Harvard Mexican Student Group Rocked By Election Fraud Claims, Media Frenzy
The Harvard University Mexican Association of Students elections descended into personal attacks and accusations of corruption — some of which found their way to the mainstream Mexican media.
A dispute over the results of a leadership election in May for a University-wide Mexican affinity group spiraled into a monthslong vicious feud punctuated by allegations of corruption and personal attacks levied through mainstream Mexican news outlets.
But the infighting started weeks before the election of the Harvard University Mexican Association of Students as potential candidates argued over the rules and whether students who did not hold Mexican citizenship could vote in the election.
In an effort to ensure the election was conducted fairly, HUMAS’ outgoing leadership asked Associate Director for Student Engagement Marshall Page, a staff member in the Office of the Provost, to administer the process and count the votes.
A slate of candidates led by Abraham H. Majluf Rizo — a student in the Harvard Graduate School of Design — won the election. The group hoped to move past the turbulent electoral process, which caused a significant rift among Mexican students at Harvard, and begin planning for the next academic year.
Then, their names and faces began to appear in the Mexican media.
A small group of students led an effort to feed negative news articles about the winning ticket to a number of American and Mexican media outlets, including The Crimson.
The campaign even made its way to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who briefly addressed the electoral dispute in an August press conference.
While no HUMAS members have directly claimed responsibility for communicating with the media, private messages obtained by The Crimson revealed a small group of students affiliated with the losing ticket led the charge against Majluf and the perceived fraud in the election.
The YouTube videos and news articles amplified allegations of fraud in the HUMAS election, citing Majluf’s romantic relationship with Maria Jose Milla — the organization’s outgoing vice president — and a failure to adhere to the HUMAS bylaws.
In interviews with more than 40 current and former members of HUMAS, nearly all the students said the election should have been run better, but the process was not corrupt or fraudulent. Many students also said they were disappointed and unsettled that the winning slate was publicly shamed in the media.
Even Fernando Chavarria, a Harvard Medical School student who lost the HUMAS presidential election to Majluf, denounced the media crusade against the winning ticket.
“I was the president of that campaign — I don’t know where the ‘angry people’ is,” he said.
“I’m not angry, I’m not upset,” Chavarria added. “I understand that we lost.”
Emerging Factions
When the former executive board of HUMAS announced the start of the election process in April, it was the first election the group had held in more than four years.
Isabel Mejia Fontanot, who was president of HUMAS for the 2021-22 academic year, said the group refrained from holding elections because HUMAS’ bylaws were outdated, leaving the organization without a clear process for running leadership elections.
In recent years, the group transferred power by building a united “coalition” of all students interested in leadership.
“We knew that elections would be contested and that there would be controversy in different ways, just because the bylaws were old and it was hard to follow them exactly,” Mejia said.
Mejia said the reluctance to hold elections also came from a highly contested HUMAS election in 2016, — prompted by a perceived failure to adhere to the group’s bylaws — which was also escalated to University officials.
As some HUMAS alumni expected, history repeated itself.
In late February, Majluf, the boyfriend of HUMAS’ then-vice president, quietly reached out to some fellow HUMAS members and asked them to join his campaign.
Majluf’s effort incited the haphazard formation of an opposition group, according to Chavarria — the presidential nominee for the opposing slate of candidates.
“People who he didn’t call at the moment got a little bit upset and started creating this narrative of, ‘This is not fair, he is the boyfriend of the vice president, and he’s probably going to be the next president,” he said.
“To be honest, we didn’t let him invite us,” Chavarria added. “The moment we heard the gossip, people who were a little upset were contacting each other and forming another team.”
Though Chavarria was the presidential candidate, he said Harvard Kennedy School student Juan Pablo Pietrini Sanchez was the primary driver in creating the opposing campaign, which was eventually named “Todos Somos HUMAS.” Throughout the electoral process, Pietrini frequently raised concerns in meetings and the official HUMAS WhatsApp group chat about the handling of the election.
