AMLO Fingers Racoon

Oh. That didn't come out right.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador today aired two amateur videos purportedly showing ballot boxes being stuffed. He asserts that this proves that Calderon and the PAN oversaw vote fraud that robbed AMLO of his victory. Leaving aside the logical leaps (does a video of an unidentified person stuffing a ballot box really prove a stolen election?), he introduced me to a Mexican term I had not heard before: mapache.

Specifically, when asked whether he was calling into question the integrity of the citizen poll workers, AMLO answered that on election day the citizens were at work, but so were the 'mapaches,' or 'racoons.' Apparently someone who steals votes is, in Mexican slang, a racoon.

This election gets more interesting every day.

As I suggested earlier, I am concerned that AMLO has so far had a lot of success using protest marches to force the government to do what he wants. I hope that this is one instance where it does not work. But frankly, if more than 1 million people rally in Mexico City, I fear that Mexico's IFE or Trife will find justification for ordering a full recount.

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