IFE Proposition: “No Election Fraud in 2006″

AMLO book: note tousled rock-star cover treatment for the man from Tabasco. Had it been me, I would have used a screenshot from the infamous Hildebrando117 case. Focus on the hard information, not the infotainment personality.

El Financiero (Mexico) reports: “Federal elections authority (IFE) repeats that there was no fraud in 2006.”

See also

• Mexico: “The Mafia Stole the Presidency”
• Mexico: Repercussions in Elections Fraud Case?

At the very least, IFE has not successfully refuted the proposition that the election was fraudulent. Which is what taxpayers pay it to do.

Most notoriously, its efforts to block any “vote by vote” recount were scandalously absurd and defended with loud bouts of surrealistic quacking and not especially clever or competent FUD.

Likewise for the technicialities used by TRIFE to disqualify numerous credible and concrete complaints of fraud for “lack of standing” on the part of the complainant.

Upon which basis — the basis of deciding to disqualify those who invited them to determine whether there was a basis or not — TRIFE ruled that there was no evidence of “systematic” fraud on which to base the argument for a full recount.

See also

• The Iffiness of IFE: You Saw the YouTube Videos, Now Read the Book
• Mexico: (Michael) Hammering IFE
• Mexican Elections Defended by Idiots: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Critique of Pure Polling
• Ugalde: Apologia Pro Bureaucratic Survival Sua
• Ugalde Tells a Whopper
• Mexico’s IFE: Open-Ended Exceptions to Transparency
• Felipe.org: Democracy 2.0
• El Mapache: A Veteran Mexican Election Fraudster Narrates the Infamous IFE “Taking Out the Trash” Footage
• Mexico: The Iffiness of IFE, Part III

I have recently moved over, as you know, from the weak thesis — “recount the votes or else we will never know” — to the strong thesis: The 2006 Mexican election was a swamp of flagrant mapacheria, backed by a filthy ratfuck campaign in the monopoly mass media and awash in dirty money (The Teacher Reaches for the Golden Apple). It was as phony as a $3 bill. The official results were utterly meaningless.

At any rate, a large rally is planned for this weekend on the Zócalo in which the losing candidate and “legitimate president,” López Obrador, will lay out his case for the other side of that question.

Workshops are planned at which evidence that has reportedly been gathered by the “vote by voters” in the meantime will be boiled down into new PowerPoint. I will have a look at all that this week to see if I want to continue maintaining the strong thesis.

I have a couple of reviews of that AMLO book in the pipeline at the moment as well, one breathlessly supportive (Proceso), one oozing histrionic disappointment at what it terms a lack of sufficient evidence on concrete evidence (El Universal).

I think I might just have to try to read the book for myself. To come.

First, this:

México, 30 de junio.- El consejero presidente del IFE, Luis Carlos Ugalde, sostuvo categórico que en la elección presidencial de 2006 no hubo fraude y que las acusaciones en ese sentido que se han hecho desde entonces hasta ahora constituyen sólo retórica, pues no se ha aportado una sola prueba que lo demuestre.

The president of IFE, Luis Carlos Ugalde, remains categorical in his insistence that there was no fraud in the presidential election of 2006 and that accusations that there was are mere rhetoric, not based on a single bit of evidence to prove the case.

“Todas las ideas que han salido han sido de retórica, han sido de suposiciones, han sido de aseveraciones sin sustento”, dijo Ugalde Ramírez en una entrevista.

“All the ideas that have come out have been mere rhetoric, speculation, statements without foundation,” said Ugalde in an interview.

“Cicarelli Assets Still Hanging Out Online”: YouTube Gets Bent But Stays Unborked

Nonsensical Net pseudolibertarian noise campaign: “Boycott Cicarelli: Brazil Without Censorship.” Source: Pravda in Portuguese, a fully-owned subsidiary of Gazprom.

