Mexico City – For the first time in the nearly six-week-long dispute over the outcome of Mexico’s presidential election, police used force Monday against supporters of the leftist who claims he was cheated of victory through fraud.
A legislative source told EFE that units of the federal police called in to safeguard San Lazaro Palace – seat of the lower house – amid protests by the left resorted to tear gas to clear an entrance the leftists had blocked with cars.
The group dispersed by police numbered around 100 and included several lawmakers from the PRD party of leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the source said, adding that legislators Juan Jose Garcia, Inti Muñoz and Emilio Serrano claimed to have been struck by police during the confrontation.
The speaker of the lower house, Alvaro Elias Loredo, told reporters after the incident that while he had summoned police to protect San Lazaro, he did not approve of the officers’ using force against the protesters.
Loredo belongs to the conservative PAN, the same party as incumbent President Vicente Fox and the ostensible winner of the July 2 election, Felipe Calderon.
The local press reported that some 500 police officers, aided by tow-trucks, took part in the operation to clear the blocked entrance.
Scores of the thousands of Lopez Obrador partisans who have been blocking roads in the capital for two weeks protested Monday outside San Lazaro Palace and at the Mexico City headquarters of Banamex, the Citigroup subsidiary that is one of this nation’s largest financial institutions.
While the protests at the bank dispersed after six hours, the contingent at San Lazaro, which includes leftist lawmakers, vowed to remain on the site through Sept. 1, when Fox is due to make the final state of the union address of his six-year term.
Calderon, meanwhile, held a press conference Monday to maintain that a just-completed partial recount of the ballots from July 2 “confirmed” his victory.
“We are satisfied with the results of the recount and believe that this corroborates the news that the (electoral) tribunal is proceeding to carry out its constitutional duty to announce the president-elect,” he said.
He described as “a lie” the leftist coalition’s claim that the partial recount discovered “thousands of lost votes” and “many irregularities” which, according to the left, could lead to the annulment of results from many of the more than 11,000 polling places included in the recount.
Calderon said he was “optimistic” that the supreme electoral tribunal, or TRIFE, would soon confirm the victory he insists he won at the polls, and he called on Lopez Obrador to abandon the campaign of protests.
Though the re-tallying of ballots from around 9 percent of the precincts nationwide concluded Monday, the results will not be officially released until after review by the TRIFE’s seven judges.
But Horacio Duarte, an attorney working for the PRD, said that Calderon lost a total of 14,140 votes in the process.
The gap between the two candidates, according to official figures, stood at 243,934 votes before the partial recount.
Duarte said more than 7,900 of the polling places reviewed had either more or fewer ballots than they should have had, meaning that the TRIFE could decide to simply annul the results from those precincts, in which case – he said – “there will a change in who obtained the victory.”
Earlier Monday, the Fox government dismissed what it described as “provocations,” referring to word from Lopez Obrador that he and his followers will seek to disrupt public events in which the head of state takes part.
“We will have to act with prudence, responsibility and without accepting provocations by people who want the government to use force,” presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar told reporters at his daily briefing.
That “responsible behavior,” he said, is aimed at ensuring normality during upcoming events such as Fox’s speech to Congress and the Sept. 15-16 independence celebrations in the capital’s main square.
But for the past two weeks, the plaza known as the Zocalo has been the scene of protest camps filled with supporters of the leftist candidate, who accuses the Fox administration of orchestrating the “irregularities” that allowed Calderon to prevail by a margin of 0.58 percent.
During a speech Sunday in the massive square, Lopez Obrador vowed that “peaceful civil resistance” will continue across the country for “as long as the people want and decide.”
The former Mexico City mayor said that his backers will go on blocking urban thoroughfares, highways, bridges and other sensitive points to press their demand for a “vote-by-vote” recount of all 41 million ballots cast on July 2.
He also announced plans for an alternative independence celebration next month in the Zocalo, which is supposed to be the venue for official observances that are to include a military parade reviewed by Fox.
The same day of the armed forces procession, Sept. 16, Lopez Obrador intends to hold a “national democratic convention” in the capital plaza.
He said Sunday that his followers will be on hand when Fox addresses Congress at the beginning of next month, and for the TRIFE session where a president-elect is formally declared, a ceremony that must take place by Sept. 6.
The leftists’ protest camps, located mainly in the Zocalo and along Reforma Avenue in the capital’s financial district, have created monumental traffic jams and are costing downtown shops, hotels and restaurants around $10 million a day in lost business, merchants say.
A poll published Monday in the daily El Universal shows that Mexico City residents disapprove of the road-blocking protests by 65 percent to 30 percent. Yet the survey also found that 59 percent agree with Lopez Obrador’s accusations of fraud on July 2, while 63 percent would like to see a “vote-by-vote” recount.
