Villahermosa, Mexico – Mexico’s main leftist party was expected to lose a governorship race Sunday seen as a key test of survival for a fiery former presidential hopeful who had campaigned heavily for his party’s candidate, exit polls showed.
The election for governor in the southern, swampy state of Tabasco was marred by shootings, street fights, arrests of supporters of both candidates, and claims of vote-buying and voter intimidation.
Former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a Tabasco native, had been pushing hard for Cesar Raul Ojeda, of his leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD. He was running against Andres Rafael Granier of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Granier led Ojeda by large margins in two exit polls released shortly after the polls closed.
Many see the vote as a referendum on Lopez Obrador. Rivals have tried to brand Ojeda as an extremist linked to the paralyzing street blockades his party launched in Mexico City to protest alleged fraud in the July 2 presidential election that Lopez Obrador lost to Felipe Calderon by less than 1 percent of the vote.
Lopez Obrador has called the state a crucial battleground.
“If the PRI wins Tabasco, our adversaries will laugh at us,” he said before the election, “and say that we even lose in our own land.” In the days before the election, more than 30 people were arrested for fighting or carrying guns, machetes and baseball bats.
PRI officials said one of their members was hospitalized in serious condition after being beaten with metal pipes.
Gangs of supporters of both candidates drove round in trucks carrying sticks and blocking polling booths on Sunday. In Villahermosa, street clashes led to 10 arrests. In the small town of Macuspana, police fired on a group of people believed to be PRI supporters.
Assailants in cars also fired shots Saturday at the houses of PRI mayoral candidates in the towns of Centla and Huimanguillo, state police reported. No one was injured.
PRD chief Leonel Cota said his party could challenge the vote in the courts, adding Tabasco to a series of disputed Mexican elections. The presidential race was decided only after the country’s highest electoral tribunal weighed allegations of fraud.