Tato Malzoni wanted the São Paulo court to rule that the entire site be interdicted until means were found to prevent the exhibition of the video with the images of him and Cicarelli [doing it] on a beach in Cádiz, in Spain.

Yeah, well

You can’t always get watch you wa-ant
You can’t always get watch you wa-ant

Consultor Jurídico reports that the infamous “sex on the beach” video involved in the notorious “blanket censorship” of YouTube.com by a São Paulo court last year — nothing of the kind ever happened — is as undead as the latest 21st-century sequel to the popular George Romero movies about brain-eating zombies.

Gist, as I understand it: Blocking the entire YouTube.com domain for the sake of Tato’s assets is an absurd proposition. But Google should try to do more than just comply with orders to block specific URLs pointing to specific copies of the video. It should try harder to find a way to identify any new copies of the video being uploaded to new URLs and bork them preemptively.

Which could be technically doable, I guess –a pattern recognition algorithm designed to flag all possible 2D manifestations of the unique Cicarelli bubble butt? — but also no doubt hackable, like everything else.

It is always interesting to see technology companies whose marketing departments rely so heavily on the “technology can work miracles!” pitch — what I call “the rhetoric of the technological sublime” — arguing “technical unfeasibility.”

So I guess the bottom line is that Google does, under this decision, need to try to find a way to do more than just respond to “this URL shows Cicarelli’s assets, block it please” letters submitted by armies of third-party Cicarelli asset managers.

Google has announced it will roll out a local edition of YouTube, freeing up Mountain View from having to import Brazilians to sort through e-mails from Brazilian lawyers. That might help.

But then again, IANABL [Brazilian lawyer, or indeed any kind of lawyer.] So somebody explain to me what the intellectual property implications are here? This lawsuit is a strategic maneuver of some kind, in the armed media monopoly wars, but I am not quite sure exactly what Google’s competitors are after here.

Background:

 

• Brazil: YouTube Beats The Bishop (in a similar case, the head of the Universal Church is refused a request to take down an embarassing clip aired on Globo in 1995)
• The Veejay Vadia Is Not to Blame
• What “the Brazilian Judge Who Changed His Mind” Actually Said
• Cicarelli Assets Still Hanging Out Online
• Who is Renato Bialystock & Blum?
• I Write to Red Herring (John Palfrey disinforms)
• In a São Paulo Court, Vandals Pull a YouTube Switcheroo
• YouTube in Sampa: One Flea Dooms The Whole Dog

The volume of lurking lobbyist-driven disinformation that got into the content pipeline on this story makes it a strong candidate for the NMM(-TV)SNB(B)CNNBS FUD Campaign of the Year.

Risk management takeaway: People admitted to the bar in the jurisdiction in question are far less likely to be blowing smoke out their asses than quango-tangoing Harvard Law professors. See also

• Brazilian Blawger: “YouTube Case Runs Counter to Trend”

I translate, hastily, for later recollection in tranquillity (Wordsworth) and pra inglês ver. The amicus briefs are the really interesting part of this case, which otherwise, as our Blawger friend notes, does not seem to run “counter to the trend” that the invalid garbled ruling that caused all the fuss in the first place ran counter to.

O Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo vetou a exibição na internet do video com as imagens picantes do namoro da modelo Daniella Cicarelli numa praia da Espanha. O site de videos YouTube está obrigado a instalar um sistema de rastreamento e eliminação dos vídeos com imagens da apresentadora flagrada em uma praia da Espanha em cenas de sexo com seu namorado à época Tato Malzoni, o empresário Renato Malzoni Filho. O site tem prazo de 30 dias para fazer o rastreamento e, no caso de descumprimento, estará sujeito a multa diária de R$ 250 mil.

