Fire Hydrant of Freedom

The Americas
Brodie Kirkpatrick, Expeditionary Intelligence

Political Violence in Mexico at Historical High as Elections Draw Closer

As Mexico prepares for a general election next month, political violence has plagued the nation at all levels. Many candidates have been killed, injured, otherwise threatened, or withdrawn from their races.


Introduction

Throughout the month of May, multiple media outlets reported that violence in Mexico leading up to this June’s general election is the highest it has been in recent history. More than two dozen candidates for various offices have been killed leading up to the June 2 vote; hundreds have dropped out of races. Additionally, hundreds of others have asked the federal government for security details. The goal of armed groups is to install corrupted or coerced leaders in local offices so they can better exploit Mexican communities.

Once largely focused on shipping drugs to the United States, the cartels now also smuggle migrants, extort businesses, and win contracts for firms they control.

Cartels have focused most of their efforts on local politics in influential states vying to control things like municipal police, public works, and many other essential departments of state and local governments. This strategy makes controlling mayoral offices crucial, however, despite the large focus on local municipalities, candidates for governor and senate seats are also at high risk. Cartels have targeted candidates from all of Mexico’s major parties. In Maravatío, a municipality of 80,000 in the central state of Michoacan, three candidates for mayor have been killed; two from Morena, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador party, and one from the opposition National Action Party, or PAN. Carlos Palomeque, head of the PAN in Chiapas, says nearly two dozen mayoral candidates from the party have dropped out of their races. It used to be that the cartels bought off voters, he says. Now, “they force candidates from the race. It’s cheaper.”

López Obrador accuses the opposition and media of exaggerating the violence in states across Mexico to discredit his efforts against organized crime. Yet even López Obrador’s protégé, presidential front-runner Claudia Sheinbaum, was stopped by masked men last month in a region of the state controlled by the Sinaloa cartel. The men warned her to “remember the poor people” and waved her through their checkpoint.

Can President Lopez Obrador End Mexico's Drug War?
Despite AMLO’s claims of exaggeration, just in the past 45 days, front-running mayoral candidates in influential states such as Guanajuato, Chiapas, Puebla, and Tabasco have been killed by gunmen. The most notable of those killed was Carlos Narvaez Romero, a member of the Grupo Tabasco, a collective of politicians and influential Mexican business owners closely aligned with President AMLO such as Adán Augusto López, former Secretary of the Interior, Octavio Romero Oropeza, general director of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), Javier May, Morena candidate to the governorship of said entity, as well as Rafael Marín Mollinedo, Mexico's ambassador to the World Trade Organization (WTO), who was also head of the National Customs Agency. Romero was slated to succeed the former head of customs who was killed in 2022. 

Analyst Comment

While political violence is nothing new for Mexico, this election season has proven to be the most violent in recent history. Despite having high political violence, Mexico’s non-state actors vying for influence are not stoking the violence to eventually conduct a coup. Adversely, the cartels want control and to be able to operate behind the scenes with impunity without being thrust into the spotlight of the international stage. Traditionally, cartels have paid off, blackmailed, or coerced officials. However, the recent uptick in violence may signal a change in the modus operandi while also highlighting the lack of control the government has over the situation. To further cement this, cartels have consistently proven to the public that if they speak out against the violence they will likely be tracked, kidnapped, tortured, and/or killed without recourse from authorities as there are multiple accounts of this. Beyond the uptick in violence, the profile of the individuals murdered such as Carlos Romero who was slated to be the next head of customs for the entirety of Mexico has also raised much concern of whether an end to this violence is in sight or if this will be the normal for upcoming elections. Going into the June elections the possibility for violence remains extremely high and is likely to worsen.

https://sandhillssentinel.com/board-of-elections.../
In my neighborhood:

"According to Howell, the mistake was an easy one to make. “The system is fairly complex; the machines, the paperwork, the processes, the technology that support it in order to safeguard the integrity of our elections is rather involved,” he explained.

"Director Towanna Dixon followed Howell to explain what, by her account, happened. According to Dixon, the issue stemmed from a mix-up of “media sticks,” otherwise known as flash drives, used to record and upload the vote totals. The results for Carthage were recorded on the drive labeled for Pinehurst B2 and vice versa. This mislabeling caused the data to be reported incorrectly."

The ease of this error is not reassuring.  Imagine were bad faith to be involved!!!

