a seasoned political street fighter and is rallying his supporters to demonstrate for free and fair elections, in the streets of Mexico, beginning this week.

By contrast, nary a march occurred here after our last two fatally flawed national elections. There was no orange revolution as in the Ukraine and no threat of national strikes and marches as in Mexico. Be that as it may, perhaps we should consider embracing rather than reviling Mexican and Eastern Block immigrants, so that their passion for free and fair elections will rub off on us, and save us from our complacency!

Carl Mrozek

Buffalo

AFTER THE HURRICANE

This year, I went on a sunny, spirit-lifting spring break with nearly 300 of my fellow St. Bonaventure University students. We chose to spend our break doing something a little out of the ordinary—we drove 24 hours on a stuffy bus to help areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Like so many of my peers, I was completely unprepared for the many ways in which this “real world” would change my perception of myself. More importantly, I was unprepared for the ways it would change my perception of my nation.

After the media frenzy over hurricane wreckage died down and temporary American sympathy ceased, thousands of people were left with an indescribable amount of work and more emotional damage than I can possibly relate to. But, more hurtful, I think, than losing everything is the promise left unkept by a country that went on to live life as usual the day newspaper headlines halted.

Some people have been asking why we didn’t hold a fundraiser and send money. The problem with money (most evident in the bureaucracy and red tape that has fettered funds in hurricane devastated areas for so long) is that it simply is not real. To these people who watched their lives fly away in 100-mile-per-hour winds and drown in 30 feet of water, little comfort exists in a check made out to an appropriate charity. The comfort, I found, as I looked into the eyes of an elderly man whose unlivable house I tore apart, existed solely in the fact that I was there.

The people I worked with at Hands On USA in Biloxi, Missisippi were a perfect medley of a hundred different stories, origins and lifestyles. Their job was essentially to save a city, but you never heard about it. Each humbly stated that the work (and it was hard work) was necessary and important. There’s nothing heroic about helping those who need it.

I planned my second trip to Biloxi as soon as I returned from my first. Having returned for a second time, I am already itching to get back. I can say the work will never be finished; I can illustrate the neighborhoods flattened under tidal surges; I can take pictures of houses left untouched and describe the smell surrounding them; I can tell you about a family living in a mold-infested house since October, getting sicker every day, with nowhere else to go. But I fear that won’t mean much unless you’ve been there, seen it, smelled it and touched it.

Checks are great and wads of cash can buy plenty of tools. But they can’t tear down crumbling drywall like hands can, and they can’t embrace a woman who was certain the world had forgotten about her until you showed up on her doorstep and said you were there to help. I am asking that members of my community make the decision to take action. Don’t rely on other people to tell you what is going on in the Gulf Coast. Don’t trust that somehow someone is doing the work that needs to be done. For more information, visit handsongulfcoast.org.

Emily-Rose Maher

Hamburg