The São Paulo [state supreme court] banned the exhibition on the Internet of a video showing spicy images of model Daniella Cicarelli [doing it in the road] on a [public] beach in Spain. The YouTube video Web site is obliged to install a system for tracking and eliminating the videos with images of the TV host, who was caught on a Spanish beach [doing it] with then-boyfriend Tato Malzoni [a Merrill Lynch investment banker with a B.A. in fashion design whose daddy -- "I am a legitimate businessman!" -- owns half the Av. Paulista, go figure.] The site has 30 days to perform the tracking and, in case of noncompliance, will be subject to a daily fine of [US$120,000].

The almighty gringobuck is down to something like R$1.92. Our glory days are over. From now on, when we travel, we travel by São Geraldão — Brazil’s funkiest bus line.

A proibição vale só para o Youtube. O video continuará livremente em circulação em centenas de outros sites da internet onde foi copiado e colado.

The prohibition only applies to YouTube. The video will continue to circulate freely on hundreds of other Internet sites where it has been copied and posted.

I have never seen it.

Good News from Rio de Janeiro: TV Globo Coverage Features Responsible Adults

White-collar perp walks: “The people like it that way.” Cover of the latest Caros Amigos. Your infotainment is loading. Please be patient. Your infotainment is now ready:

… we must dare to be free, even as we weep at the pain of those who offer up their own flesh to the hot steel, as have the police who have fallen these last months, watering the soil with blood and honor so that the seeds of peace may be sown. — Lt. Col. Mário Sérgio de Brito Duarte, former BOPE commander and current head of strategic planning, state public security department, Rio de Janeiro, writing on his Web log yesterday.

As you know, I am taking copious notes on the reporting on the latest outbreak of bloody chaos in the northern suburbs of Rio this week.

Today, a postmortem on the reporting from one of TV Globo’s other nightly newscasts.

The “why don’t they report the good news?” meme is very common these days. See

• “The Good News About South Africa”
• “Business-Friendly”: Civita and Murdoch

But there actually is genuine good news on the journalistic front in the midst of all the blood and guts and chumbo quente and “Rio is Baghdad” alarmist bunkum.

It is not the Second Coming of St. Walter of Cronkite by any means (and the most trusted man in America in his day, for all his virtues, was no saint either, to be honest. Sainthood is not necessary to the preservation of one’s professional self-respect).

But it does, I think, represent appreciable gains for the reality-based community in the struggle for the million-megawatt megaphone in Brazil.

As I noted the other day, critics, in the YouTube comments thread, of this example of TV Globo news reporting thought the Jornal do Globo coverage was remiss in only hearing from official sources.

And it is true that in this report, only the state public safety secretary and the chief of the state judicial police — and pointedly (I thought) not the third man in the triumvirate, the commandant of the state military police — are heard from.

I also thought that was less than ideal, and still do.

The specific complaint was that responsible critics of the operation from a human rights angle were not heard.

That is a fair criticism, I think

On the other hand — and this is not chopped liver — the “let us not rush to judgment” defense for this editorial decision is not spurious, either.

I am willing for the news media to let that hot-blooded story — Rio: “11 of 19 Alemão Dead May Have Been Innocent” — cool on the windowsill before trying to eat it. But I do expect it to be covered eventually.

The barring of OAB representatives from the autopsies is a disturbing development. Just look at what happened to old Mrs. Ascencio in Veracruz, Mexico.

What did happen to old Mrs. Ascencio?

Exactly my point.

On balance, however, I found this JN report a far cry from the kind of outrages on professional ethics regularly perpetrated by Fantástico and the Jornal Nacional — even if, on some of the hard facts, its factual reporting diverged dramatically from facts stated by other news agencies. See Rio: “How Many Dead at the Complexo Alemão?”

Did the operation start at 9 a.m. or 10? And so on.

Still, let us focus on the positive. The Kremlin demands it.

A Gazprom-controlled radio station — Gazprom has bought up some 90% of the Russian media — recently ordered its news writers to make at least 50% of the stories “positive,” according to the Harper’s Index.

