A couple of days ago started the broadcasting of spots where the political parties attacked each other to point out the missteps of the candidates for the presidency of Mexico.
Additionally, there have been cases where there's a clear manipulation when it comes to promotional events and the guidelines that attendees have to follow to support a candidate, buying a media, strategies of many years of work to get where they are today, including the lack of audience to events when the candidate arrives late and followers are long gone.
How do they affect the voters decision?
Mexico is just months away from electing their new president, we checked on the most visited internet sites in the country and we found out that the top places are the entertainment sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. It's true that these can also be used to search for information, but let's be honest, ¿do we get informed about the candidates or do we use the social nets to joke about them?
Recently I saw a comment that got my attention "What do you do for Mexico besides criticizing all the presidential candidates?" Up to now we could say that the internet is a free space and each person can do whatever they like, if you don't like an opinion, you remove that person from your contact list and the problem is over. The reality is that the campaigns themselves invade your news feed or "timeline" and, how does this influence in your decision to vote?
In Tijuana , there's a lot of talk about the amount of publicity invading the streets and some media. Three weeks after the presidential campaigns have started, it's clear that PRI party has an advantage over the competition, ¿where do you find a space without ads of Enrique Peña Nieto? The day that campaigns officially started, in less than 12 hours you could see cars with stickers of the PRI party candidate. And what about the other three?
Today it's easier to find publicity from the PAN and PRD parties, but it's uneven, and we appeal for more work from the regional offices of each party, a bigger support to the party's respective candidate, instead of complaining about some other candidate having more resources, or more connections of which the candidate is taking advantage of.
Diez4 magazine is known for showing, in an honest way, the reality of the regional youth; it recently presented an article about the lack of interest in regard to the national politics and with it, an alarming number: "A recent study from the Department of Sociology in the UAM Iztapalapa University, concluded that 75 percent of the Mexican youngsters will not vote in the coming federal elections. The reasons they mentioned are: discourage and exclusion".
We want to be clear, this article is not intended for the people to vote for a certain candidate, it's simply an invitation to use all the tools we have nowadays to get to know the propositions and the experience of each candidate before and during the current campaigns, and then vote for who we consider the best candidate.
It is a call of faith for the new leader of Mexico to work on the country's biggest necessities, a strong economy with a creation of new jobs, a better level of education, health services, public security in general terms, better life conditions for the Mexicans.
brenda.colon@sandiegored.com
Original Text: Brenda Colón
Translation : Daniel Blanco
