In the session of the General Council of the INE held on Thursday of last week, April 18, a minor character of the lowest level of political mischief, surnamed Noroña, who acts before said collegiate body as a representative of the parliamentary group of a party allied to Morena, a character who is usually used as a vulgar beater in desperate situations, made a statement before said electoral body that must be denied.
Denied as false, not because the bizarre character who uttered it is important. Denied, furthermore, because everything seems to indicate that it is part of an already decided strategy, given the scenario that Morena and his allies lose the election on June 2. For that matter, it is urgent for them to create an environment in which they can only be defeated if there is fraud. As happened in 2006, as recognized – they claim – by the then highest representative of the electoral authority, Luis Carlos Ugalde, president of the then IFE.
In discussion with counselor Jaime Rivera, from the INE, in said session Noroña recommended that he read the book This is how I lived it, written by Ugalde, where he – he says – “recognizes (that the 2006 presidential election) was won by AMLO.” He offered Counselor Rivera that he would later give him the page where that is read. It will be good if he does, because he is not here.
Of course, this is not about making a kind of unofficial defense of what Luis Carlos Ugalde wrote in his book. In short, what is written is written. But to denounce the narrative that is already being prepared to make the population believe that the eventual defeat of Morena on June 2 will necessarily be the product of a great electoral fraud, “like that of 2006.”
In his book, Ugalde remembers that around eleven o’clock at night on election day, July 2, 2006, he directed a message on television in which, given the closeness of how the results of the elections were being presented, he had He asked the candidates (Calderón, Madrazo and López Obrador) for caution and to refrain from declaring themselves winners.
However, he says that not ten minutes had passed since the end of his message when AMLO, in a hotel where he was and in front of national and foreign journalists, said that according to the reports he had from quick counts he was “at least 500 thousand votes up.”
Ugalde writes about it in his book: “Months later I learned that AMLO was lying, because the quick count given to him by his pollster, Ana Cristina Covarrubias, put Calderón 1 point – that is, approximately 400 thousand votes – ahead. López Obrador – says Ugalde – gave the result the opposite of what reality was. She said it in November 2006, at a survey seminar organized by the IFE. It was true that Covarrubias herself had announced shortly after 8 p.m. that AMLO was ahead of Calderón, but she had asserted it based on an exit poll. That night Covarrubias also did a quick count, which is a more precise statistical exercise, and in this one, which according to AMLO, put him 500 thousand votes ahead, it was actually Calderón who surpassed his opponent by 1 percentage point. AMLO had that quick count in his hands. Covarrubias gave it to him” (This is how I lived it, p. 197).
As will be remembered, AMLO insisted that the errors in filling out the scrutiny records were proof of the fraud he alleged. On this point, Ugalde writes: “If all the minutes with errors in 2006 are eliminated, the beneficiary would be Felipe Calderón, not López Obrador. The PAN candidate would expand his lead by almost half a million votes. Because there were a little more errors in the boxes where López Obrador won than where Calderón won, eliminating the latter increases the advantage of the latter” (page 284).
And regarding a new recount being carried out “vote by vote, box by box”, as AMLO and his followers demanded, Ugalde writes: “In any case, it is likely that if the boxes where López Obrador won widely had been recounted ( since it was only done in those in which Calderón triumphed), perhaps the vote would have changed (but) to the benefit of the PAN candidate” (p. 310).
Nowhere does Ugalde write in his book that López Obrador won the 2006 election. Rather, he says exactly the opposite. But hey, it’s about creating the version that in 2024 “there will also be electoral fraud.”
BOOK
This Tuesday, April 30, at 5:30 pm, on the south campus of the Anáhuac University, there will be the presentation of the book of my authorship “Don Quixote yesterday, today and always”. The comments will be provided by Diego Fernández de Cevallos, Juan José Rodríguez Prats and Carlos García Fernández.
