Supporters of Mexico’s two presidential candidates are slogging it out for votes online with attack-spam campaigns. The guy on the left will steal your house, and the guy on the right? Tastes like Hitler! Snip from Reuters item:
As the top candidates spend millions of dollars on negative ads, their backers are launching stealth attacks on their behalf from the unregulated anonymity of cyberspace, making outrageous claims in mass mailings, chat rooms and blogs. Leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and conservative ruling party contender Felipe Calderon are running neck-and-neck ahead of a July 2 election in a campaign marked by smear tactics.
But those attacks pale in comparison to e-mails claiming the leftist would ban religious meetings, or limit foreign travel, or that Calderon would seek to emulate Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973-1990 rule in Chile. Among the more polite missives: “Adolf Hitler’s rhetorical discourse is identical to that of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.”
Link. They should talk to this guy about this.
Reader comment: “Monterrey” of the Monterrey, Mexico-based blog ochocuartos says,
The mexican presidential election campaigns have been the worst ever. The top two parties have started a war of lies that has made that a lot of mexicans don’t trust any candidate. It’s like a shit-throwing war. Yes, the other candidate will end up covered up in shit. But so will every other candidate. Take a look at this youtube video: Link. Even if you don’t know spanish, you will quickly get that comparing any candidate to Stalin, Pinochet and Hitler is, probably, a little bit too much. Even for Mexico. And we get to hear that kind of “dirty war” propaganda, as it is called here in Mexico, everyday. Makes you sick to your stomach. It’s the ugly side of democracy.
Reader C. says,
This site has most of the smear emails that followers of the mexican leftist party PRD and his candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, are distributing. I haven’t been able to find a repository of smear emails against the conservative party PAN and their candidate, Felipe Calderon, although I have received several of them.