On Sunday June 7 (election day), the Mexican federal Police killed the young Antonio Vivar Díaz. He was not the only person assaulted by the public forces in Tlapa. At least four other people were seriously wounded. Antonio was the father of an eight-month-old child.  He was studying in the final year of an undergraduate degree in integral community development; in the National Pedagogical University.

This all began at 2:30 in the afternoon, when elements of the Federal Police arrived in two patrol cars and violently raided the offices of the Coordinadora Estatal de Trabajadores de la Educación de Guerrero (CETEG – education workers’ union of the State of Guerrero). Without any order of arrest, they detained six teachers. Later, policemen from the same group returned to the teachers' offices and seized two of their vans.

The agents also entered the house of Professor Juan Sánchez Gaspar and violently apprehended him. His son is teacher Juan Leuquín Sánchez, who, on June 5, was brutally attacked by state police and thugs from political parties.

Inhabitants of the Tepeyac colony, indignant at the arrests and raids, reproached the uniformed agents for their behavior, held them in custody and warned that they would not let them go them until the arrested teachers were released. The Federal Police responded by unleashing a heavy siege operation against the village. Finally with the mediation of Tlachinollan, an agreement was reached to exchange the prisoners of both bands.

About 8 PM, without fulfilling the agreed compromise, the federal Police moved into the village firing live ammunition and tear gas. According to witnesses, soldiers from the 27th infantry Battalion also took part.  In this operation, the agents assassinated Antonio Vivar Díaz.

What happened in Tlapa was no exception. In Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero and Michoacan, elements of the Federal Police, the Army and the Navy protected the election booths. The elections in these areas took place in a climate of militarization. Their objective was to prevent the call for a boycott of the elections promoted by the Movimiento Popular Guerrense and the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, calling for a solution to a petition platform of 11 points presented to the Ministry of the Interior, which, among other things demands: the presentation, alive, of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa and other disappeared persons, the repeal of all the structural reforms, in particular that of education and a new national pedagogical model.

In Chiapas, teachers carried out various protest actions. Teachers in Oaxaca occupied the district headquarters of the National Electoral Institute (INE) as well as gas stations and the warehouse of Pemex. Following a meeting with the negotiating commission and the Minister of the Interior, on the evening of Friday June 5, in the Nº one Military Camp, in which the government official gave an ultimatum to the movement, a Oaxaca union leader ordered a retreat from the occupied installations, to concentrate in the public parks.  In spite of this, in cities such as Tuxtepec teachers and local people had confrontations with the military. Dozens of teachers were detained.

According to the INE, those who promoted the boycott prevented the installation of 603 ballot boxes -- the highest number in many years -- the majority in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero and in some indigenous communities of Michoacán. In addition, a great number of votes were annulled by those calling to protest in this way, and who then spread their decision through social networks.

However what happened in areas of the south and central Pacific region was not replicated in the whole country. This June 7, the unease of citizens over the party system and the division of power that emerged from the Barcelona Agreements of 1996 was expressed in different ways in other regions. In the end, Mexico is many Mexicos. If in one case there was a call for a boycott, in others the protest involved independent candidates or emerging parties, and in yet others was expressed through annulment of the vote (5 per cent of votes emitted).

For example in Nuevo León, Jaime Rodríguez, until recently a PRI leader, was elected governor as an independent candidate. The triumph of El Bronco expresses both the fact that voters had had their fill of the party system as well as the decision of a sector of the powerful Monterrey bourgeoisie to have a direct political representative, from neither PRI (the Revolutionary Institutional Party, in government), nor PAN (National Action Party). We have a situation similar to when Manuel Clouthier and a group of businessmen joined the PAN, and had their most outstanding moment in the victory of Vicente Fox; only that now, thanks to an independent candidate, there was no need to negotiate with heads of parties.

From a similar vision one can understand the triumph of football player Cuauhtemoc Blanco as Mayor of Cuernavaca, under the banner of a local party that for years had struggled to remain alive. Without any particular political merit, supported by his friends from the sporting world and celebrities of the entertainment world, Blanco won a landslide victory, to the shame of the electoral operators of the PRI.

Another expression of this tendency to question the existing institutional structure is the national debacle of the PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party), particularly significant in their stronghold, Mexico City. The emergence of Morena in the capital of the country as the second electoral force indicates the discontent of the voters in the capital both with a corrupt and decayed political force, as well as with a local government that is formally in opposition, but has surrendered to the interests of the federal government.

In these circumstances, to speak of the election as a success or that democracy is advancing in the county is simply absurd. It is true that this was a historic election but not for the reasons alleged by its apologists, but for the contrary. The final result indicates that there is a serious problem of political representation and serious unease with the existing party system. This means a grave crisis of representation.

(June 9 2015)

(Translated by Jordan Bishop for ALAI)

Twitter: @lhan55

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/06/09/opinion/022a2pol