Election

NAIROBI, Kenya -- As Kenya faced another disputed election Sunday, the country passed an important test: Despite outrage among many Kenyans over a result they saw as flawed, there was no major outbreak of violence. A massive deployment of security forces dispersed the few protests, earlier banned by Kenyan authorities. Kenyans were determined to break with the past, after tribal violence broke out in the wake of the disputed 2007 election, killing more than 1,000 people and tainting the country's reputation as an emerging democracy.

Re "Independence, spoiled," editorial, Sept. 18 It is clear The Times would prefer that all Mexicans quietly accept the continuation of the same regime that has kept them in poverty. Indeed, intellectual Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won the election in 1988 but did not have the courage to do what the most recent presidential challenger, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is doing. Cardenas failed the Mexican people then, and he fails again by not supporting Lopez Obrador. Mexicans want progress, but not the kind of progress that will keep them poor.

William Bundy's pedantic article (Opinion, Feb. 16) on the Philippine election would have us believe that all the bad little Filipinos follow Marcos and all the good little Filipinos follow Corazon Aquino. The truth is that lies, fraud and corruption are a way of daily life in the Philippines. There is no one good group and no one bad group. They all live by the same code, and they all vote according to their own best interests, and to hell with anything else. R.L. HUDSON Phoenix, Ariz.

Was Rosa Parks being divisive when she refused to move to the rear of the bus? Was Martin Luther King Jr. being divisive when he marched for civil rights? Were the suffragettes divisive when they marched to gain women's right to vote? Were the colonials divisive when they dumped tea into Boston harbor? Was Lincoln divisive when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation? Our nation's history is steeped in divisiveness. At the Jan. 3 hearing on filling former Thousand Oaks Councilman Frank Schillo's seat, Councilwoman Elois Zeanah was charged with being divisive for failing to appoint Mike Markey to fill the vacant council seat.