Mexico's hotly contested presidential election is only two days away. In The Narco News Bulletin today, Al Giordano files some final predictions and analysis on what might be in store for the country after Sunday.

Giordano writes:

"Anything can happen on Sunday, including an attempted electoral fraud, as occurred here in 1988. But this time the Mexican people will not swallow it. If Mexico's dubious Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, in its Spanish initials) tries to repeat that dark history, the revolution will begin on Monday. Those in power can't be that stupid. Or can they?

"All objective signs - if the vote is to be tabulated fairly and accurately - point to a punishing electoral victory by former Mexico City Governor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The big boys - at least the domestic ones who seem to believe their own hype that López Obrador is a 'leftist' (foreign capitalists are much more sanguine about the probability of victory by the candidate with the initials AMLO) - have tried everything to stop it. In 2005, they tried to remove López Obrador from the ballot with a legal maneuver called the desafuero. They only ended up making him stronger. Lately, they've attempted an Election of the State to impose a whiney little man named Felipe Calderón of the PAN (National Action) party as Fox's successor, but this week they were caught red-handed trying to rig the voter lists, among other old-style maneuvers, on Calderón's behalf. They were undone at each step through a medium known as the Internet, which did not exist in Mexico in 1988. They may still attempt to impose Calderón on Sunday but your correspondent doubts it because, if so, it bears repeating, a revolution will break out on Monday.

"The Mexican business and political elites are left with two other possible scenarios to try and stop the unstoppable: The first would be a 'surprise' victory by Roberto Madrazo, candidate of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), a man who has trailed the two frontrunners all year long according to the polls. Obviously, that scenario would be suspected by many as a fabrication and would not stand for long.

"The other possible scenario - now being spoken of openly in some corners of the Mexican press - would be to 'annul' Sunday's election results (there certainly have been enough documented irregularities to justify such a maneuver) and install an 'interim president' named Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. That last scenario would fascinate those above, since it was Cárdenas who acquiesced to the historic 1988 election fraud that robbed him of the presidency then, and who, of late, has shown an apparent bitterness that López Obrador, and not he, is his party's candidate today. In that scenario, the system would try to sell a Cárdenas bait-and-switch as a kind of latent display of 'justice,' the realization of a long-denied advance, eighteen years after the fact. But down below, few would be wowed or impressed by any play so cynical and mocking of an electorate's dignity. And there is that pesky little force down below and to the left that, seen or unseen, would put a stop to it faster than one can say 'national rebellion': the Zapatista Other Campaign."

Read the full story in The Narco News Bulletin, including some remarkable revelations of electoral crimes on the part of the PAN that have gone virtually unreported in the international press:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article1945.html

There will be more coverage of this potential turning point in the history of Mexico during the coming days in these pages, so keep reading. All eyes seem to be focused above now, but as Giordano explains, the deciding force for the country's future is "below and to the left."

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com

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