Contender Alleges Mexico Vote Was Rigged
Populist's Plan for Legal Challenge Ignites Boisterous Crowd at Massive Rally in Capital
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 9, 2006; A01
MEXICO CITY, July 8 -- Downtown Mexico City swelled Saturday with the accumulated frustration and rage of the poor, who were stoked into a
sign-waving, fist-pumping frenzy by new fraud allegations that failed populist candidate Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador hopes will overturn the results
of Mexico's presidential election.
L?pez Obrador ignited the smoldering emotions of his followers Saturday morning, alleging for the first time that Mexico's electoral commission had
rigged its computers before the July 2 election to ensure the half-percentage-point victory of Felipe Calder?n, a champion of free trade. In a news
conference before the rally, L?pez Obrador called Calder?n "an employee" of Mexico's powerful upper classes and said a victory by his conservative
opponent would be "morally impossible."
L?pez Obrador added a new layer of complexity to the crisis by saying he not only would challenge the results in the country's special elections court
but also would attempt to have the election declared illegal by Mexico's Supreme Court. That strategy presages a constitutional confrontation because
according to many legal experts the special elections court is the only body that can hear election challenges.
Calder?n was declared the winner Thursday and has begun publicly presenting his plans for Mexico, even though L?pez Obrador has refused to concede.
European Union election observers have said they found no significant irregularities in the vote, and many Mexicans appeared to accept Calder?n as
their next president.
L?pez Obrador's approach pairs legal maneuvers with mass public pressure. On Saturday, he gave a mega-display of street power, drawing an estimated
280,000 people into the city center on a humid, drizzly afternoon, according to a Mexico City government estimate.
The crowd chanted, "Strong, strong!" when L?pez Obrador stepped to the microphone. The former Mexico City mayor then declared that the electoral
commission had "played with the hopes" of millions of Mexicans by allegedly rigging the vote total. Thousands chanted back: "You are not alone!"
L?pez Obrador also told the crowd that he was organizing a march to the capital Wednesday from all over Mexico, including states hundreds of miles
distant.
"This is, and will continue to be, a peaceful movement," he said. Seconds later, he announced another mass rally, this one for July 16, at which the
crowd raucously yelled back: "What time?"
During his 40-minute address, L?pez Obrador stressed Mexico's class divide, accusing "powerful interests" of trying to deny democratic freedoms to
"us, the poor." The crowd, which spilled into side streets off the square and may have been the largest of the presidential campaign, chanted,
"Presidente, Presidente!"
Blaring kazoos competed with the thump and boom of massive speakers blasting salsa rhythms and a Spanish-language homage to L?pez Obrador set to the
tune of the American pop song, "Love Is in the Air."
L?pez Obrador had called his followers into the large downtown square, the Zocalo, the backdrop for generations of Mexican revolutionary fervor, to
lay out his long-shot case for overturning Calder?n's apparent presidential victory. But he got more than that: He got a moment of mass catharsis, an
outrageously loud, communal venting.
"The Mexican people are awakening," said Mart?n Garc?a Trujillo, a farm laborer from the state of Michoacan who had left at midnight for the six-hour
bus ride to the capital. "We know Andr?s Manuel won. They just won't let it happen. We can't take this anymore."
L?pez Obrador wants a vote-by-vote count, which would require opening sealed vote packets from more than 130,000 polling stations. Electoral
commission officials have sided with Calder?n's strategists, who argue that the law does not allow for the packets to be opened unless tally sheets
attached to the packets appear to have been altered. L?pez Obrador said that only 2,600 vote packets were opened Tuesday and Wednesday during a
marathon official count, which shrank Calder?n's lead from 400,000 votes after a preliminary vote to 230,000.
Thousands of L?pez Obrador's supporters, many of whom had marched across the city for hours, chanted "Voto por voto, casilla por casilla" -- vote by
vote, polling place by polling place -- as they streamed into the Zocalo on Saturday. Many entered the square waving the yellow flags of L?pez
Obrador's Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD.
Street vendors hawked T-shirts bearing the now-ubiquitous cartoon depiction of L?pez Obrador's face next to the word "Smile." Speakers screamed, "Vote
by vote!" as their images flickered across a huge screen suspended above the stage.
x "They stole this from us," said Concepci?n Myen, 68, a lifelong Mexico City resident who is unemployed. "This is the worst thing that can happen to
Mexico."x
Myen personifies the L?pez Obrador target voter. She is a senior citizen and said she had looked forward to the monthly pensions L?pez Obrador
promised. She is also a single mother, who struggled to raise her child alone, and said her life would have been much better if the aid program L?pez
Obrador had vowed to give single mothers had existed when she needed it.
