First, Jules, your false statement that in 2000 I was “all for Fox” is a blood libel. Retract it, please, because I do take it personally. Of the eight stories for which I was sued by Banamex that year, one was my report of Citibank and money laundering by the Fox campaign (June 24, 2000), prior to the election and my report of Fox and the Banamex owner meeting on narco-trafficking lands (July 9, 2000) three days after the vote. See this link to refresh your selective memory.

I criticized you at the time (privately) for defending the PRI’s vote-buying campaigns (which you portrayed as “social programs”, a maneuver repeated this year by the PAN federal government). But for you to imply that my critique represented a pro-Fox position is false and defamatory. I paid a price for reporting the inconvenient details about Fox at an hour when you were – as now – shooting spitballs in your underwear seated in front of your computer. True, my reports were vindicated by the New York Supreme Court, but it cost me a year of my life to defend myself. And if those guys couldn't silence me, what makes you think you can?

Your other false statement of fact – one that reveals you haven’t done your homework before inventing accusations that come from your own fantasies and sloth when it comes to investigating before you accuse – is this one:

You claimed:

"You were out there a while back there with the Zapatista caravan discouraging people from voting. Now you're all concerned about the voting process."

I have been with the Other Campaign since its inception and still am. I challenge you to furnish a single statement by Marcos or the Other Campaign urging anybody not to vote. To the contrary, you will find multiple statements specifically respecting everyone’s personal decision about whether to vote and who to vote for. The main point of the Other Campaign was that the electoral process can’t be trusted, that it is rigged and unfair and doesn’t address the systemic abuse of the people by those above. On this point, Mexican electoral authorities are proving, today, that the Other Campaign is correct (and you will see, if the fraud succeeds, an exodus from political parties to the more radical praxis of the Other Campaign, very soon, if the fraud is sustained; and the Other Campaign, unlike the parties, will know how to channel that rage).

I find this accusation particularly unseemly because in January I contacted you when the Other Campaign came to your town and invited you to have special access to a meeting between Marcos and Other Campaign adherents to which the Commercial Media was not invited, but as a member of our J-School faculty, you were welcome to come. You choose not to attend. Do you remember the reason you gave me? If I quote you here you’ll be really pissed off. So I will just invite you to explain to the readers why you declined that very special invitation in your own city to see the true facts for yourself, in your own words.

Having declined the opportunity to learn for yourself, it is unacceptable for you to now invent my position or that of the Other Campaign and distort it into something it has never been. Having made those accusations, the burden is now on you to either document them with hard facts or retract them. Anything less is irresponsible.

As for more evidence of the fraud, you know - and my previous PREF report reveals - I am preparing to deliver. So keep your powder dry and stop distracting me with invented falsehoods from your fertile imagination. Not you nor anybody has a right to tell me to shut up, to not be “inflammatory” (translation: to not tell inconvenient truths), and especially not because I’m in your eyes a “foreigner.” I am not going to shut up and you ought to know that about me by now.

Should “foreigners” like Mexicans in the US shut up about what goes on there? Even if geezer immigrants with more time there tell them to do so? If you don’t wish to speak against the social order, or see too much personal risk in it, that’s your prerogative. But don’t then try to silence those of us who, at considerable personal risk, refuse to shut up or defend a corrupt system. It is the easiest thing in the world to defend those in power. But to resent and try to foment distrust against those men and women that do have balls to risk all to tell inconvenient (or "inflammatory") truths is simply the worst form of cowardice. You are, or used to be, better than that.

Finally, the fact that I was not an AMLO supporter, I think, makes my arguments more, not less, credible. You seem to think that the burden is on his campaign, as if this is a soccer game. But this is not futbol: the consequences inflict everyone. The moment the polls closed the election returned to being the collective property of all. And the IFE and the rest of the system are demonstrating today that everything we said before about the fundamental unfairness and criminality of the system is coming true. It is that fact - and not anybody saying it - that inflames.