"Harris's 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” earned just $234.13 in royalties last year"  - according to her 2023 financial disclosures

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/16/kamala-harris-financials-confirm-what-you-thought-about-her-books-n4929081

Reminds me of the number of delegates she won running for President, with her moving debate line, "That girl was me!"  0.0 delegates

They really know how to pick 'em.

the only "system" he is trying to save is the power of the Democrat Party.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=k1Sr2pIm&id=8A21ECFFECF8AE24B62EDE1E4F0C4DA5B8EA8196&thid=OIP.k1Sr2pImh5GammAmc2IFYQHaEw&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.9354abda922687919a9a602673620561%3frik%3dloHquKVNDE8e3g%26riu%3dhttp%253a%252f%252fstatic.demilked.com%252fwp-content%252fuploads%252f2018%252f04%252f5ae6e464ca166-mud-balls-hikaru-dorodango-japan-coverimage.jpg%26ehk%3dKGtKFKf7NGT1fCc8tNSQPR7QBQug14vYoe%252fZwsWFeTQ%253d%26risl%3d%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=411&expw=640&q=image+of+a+dirtball&simid=608005432429642921&FORM=IRPRST&ck=861B81B0A06CF1AF2B012FEBD2FA9C73&selectedIndex=0&itb=0&ajaxhist=0&ajaxserp=0

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-trial-against-trump-will-throw

The Trial Against Trump Will Throw the Election into Chaos
The former president has been dragged into court on a flimsy charge that rests on the testimony of a convicted liar.


By Eli Lake

May 15, 2024

When Donald Trump was indicted last year by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, I was skeptical. The indictment alleged that the 45th president had falsified payments to his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, by classifying them as legal fees when in fact it was reimbursement for hush money to the porn star known as Stormy Daniels.

As the trial has unfolded over the past two months, Daniels has testified that Trump had sex with her at Lake Tahoe in 2006 and didn’t wear a condom or display much sexual endurance. Cohen testified that he dutifully made the payments to Daniels on Trump’s behalf because he was “knee-deep in the cult of Trump.” Former senior Trump aide Hope Hicks has testified to the lengths the 2016 campaign and Trump White House went to suppress stories of the former president’s past sexual scandals.

The resistance commentariat insists that Trump is going down. Republican Never Trump lawyer George Conway writes in The Atlantic that Bragg’s case is “kind of perfect.” MSNBC host and former Republican operative Nicole Wallace assures viewers that Trump’s lawyers “bombed” their cross-examination of Cohen. Former Justice Department official Andrew Weissman praises Bragg’s “crackerjack team of experienced attorneys” for building an airtight case.

But missing from this wall-to-wall coverage is any mention of the underlying crime that Trump falsified business records to advance his campaign. And that is a fatal flaw in the case, because New York law stipulates that falsifying business records can only be charged as felonies (as Bragg has done) if it’s done to further another crime. Trump has not been charged with another crime, though Bragg has floated the theory that the business records were falsified to deprive 2016 voters of information about his tryst with Daniels.

There are other flaws as well. Robert Costello, one of the lawyers who worked closely with Cohen at the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Southern District of New York, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that his old office declined to prosecute the hush money case against Trump because Cohen was “totally unworthy of belief.”

Cohen is Bragg’s star witness. And according to Costello, Cohen told the U.S. attorney’s office in 2018 that the “payment to Daniels was his own idea, designed to try and get him back into the inner circle of Trump people in Washington.”

That is damning testimony from a far more credible source than Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress and served two and a half years in prison.

It’s still quite possible that the Manhattan jury will convict Trump on the 34 felony charges Bragg has brought. But there is no chance the conviction will withstand appeal, particularly given that it relies so heavily on Cohen’s testimony.

At best the anti-Trump “resistance” will win a Pyrrhic victory. They may get their headline: “Trump Convicted in Hush Money Trial.” But the charge will not stick.

In the meantime, Alvin Bragg has thrown the 2024 election into chaos by dragging the presumptive Republican presidential nominee into court to defend himself against an untested legal theory premised on the testimony of a convicted liar.

Trump already has proven that he will not recognize the results of elections that he doesn’t win. Bragg’s prosecution gives Trump and his supporters a ready-made excuse not to accept the results of the 2024 election should President Joe Biden prevail.

The hush money trial also gives permission and incentive to ambitious Republican prosecutors to repay Democrats in kind. Our legal system will soon be dominated by the whims of those in power as opposed to the rule of law.

Costello on Wednesday summed up the dangers of Bragg’s folly. “In the Trump case, they are seeking a conviction by any means necessary,” he said. “They do not care if it is overturned on appeal because that will likely not happen until after the election. In the meantime, they will have effectively interfered with the 2024 presidential election and perhaps influenced some voters because of an ill-gotten conviction.”

In other words, Alvin Bragg is destroying our democratic system in order to save it.