Mexico City – Mexican presidential candidate for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Roberto Madrazo, accused the government Saturday of seeking to manipulate the upcoming elections to favor the governing party’s candidate, Felipe Calderon.
“It would be very healthy if several parties could agree to stop this (manipulated) election that the federal government would like to set up in favor of a specific candidate,” Madrazo said at a campaign rally in the town of Tenosique in the southern state of Tabasco near the Guatemalan border.
Mexicans will go to the polls July 2 to elect the successor to President Vicente Fox and legislators for both houses of congress.
Madrazo, candidate for an alliance formed by the PRI and the Green Ecological Party of Mexico (PVEM), said Saturday that “starting in May” the Fox administration wants to launch “a mechanism for manipulating the vote using public funds.”
“Starting in May they are going to pull out all the stops; that is the month to rig the election,” said the PRI candidate, who represents what is today Mexico’s biggest opposition party and which governed the country without interruption from 1929 to 2000.
During that period of hegemony, the PRI relied mainly on patronage and control of organized labor and the mass media, though it was not above resorting to outright vote-rigging and even violence.
One government official consulted by EFE declined to talk about Madrazo’s accusation, with the argument that the administration “does not comment on the activities of presidential candidates nor on their election campaign strategies.”
According to surveys, Madrazo is currently in third place in voter preference behind the leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, the party of President Fox. EFE
