Mexico City – The conservative who got the most votes in Mexico’s disputed presidential election introduced on Tuesday the transition team he hopes can forge a government of “national unity,” even as his leftist rival presented more videos to back a claim of electoral fraud.
“We have initiated the work leading to the transition from the administration of President Vicente Fox to the one I will have the honor to head from Dec. 1,” Felipe Calderon told a press conference at the headquarters of the governing National Action Party, or PAN.
The former energy secretary said he will work in the coming months to reach a consensus with Mexico’s other parties on an agenda designed to diminish the country’s big and widening gap between rich and poor and to create “equal opportunity for everyone.”
But Calderon’s opponent, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has filed a challenge to the election results with an electoral tribunal known as the TRIFE, which has until Sept. 6 to declare who will be Mexico’s president for the 2006-2012 term.
In the face of his rival’s allegations of fraud, Calderon described the July 2 ballot as “the most democratic election in the life of the country,” citing the nearly 60 percent turnout and what he characterized as the transparency of the process.
The PAN standard-bearer named long-time confidant Juan Camilo Mouriño and erstwhile campaign manager Josefina Vazquez Mota to direct his transition team.
Calderon said the two aides will reach out to other parties and that figures from outside the PAN may well be appointed to posts in his government, but only in the interest of assembling a working majority in Congress behind substantive proposals.
“We are contemplating an in-depth negotiation to achieve a program of government for the benefit of all Mexicans that can count on majority support in the legislature,” he said.
Though the PAN won the most votes overall in the legislative elections, it did not secure a majority of seats in either chamber and will need help from other parties to get anything done.
Calderon asked his supporters to “remain calm, strengthen the institutions and organize in a civic manner” while ignoring the mass protests convened by Lopez Obrador.
“It is very clear that the scenario in which we all win is that of collaboration, where we are capable of putting the national interests ahead of private ones,” he said, pledging to install a “pluralist” Cabinet once he takes office.
He also said he will soon undertake a nationwide tour “to express gratitude to the votes and majority support of Mexicans (and) acknowledge the entire society’s commitment to the civic values that have permitted the country to elect its leaders in peace and order.”
When asked later at his own Tuesday press conference about Calderon’s plans for the transition and a victory lap around the country, Lopez Obrador said that “dreaming doesn’t cost anything.”
But the main point of the leftist’s latest session with reporters was to present two new videotapes purporting to document irregularities in the election, which authorities say Calderon won by a margin of less than six-tenths of 1 percent.
In the tapes shown Tuesday, people are seen opening – illegally, according to Lopez Obrador – packets of ballots that are under military guard at warehouses in southern Mexico.
The candidate also affirmed the “veracity” of a video he presented Monday that appeared to show a ballot box being stuffed at a polling place in the central state of Guanajuato, where Vicente Fox was formerly governor.
Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, said Monday evening that the man seen in the video was not stuffing the ballot box, but rather transferring ballots from congressional races that had been placed by mistake in the box corresponding to the presidential contest.
The transfer was carried out with the agreement of all of the officials at the polling place, the IFE said, a contention subsequently echoed by an observer from Lopez Obrador’s coalition.
Juliana Barron told the capital daily Reforma that no fraud was perpetrated as the precinct in question and that Lopez Obrador “should learn how to lose.”
Confronted with her comments, the leftist said: “That demonstrates that not all of our representatives have acted correctly.”
“There were offers of money and pressures on officials at polling places, and if they bought votes, why wouldn’t they try to buy our representatives,” Lopez Obrador said.
On another front, he followed up on his earlier accusation that Fox helped orchestrate election irregularities by claiming the incumbent had mobilized Mexican diplomats to lobby foreign governments to recognize Calderon as the winner.
The United States, Spain, Colombia and the European Union, among others, have already extended congratulations to Calderon, though Madrid later said that it had not intended to preempt the ongoing electoral process.
The leaders of the coalition backing Lopez Obrador – centered on the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD – are disputing the validity of the tally sheets from some 52,000 of Mexico’s more than 130,488 polling places.
Lopez Obrador is demanding a vote-by-vote recount of all 41 million ballots cast in the election, a move opposed by electoral authorities and Calderon, and to press that demand, the former Mexico City mayor has called on his supporters around the nation to converge on the capital for a massive rally on Sunday.
