AT LEAST IT IS BETTER THAN NOTHING
July 4, 2005

            Miami. It isn’t all that we Mexicans living in the United States were hoping for, but at least it’s better than nothing.  The chance to vote in the upcoming presidential elections is, indeed, a “historical” event, as President Vicente Fox said.  However, in passing this measure, the Mexican Congress didn’t go far enough, not far enough at all. It demonstrated, one more time, its inability to do things well and in a timely manner. I’ll explain why in a minute.

            But let’s start with what’s important.  A vast majority of the members of the House of Representatives —455— approved the measure allowing Mexicans living abroad to vote by mail in the next presidential elections on July 2, 2006. The Mexican Senate had already done the same, and Fox signed the law last Thursday. Thus ends a struggle that has lasted nearly two decades, in which millions of Mexicans were treated as second-class citizens.

The victory belongs, without a doubt, to the organizations of Mexicans abroad who pushed and pushed until they finally made what is clearly established by the Mexican Constitution a reality.  They managed do this in spite of all the obstacles that came up in Congress and within the political parties.

Sometimes it looked like nobody wanted such voting rights to materialize.  Six years ago it was the Mexican Senate, controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that killed a proposal that would have allowed Mexicans living abroad to vote in the 2000 election. The PRI was afraid that Mexicans who had left the country (due to the corruption, poverty and murders that characterized the seven decades of PRI administrations) would vote against them. The PRI lost anyway; those who had stayed home were just as angry as those who had left the country.

And this time, all the proposals that would have given the vote to the 11 million Mexicans who were born in Mexico but reside abroad, were struck down one by one. Finally, and with very little time remaining in the electoral calendar, a watered-down version was proposed that would give the vote to some four million Mexicans living abroad. Of course, that’s alright for them. But what about the other Mexicans, like me, who want to vote but don’t have a voter card?  Once again, they have pushed us aside and made things very complicated for us.

At the age of 47, I’ve never voted in my life. At first, when I was living in Mexico, I refused to do it because the PRI always cheated.  And now that there is a real representative democracy and I do want to vote absentee, it turns out that my country’s Congress is standing in my way.  In order to vote I will have to go to Mexico, apply for my voter card there and then come back to the United States to vote by mail. I am lucky enough to have a United States residency card (green card) but millions of undocumented immigrants lack the papers they need to be able to go back and forth to Mexico, nor do they have the money to do so.

This is the consummate example of the inefficiency of the Mexican House of Representatives and Senate.  They had not one, but several years to approve changes to the Federal Electoral Institutions and Procedures Code (Cofipe) that would allow Mexicans living abroad to vote.  But the representatives waited until the very last day of the last extraordinary session of the last year of the legislative calendar prior to the elections, to do anything.

In the end, it is true, they passed it.  But the Congress did its job poorly and at the wrong time.  Why couldn’t they have brought up exactly the same thing, one, two or three years ago? Moreover, since they did everything in such a mad scramble, they made everything much more complicated.  Voting will be done by mail, with a bunch of rules and deadlines, and not in person at a ballot box like the Mexicans in Mexico on voting day.  This could lower the real number of voters abroad to only about 400 thousand.  And they left a lot of things up in the air.  For example, how will the candidates campaign abroad?  As of now nobody knows.

If the congressmen were employed by a private company, they would have been fired long ago for failure to do their job. It is easy to imagine what would happen to any employee who failed to promptly perform the duties of his job, he’d be fired. No employee can last long if he takes five years to do a project that should have taken him one, and even so, he turns it in unfinished.  But since congressmen cannot be fired for incompetence, the Mexican people are the ones who suffer. And now it’s those of us who live on the other side of the border’s turn. And what is the congressmen’s poor excuse?  That’s the way it goes, it’s all we could do. Well, it was precious little.

The congressmen and senators tend to lose sight of the fact that they are public servants, and that Mexican citizens are their bosses, and not the other way around.  The worst sort of stereotypes associated with Mexicans—that we do everything late and haphazardly—proved true in this last session of the Mexican Congress.  This is legislative mediocrity.

Doubtless the joy of knowing that millions of Mexicans will be able to send their vote—and not just their dollars—to Mexico is tempered by the frustration of the many others who will not be able to do the same.  The truth is I don’t want to rain on the parade of those who won. It is a well-earned victory achieved on what sometimes seemed more like enemy soil than our own country. It is better than nothing.  But while some are celebrating, others will have to wait another six years to see if Congress will see fit to do its job.

I myself am planning to go to Mexico to get my voter card and vote in 2006.  I’ll let you know how the entire process goes.