Mexico City – Leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador led a weekend rally of, at a minimum, some 100,000 supporters in Mexico City’s central plaza where the crowd promised to keep up the fight “to the end” against alleged “fraud” in the July 2 election.
The massive crowd congregated under rainy skies on Saturday in the huge Zocalo square to hear the candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, say he would “peacefully” defend in court what he claimed was his unrecognized election win over conservative governing National Action Party candidate Felipe Calderon.
He also said that he would go to the Attorney General’s Office to question the results of the elections that he lost by only 0.58 percent of the vote, according to official statistics.
“We’ll follow you until the end,” chanted university students near the dais set up in the center of the plaza, from where AMLO – as he is sometimes known – addressed the throng.
The Public Safety Secretariat for Mexico City – where Lopez Obrador was mayor from 2000-2005 – estimated that a quarter million people attended the rally, but the media placed the size of the gathering at about 100,000.
Thousands of men, women and children dressed in yellow – the distinctive color of the PRD – were among those people filling the capital’s central plaza.
Many of the people jamming the plaza, however, fainted and some had trouble breathing during Lopez Obrador’s speech, which lasted about 50 minutes under rainy conditions.
Before he spoke, many PRD activists collected signatures from those on hand demanding that the judiciary conduct a “vote by vote” recount of the election results to “clean up the elections and give certainty to Mexican institutions.”
“We’re going to demonstrate that the upright principles of certainty and legality enshrined in the Constitution have been violated,” AMLO said, while some of his followers wearing PRD caps, and brandishing flags and other items, chanted slogans like “No to fraud,” “You’re not alone” and “Obrador endures, the people rise up.”
One woman held up a placard on which was written: “I’m not going on vacation because I’m staying to defend Lopez Obrador. He’s my ‘gallo’ and they haven’t plucked him,” using the Spanish word that generally means “rooster,” but which also denotes a “tough guy” in Mexican slang.
Some of the Zocalo demonstrators criticized a portion of the press for what they said was alleged partiality to Calderon.
Commentators said that the rally recalled those convened by AMLO last year when he was defending himself against a legal attempt by the Attorney General’s Office to strip him of his right to run for president, an Executive Branch move that was eventually shelved.
Also at the rally, Lopez Obrador called upon his followers on Wednesday to stage a “peaceful national march for democracy” from every state to Mexico City, a plan that evokes the demonstrations he headed two decades ago to denounce the alleged election fraud committed in the gubernatorial race in the southern state of Tabasco.
“I invite everyone to take part in this civic demonstration, because we cannot permit a retreat from Mexico’s democracy,” the PRD leader said.
He added that the demonstrations do not seek to “affect the rights of others or to break the law,” but rather their purpose is to “strongly denounce this unacceptable situation of electoral fraud.”
Lopez Obrador also accused Mexico’s President Vicente Fox of being a “traitor to democracy,” supposedly for having orchestrated “multiple irregularities” which he said kept him from winning the election.