Okay, so how about this: This is another news team inside the Globo empire, doing another kind of journalism — and apparently thinking carefully about it, finding room for maneuver within the boundaries of the hackneyed formulas imposed from above by the likes of Ali Kamel, and trying to do their job in a manner befitting responsible adults.

So if we must always have a good news angle to the story — I tend to believe that the vast majority of news, to most people, is neither good nor bad, but rather relevant or irrelevant, useful or not useful — I would say that is it: There are plenty of signs that the responsible adults at Globo are beginning to assert themselves, and not just on the Internet, either.

I say more power to them.

And I will try to be more careful in the future not to throw the responsible adults out with the bathwater when I blast the Ali Kamel-run Globo Journalism Central as an insanely banana-republic font of gabbling, hysterical, propagandistic, often viciously racist FUD and infowar.

As I will continue to do whenever I see examples of it. Which are legion. See

• O Jornal Nacional (Brazil) x O Jornalismo: A Case Study
• NMM(-TV)SNB(B)CNNBS: The Cops of Fox x Globo’s BOPE

Colombia: “U.S. Democrats Want To Hear From Mancuso”

Product placement: Salvatore Mancuso and his Sony laptop of parapolitical doom. Just like in 007: Casino Royale (See my review, 007 카지노로얄).

You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. — Vice President Dick Cheney, Sept. 16, 2001

Congresistas demócratas de E.U. están interesados en escuchar versiones de Salvatore Mancuso (EL TIEMPO, Bogotá): “U.S. congressional Democrats are interested in hearing Salvatore Mancuso’s side of the story.”

As I noted on April 2, 2007:

Also in El Tiempo this weekend: El Alemán says that payoffs to paramilitaries from multinational fruit companies were common knowledge. See also Yes, Nos Temos Bananas, on the Chiquita admissions.

Ohio-based banana-republican Chiquita (Public, NYSE:CQB) has admitted to having a problem — if I may engage in some consultantspeak here — with an imperfectly transparent strategic alliance in which the co-opetition dynamic got somewhat, er, out of hand, overrunning its business ecosystem like swarms of African killer bees.

It [Chiquita subsidiary Banadex] also collaborated in bringing more than 3,000 AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds in to Colombia, weapons later used in various massacres in the Northeast.

Ouch. Worse:

According to US court documents, Chiquita told the [U.S.] justice department in April 2003 that it was funding the paramilitaries, and then kept paying them for another 10 months with the department’s knowledge.

Compare Adult Supervision for Mexican Narcs?

Sergio Gómez Maseri, El Tiempo’s Washington correspondent, files this yesterday:

El representante William Delahunt no descartó que una comisión viaje a Colombia a escuchar al jefe ‘para’ en la cárcel. Vienen más audiencias.

Rep. William Delahunt did not rule out sending a delegation to Colombia to interview the “para” warlord in jail. Other interviews are in the works.

Rio: Carnival of Indignation!

No Mínimo (Brazil) Web poll: Do you think Carnaval 2007 was fixed? Top answer: “Of course it was! In Rio, corruption runs hog wild.”

Time will tell whether the emergence of the quasi government is to be viewed as a symptom of decline in our democratic government, or a harbinger of a new, creative management era where the purportedly artificial barriers between the governmental and private sectors are breached as a matter of principle. — Kevin R. Kosar, “The Quasi Government: Hybrid Organizations with Both Government and Private Sector Legal Characteristics” (Congressional Research Service, February 13, 2007)

CPI do Carnaval vê contradições em depoimentos de jurados (O Globo Online): The jurors from this year’s (internationally televised) competitive Carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro start to testify before a municipal parliamentary commission of inquiry, or CPI, into an allegedly bribery (and extortion) scheme designed to rig the results.

What was in those “kits” distributed to jurors, the ones discussed by a LIESA official on a federal wiretap in Operation Hurricane? Police say, based on their analysis of other conversations unrelated to Carnaval, that “kits” is mafia code for bribes.

