Word: blancos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...alien community of “Planet 51”—brought to life by co-directors Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad, and Marcos Martinez alongside screenwriter Joe Stillman (“Shrek”)—immediately calls to mind an idealized 1950s America. White picket fences and pink-lipsticked Stepford alien wives make up the charming atmosphere of their small-town utopia. The film acquires all the makings of a sci-fi romantic comedy when Lem, the teenage protagonist voiced by Justin Long (of Mac commercial and “He’s Just...
...wasn't always this way. In the 1970s, burnished by a romanticized image of its members as revolutionaries fighting Francisco Franco's authoritarian regime, ETA assassinated Luis Carrero Blanco, the Prime Minister whom Franco had picked to succeed him. By the end of the decade, it had killed hundreds more people. And in the 1980s, the clandestine organization carried out a series of highly visible attacks: a car bomb parked at a Barcelona department store in 1987 left 21 dead; another, in 1986, exploded as a convoy of civil guards passed, killing...
...small percentage of people who actually make the effort to go and annul their ballots, he predicts that the overall abstention rate will be a shocking 70%. "Politicians will not be able to ignore a level of turnout that low," he says. Lund says the voto en blanco supporters could then go on to form a new political opposition along with disaffected members of the main parties. "This movement is a response to a lack of serious options," he says. "But in a country like Mexico, with all its problems, you cannot go on [like this]. People need...
...figure salaries in a nation where the minimum wage is $5 a day. And while video evidence has shown prominent politicians stacking wads of dollar bills into briefcases or extorting businessmen, the same candidates keep beating the courts and getting back on the ballot. For the voto en blanco movement, Mexico has swung from dictatorship to a kleptocracy. One YouTube video for the campaign shows supposed politicians from the three main parties laughing as they tear into a cake shaped like Mexico. (See pictures of the tunnel technology of Mexico's drug cartels...
...successful is the voto en blanco campaign? The Demotecnia survey found only 3% of respondents saying they would deliberately annul their vote, suggesting the loud campaign is having a limited effect. "This is a very élitist movement of university professors and wealthy young people on the Internet," says Demotecnia president Maria de las Heras. "The media are covering it so much because it is something fun and different. But it will not have any long-term impact on Mexico's political system...