Due to the continued complaints about the conflict of interest, outgoing HUMAS president Monserrat Magaña Ocaña brought in two neutral observers — Brett A. Monson, then the president of the Harvard Graduate Council, and Page, the associate director for student engagement in the Office of the Provost — to oversee the election.
Having shifted responsibility to Monson and Page, the outgoing board viewed the issue as resolved. Milla said she stepped away from the administration of the election and had Magaña Ocana and Marco A. Noriega, the outgoing treasurer, lead the process to transfer power to the neutral observers.
“At that point, I removed myself from the process entirely,” Milla said.
‘It’s About Process’
Though Monson and Page were brought in to help manage the integrity of the election, the allegations of fraud only grew louder.
The most vocal members of HUMAS who voiced concerns about the election were Pietrini and Chavarria, as well as the losing slate’s treasurer Mariana J. Canet Atilano and HUMAS alumnus Sergio Herrera Carranza.
The criticisms largely stemmed from a perceived lack of compliance with the HUMAS bylaws which were inconsistent with Harvard’s student group handbook, the set of policies Monson and Page are instructed by the University to uphold.
Jaime Espinoza, another member of the losing ticket, said the process could have been improved with a longer election period and a preexisting voter registry of HUMAS members.
Two aspects of the electoral process stipulated by HUMAS bylaws — electoral observers and the restriction of voters to Mexican international students — were no longer applied after the transfer of power to Monson and Page.
Canet said in an interview that the involvement of the neutral administrators in the election was unsatisfactory.
“We demanded someone external to oversee the process, because we did not trust the girlfriend of the candidate to oversee the process,” Canet said. “But Marshall has stated thousands of times that the only thing he did was counting the votes, that the rules of the process were internal.”
Beyond simply counting the number of votes, students on the losing ticket wanted Page to verify that each voter was a Mexican international student.
Canet said the outgoing HUMAS leadership told candidates that “only Mexican votes would count” and that they campaigned under that assumption. She said the lack of electoral observers made it impossible to verify after the election that only Mexican students voted.
University spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment on Page’s involvement in the election.
In response to a request for comment, Monson directed The Crimson to a June document sent in the WhatsApp group by the outgoing board. The document states that the elections were “organized, supervised, executed, and validated by the Provost’s Office in conjunction with the Harvard Graduate Council.”
The central complaint that emerged was that the number of votes exceeded the Office of International Education’s published data on the number of enrolled Mexican international students. Only 104 Mexican international students were enrolled for the 2022-23 academic year, while 144 people voted in HUMAS’ May election.
But almost everyone else, including the winning and outgoing boards, Page, and many rank-and-file members interviewed for this article, described the complaint about “non-Mexican” students as invalid and even a violation of the University’s nondiscrimination policies.
Noriega, who is Mexican American, said it would be extremely difficult to verify that only Mexican international students voted in the election as it would be “pure, blatant discrimination” to ask for students’ nationalities.
“With all of the DACA rules and all that, there are many Mexican Americans who are culturally Mexican Americans but not even legally Mexican Americans. They’re Americans 100 percent,” Noriega said. “Mexicans come in all colors and flavors.”
But Herrera said the inconsistent messaging about voter eligibility gave the losing ticket the impression that they were competing for a smaller voting base, saying it “seems like corruption.”
“Once the authority in the organization, which is the president, tells you ‘This is the eligibility,’ you take it for granted,” Herrera said.
Canet said she “would accept the results” of the election if a representative of the losing team could verify that the list of voters was only Mexican students.
“If they showed the results and it showed that they had more Mexican votes, I would be fine with that,” Canet said.
“It’s not about winning, it’s about process,” she added.
The ‘Mafia’ and the Media
The election ended with the slate of candidates led by Majluf earning the most votes, but the small group of students who had previously voiced concerns about the process did not immediately concede the race.
Instead, they got the president of Mexico involved.