The CPI will shortly adjourn until August, after the Pan-American Games.

For some background, see

• Brazil: “Hurricane II” Targets Police Corruption
• Rio: Carnaval Carnage Goes on the Record
• Rio: Carnival Carnage is Political Circus!
• Brazil: Hurricane Blows Lid Off Hummingbird Hype?
• Hummingbirds Roar Like the Lion King at Sapucaí

You will also recall that the Rock in Rio event, also organized by a public-private partnership, was allegedly used to funnel public money into political slush funds through publicity contracts managed by the infamous Belo Horizonte Baldy.

The former president of the PSDB, Sen. Eduardo Azeredo, has admitted his 1998 run for governor of Minas Gerais received dirty money — a lot of dirty money — through this mechanism.

Former governor Geraldo Alckmin of São Paulo is under investigation for a similar scheme; see São Paulo: Did Harvard Man Love The Second Superpower Too Much?

RIO - A Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito (CPI) da Câmara Municipal, que investiga as suspeitas de fraude no resultado do carnaval, já ouviu nove dos 40 jurados do desfile das escolas de samba do Grupo Especial.

The muncipal legislature CPI investigating suspected fraud in the Carnaval results has now heard 9 of the 40 jurors who judged the parades of the Special Group.

Um dos chamados para depor se negou a falar, o produtor cultural William Taranto. Os vereadores consideraram contraditórias as informações sobre o conteúdo dos kits recebidos antes dos desfiles. Também houve contradição sobre o número de reuniões de que eles participaram.

One of the jurors summoned to appear, producer William Taranto, refused to testify. City lawmakers consider contradictory the testimony they received about the content of the “kits” received by jurors prior to the parades. Also contradictory was testimony about the number of meetings they participated in.

On June 13, LIESA held a press conference to express its “indignation” over the charges (text of the release translated below).
Taranto was one of the more indignant ones, according to documentations of the event on the LIESA Web site. At the event, according to a photo caption, “Ana Maria Maia spoke in the name of the Mayor.”

Jornal do Globo: 1,350 in the Complexo do Alemão

YouTube: The TV coverage of the battle of the Spartan 1,350 in Rio’s Complex do Alemão is starting to get posted. This is the Jornal do Globo from June 28, 2007.

Comment on the YouTube posting: “They interview tons of cops and nobody else.”

Noted for later comment.

Rio: BBC Newbie on Belfast & Rio

Take a look where you’re livin’
You got the Army on your street
And the RUC dog of repression
Is barking at your feet
Is this the kind of place you wanna live?
Is this were you wanna be?
Is this the only life we’re gonna have?
What we need is
An Alternative Ulster
–Stiff Little Fingers, 1979

Repórter irlandês compara violência entre Rio e Belfast: The Folha de S. Paulo carries the impressions of Gary Duffy, a new BBC reporter in Brazil, on the War of the Spartan 1,350 in the Complexo do Alemão in Rio de Janeiro.

It’s like Belfast, he commented.

Which is exactly the comparison that comes first to my mind as well.

Hence one of my first posts on the “army in the streets” debate in Brazil: ‘Take a Look Where You’re Living, You Got the Army on the Streets’

Which is why I like to use the expression “the hard men in their hog heaven.”

“The hard men” being an Irish euphemism for the IRA.

A statement from UNICEF compared the situation to the Gaza Strip.

Globo, meanwhile, continues to pound on the talking point it has beaten to death for months now: Rio de Janeiro is Baghdad. The Estadão’s Moonie squad continues to insist that Rio is Port au Prince.

The Rio government exchanged visits earlier this year with the police in Bogotá, meanwhile, but the Governor then backed off on promoting parallels between the two cases.

According to public health analyses that I read, the relative success in bring down the levels of violence in Colombia was due to one factor: Gun control. A 2005 national gun control refe