Activist to Cast Blank Ballot in General Elections EFE
go to original March 29, 2012

Javier Sicilia (Peter Hapak/TIME)

MEXICO CITY - Mexican poet and peace activist Javier Sicilia said he plans to cast a blank ballot in this year's general elections as a means of asserting his "dignity" and scolding the nation's political parties for failing to address problems of violence, poverty and social marginalization.

Sicilia told Efe he has "no favored candidate" because none of the hopefuls has a political and economic platform that promotes "peace and (national) development."

That is why he will be among the first to cast a blank ballot on July 1, when Mexicans choose President Felipe Calderon's successor and 2,000 other officials, including members of Congress, he said.

"If citizens had a little bit of dignity, they'd cast a blank ballot ... which at least would be a moral vote and that's something they can't take away from us," Sicilia said.

The poet, who launched the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity after his 24-year-old son, Juan Francisco, was brutally murdered a year ago by suspected drug-gang members, predicted "a high degree of abstentionism and a large number of blank ballots" in the elections.

He said many people are displeased that a bill that would have allowed candidates not affiliated with a political party to run was not approved in time for this year's election.

Speaking from Mexico City, where he presented his most recent novel, "El fondo de la noche" (The Depth of the Night), dedicated to his late son, Sicilia said whichever candidate wins Mexico's "ignominious" presidential elections "will simply continue administering the disgrace."

Nevertheless, the poet told Efe he will try to meet with the presidential candidates in mid-May and urge them to include issues of concern to citizens - "such as a nationwide lack of law and order, injustice, impunity" - in their platforms.

"I think it's Kafkaesque that, with the country being how it is, they're wanting to have some elections" as if Mexico were "at peace," the writer said.

Conflicts pitting heavily armed cartels against each other and the security forces have claimed some 50,000 lives in Mexico since December 2006, when Calderon took office and militarized the struggle against the drug mobs.

Sicilia's group has organized several marches bringing together relatives of victims of violence to demand an end to the president's tactic of deploying army soldiers to drug-war flashpoints, which it says is only making the country more insecure.

Mexico's campaign season officially gets underway on Friday.

Polls show Enrique Peña Nieto, candidate of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, with a more than 20-percentage-point lead over Josefina Vazquez Mota of the governing National Action Party, or PAN.

The candidate of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is a distant third, 10 percentage points behind Vazquez Mota.

The PRI ruled Mexico without interruption from 1929 until 2000, when National Action's Vicente Fox won the presidency with support from across the political spectrum, but the conservatives barely held on to power in 2006, as Calderon defeated Lopez Obrador by a mere 0.56 percent of the vote amid accusations of fraud.

Mexico's constitution limits the president to a single six-year term.

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