The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)

by Don Winslow

That the Federación had helped this president to steal the election. Four years ago, back in ’88, it seemed certain that the opposition candidate, the leftist Cárdenas, was going to win the election and topple the PRI, which had been in power since the 1917 Revolution. Then a funny thing happened. The computers that counted the votes magically malfunctioned. The election commissioner appeared on television to shrug and announce that the computers had broken down and that it would take several days to count the votes and determine the winner. And during those several days, the bodies of the two opposition watchdogs in charge of monitoring the computer votes—the two men who could have and would have asserted the truth, that Cárdenas had won 55 percent of the vote—were found in the river. Facedown. And the election commissioner had gone back on television to announce with a perfectly straight face that the PRI had won the election.