In late May, reporters for The Crimson began receiving cryptic text messages about “very corrupt acts” that took place during the HUMAS election. Soon after, on June 13, notable Mexican journalist Hernán Gómez posted a nearly nine-minute video to his 144,000 YouTube subscribers about the HUMAS election.
The video singled out Majluf and Milla, suggesting that their relationship was evidence of corruption in the election. Gómez also pointed to the friendship between Milla and Magaña — the former HUMAS president — as additional evidence of collusion in the election.
The video marked the beginning of a successful campaign led by Pietrini, Canet, and Chavarria to convince mainstream Mexican media outlets to amplify their criticisms of the HUMAS election. Similar versions of the story reported by Gómez appeared in five other Mexican newspapers, including La Razón de México and El Popular México.
Pietrini authored a document titled “Articulo HUMAS,” or “HUMAS article,” that outlined the group’s complaints with the handling of the election and referred to the electoral ticket led by Majluf as “the mafia.”
“In the end the result of the election was 81 votes in favor of the mafia and 63 for the other students. 144 votes in total,” the document stated. “The problem is that according to information from the Harvard International Office itself, there are only 104 Mexican students at Harvard.”
While Canet acknowledged in an interview that she collaborated on the effort to tell Mexican journalists about the turmoil within HUMAS, she later distanced herself from the effort and maintained that she did not personally reach out to any journalists.
“I highly doubt that someone will come forward and say, ‘Hey, I did it,’” Canet said.
Pietrini, however, acknowledged his role in a statement on Wednesday.
“I am very proud to have contributed to the investigative and complaint documents that were made, and like other alumni and students, such as Fernando Chavarría at the time, I sought to have them published in the media,” Pietrini wrote.
“I applaud the people who managed to get this published in the media, as it required a lot of courage because there were threats to try to keep the issue hidden, and many who complained have been excluded from the groups managed by the new HUMAS committee,” Pietrini. “They should be very proud of raising their voices.”
According to May text messages obtained by The Crimson, Pietrini’s document was created with the intention of sending it to “pro-4T” media organizations, referring to newspapers that are favorable toward the incumbent president of Mexico. In August, a journalist asked López Obrador, the Mexian president, about HUMAS and the alleged electoral “fraud” during one of his regular press conferences.
Rather than waving the question off, López Obrador addressed the scandal for nearly five minutes, using it as an opportunity to make a convoluted point blasting his political opponents and their former Harvard affiliations.
The media storm in Mexico about the HUMAS elections died down in the weeks after the press conference with López Obrador, but some students have continued to discuss the fallout with Harvard administrators.
In an Aug. 26 email to Canet, Page wrote that he and Associate Provost for Student Affairs Robin Glover “asked the HUMAS leadership to undertake an internal review in the early fall to analyze voting processes and procedures of the group.”
Canet also expressed some regret about her approach to the contested HUMAS election.
“I am never going to say that what they did was right, never,” Canet said. “And I’m going to die saying that.”
“But in terms of being a leader and being an asset for the community, maybe instead of confronting them so much, now that I look back, maybe I could have worked with them to perfect the electoral process for the future generations,” she added.
Majluf said in an interview that as HUMAS president, he intends to embrace a message of unity for the rest of his tenure.
“I don’t think it’s about looking at the past and trying to destroy things,” he said. I think right now, the purpose should be, ‘Hey, how can we rebuild,’” Majluf said.
“This is a student organization,” he added. “This is not a political party, this is not government — coming to Harvard is a dream come true for everyone here, and everyone has the right to explore that dream.”
Harvard Business School student Regina Gomez Aguirre said that the bickering of the election made her become disillusioned with HUMAS.
“My understanding of the group was that it was just a support group where we would share, like, ‘Where can I find a good salsa or where can I find tacos?’” Gomez said. “And then, suddenly, everything was blown out of proportion.”
—Staff writer Azusa M. Lippit can be reached at azusa.lippit@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @azusalippit or on Threads @azusalippit.