Mexico City – As a swelling legion of Mexican leftists was making its way Thursday toward the capital to press for a manual recount of ballots from the July 2 presidential election, their leader was broadening his attacks on the entire electoral process.
The Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, says its man, former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, was cheated in the official count that gave a preliminary victory to conservative Felipe Calderon.
Lopez Obrador, who lost by just over half a percentage point, has filed a legal challenge to the result with the electoral tribunal known as the TRIFE and offered videotapes purporting to substantiate his charges that the process was marred by fraud and irregularities.
Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute – IFE – announced last Thursday that Calderon, of the governing National Action Party, defeated his leftist rival in the country’s tightest-ever presidential contest by a margin of 243,934 votes, or 0.58 percent.
Thursday, with his supporters en route to the capital for a weekend rally, Lopez Obrador offered reporters yet another video show, though the latest edition featured not only a tape of ostensible electoral chicanery but a montage of television ads he described as containing “subliminal” messages aimed at discrediting him and boosting Calderon.
The leftist hopeful said the ads were financed by the food companies Jumex and Sabritas, the powerful CCE business federation and drug-store magnate and political gadfly Victor Gonzalez Torres, among others.
Saying that the spots represented some $56.4 million worth of free promotion for Calderon’s campaign, Lopez Obrador decried the IFE’s failure to stop them from being aired.
Mexico’s system for public financing of elections entails limits on spending and casts the IFE in the role of a referee. In the course of this year’s campaign, the institute had occasion to order both Calderon and Lopez Obrador to pull ads attacking the other.
The IFE also forced the CCE to discontinue spots that purported to be general statements on the issues but which the regulators deemed to be exhortations to vote against Lopez Obrador.
Thursday’s other video showed what the PRD candidate said was the falsification of the tally sheets at several precincts. He also claimed the sealed envelopes containing the ballots from individual polling places were being opened across the country and that the IFE “is lending itself to (an effort to) cook the numbers.”
Joining Lopez Obrador at the press conference was the PRD’s delegate to the IFE, Horacio Duarte, who accused the election authorities of maintaining a “clear and resounding” complicity with Calderon’s party to avoid a ballot-by-ballot recount.
Calderon, for his part, said Thursday that it is unlikely the TRIFE will accede to Lopez Obrador’s demand for a vote-by-vote review of all 41 million ballots cast on July 2.
Recounts can only be carried out on an “exceptional” basis, the conservative candidate told reporters at his campaign headquarters.
If the TRIFE determines “that some polling place should be recounted, then we will understand that there is, firstly, a legal basis, and above all sufficient reason and motives, but we will be attentive to what the Tribunal says,” Calderon said.
Elsewhere in the capital, the non-governmental Mexican Commission on Human Rights, or CMDH, met with reporters to give a similar appraisal of the election dispute.
The group’s president, Carlos Sanchez, said Lopez Obrador will probably not get the comprehensive recount he is seeking because under the law, the TRIFE would need an extraordinary reason to order such an exercise.
Accredited by the U.N. Development Program, the CMDH has been observing elections since 1994, though its oversight of the July 2 balloting was limited.
The CMDH rejected the idea that the TRIFE might decide to annul the entire election and order a re-vote. While acknowledging that tallies from individual precincts may have to be thrown out due to minor irregularities, Sanchez said his group saw no evidence of widespread systematic violations of electoral regulations.
Most observers, including those from outside the country, rated Mexico’s July election as free and fair, but Wednesday, the watchdog group Civic Alliance said there was “sufficient” cause for a “vote-by-vote” recount to ensure transparency, citing “irregularities” at 2,400 of the country’s 130,477 polling places.
Though TRIFE has until Sept. 6 to decide who will be sworn-in Dec. 1 as Mexico’s president for the 2006-2012 term, Leon Halkin, head of the Concamin industrialists’ federation, said Thursday that the country could not endure weeks without knowing who the new head of state will be.
He said a full recount would rattle international financial markets and threaten Mexico’s current economic stability.
Yet the chairman of the Mexican Bankers Association, Marcos Martinez Gavica, said that “because of its soundness” the country’s economy has not been adversely affected by the election controversy.
He said outright fraud was unlikely due to the “active participation of the citizenry,” but acknowledged that there may have been some irregularities that he said should be resolved through institutional channels. He added that the Mexican banks would work with whoever emerges as the next chief executive.
While politicians, business leaders and NGOs talked, Lopez Obrador partisans from around the country began their trek to the capital for a Sunday march that will end at the Zocalo, Mexico City’s giant main square.
A top official in Lopez Obrador’s campaign, Jesus Ortega, said some 50,000 were already moving by late Wednesday, and that the figure would rise “as they pass through the cities and the contingent (of demonstrators) continues to swell.”
Ortega said that pro-PRD officers within the Federal Highway Police had warned him of the possibility that that force will seek to halt busloads of leftists en route to the capital.
He said he expected Sunday’s rally will be “extraordinary” and a manifestation of “the people’s indignation,” noting that the PRD has not spent “one dime” to finance the demonstration.
The march “is the result of cooperation among citizens who are struggling for effective suffrage,” Ortega said before adding that the demonstration would be peaceful.
According to the campaign official, most of the demonstrators who are descending on the capital from all over will return to their homes Sunday or Monday to “continue with the struggle in their states” and are not planning to remain in the Federal District, as Mexico City is officially known.