The anger on display in the square grows from decades of perceived indignities and a sense of persecution by a succession of ruling parties. Garc?a
Trujillo, the farm worker from Michoacan, recalled feeling the same anguish in 1988 when the PRD candidate, Cuauht?moc C?rdenas, lost a presidential
race that many international observers have said was stolen by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. He said he felt the same rage two years
ago when outgoing President Vicente Fox's administration unsuccessfully attempted to impeach L?pez Obrador, who was then the mayor of Mexico City.
Now Garc?a Trujillo's anger is directed at another institutional power, Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute, which has a stellar international
reputation but is accused by L?pez Obrador of "manipulating" the results.
The electoral institute will cede control of the election to Mexico's special elections court, which has until Sept. 6 to decide whether to certify
the results. Calder?n has not waited for the elections court, and neither have world leaders. He accepted congratulatory calls on Friday from
President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. But L?pez Obrador cautioned against such formalities, saying, "Right now, there is no
president-elect."
After L?pez Obrador left the stage Saturday, the crowd lingered. Someone started singing the national anthem, and countless voices joined in its
rallying cry: "Mexicans, to the shout of war!"
Crowds rally for leftist
Nearly 300,000 pack Mexico City plaza to protest the election results
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS and MARION LLOYD
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Foreign Service
MEXICO CITY - At the behest of leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, nearly 300,000 people packed the Mexican capital's sprawling central
plaza Saturday, demanding a recount of the July 2 election that official results show he barely lost.
"We're defending a just cause: the right of Mexicans to choose their leaders," Lopez Obrador told the cheering, chanting throng. "Democracy is
indispensable to achieve a Mexico of justice and dignity."
"We're going to defend democracy."
Lopez Obrador called on supporters nationwide to begin marching on Mexico City on Wednesday and to gather for another mass rally in the central plaza,
the Zocalo, in a week.
The Federal Electoral Institute's official tally has Lopez Obrador losing to ruling party conservative Felipe Calderon by fewer than 250,000 votes of
41 million cast.
Lopez Obrador has vowed to fight the outcome in the courts. And though he's asking supporters to take to the streets, he urged them to be peaceful.
"We don't want to affect the citizens. This is not about blocking highways," he said. "This is, and will continue being, a peaceful movement."
But few in the crowd were in a peaceful mood.
"The people are heading for social conflict, with arms if necessary," said Marcos Montiel, 50, from the Pacific resort city of Acapulco, which Lopez
Obrador's party governs. "The people of the south are on the path of struggle."
Montiel shook with rage as he spoke. He's hardly alone in his fury.
"If they let that thief Calderon take office, I can tell you there will be the biggest strike Mexico has every seen," said Hilario Lizama, a member of
the electricians' union, one of Latin America's largest with more than 60,000 members.
For many in the plaza, trust in the electoral institute, built painstakingly in the past dozen years, has been shattered by this election's outcome.
They accuse President Vi- cente Fox and his National Action Party of conspiring with those who ruled Mexico as a one-party state for most of the last
century to keep Lopez Obrador from power.
Fox ended the Institutional Revolutionary Party's seven-decade hold on the presidency with his election six years ago. Lopez Obrador on Saturday
called him "a traitor to democracy." A former Mexico City mayor, Lopez Obrador enjoys heavy, but hardly unanimous, support from the urban poor and
desperate farmers.
A mostly Maya Indian uprising in 1994 continues to roil part of southernmost Chiapas state. And a smaller guerrilla movement that emerged outside
Acapulco in the mid-1990s simmers still.
But the armed movements did not support Lopez Obrador. Subcomandante Marcos, the most visible of the Chiapas rebel leaders, has declared all political
parties to be frauds.Capt. George - 7-9-2006 at 08:11 AM
Well, I guess Mexico has been introduced into the 4 B's,:
To some everything is a conspiracy. In the end it's all about if your candidate wins or not. The winners smile and party and plan the future. The
losers whine and cry, make excuses and threaten legal action.
it's all about who's ahead
Taco de Baja - 7-10-2006 at 07:27 AM
Would Obrador be yelling about the ?irregularities?, ?overvoting?. ?thrown away ballots? and be attempting to have the election declared illegal, if
HE had won????
Of course not. He would say something like: ?Will of the people must be abided by? or ?The people have spoken, we must listen to them? ?Mexico has the
fairest election process in the world, although there may be a few problems they are insignificant, the results would be the same.?
And what's up with the kazoos?
Are they the official instrument of Obrador?
Quote:
Blaring kazoos competed with the thump and boom of massive speakers blasting salsa rhythms and a Spanish-language homage to L?pez Obrador set to the
tune of the American pop song, "Love Is in the Air."
And wouldn't the American pop song "Revolution" have been a better choice???SiReNiTa - 7-11-2006 at 01:37 PM
well it all comes back to obrador...jeez i swear someday we are going to have another revolucion mexicana...not exactly with guns...word can be
powerful but i don't understand why he is making such a fuss about it...he already lost...right?
