Official loser in Mexico election to ignore result

[curiouspat]

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13944197/

Official loser in Mexico election to ignore result

Lopez Obrador set to begin campaign of civil resistance; bishops urge calm

Updated: 7:36 p.m. PT July 20, 2006
MEXICO CITY - Mexico’s leftist presidential candidate said Thursday that he would never recognize the results of the election he said he lost by fraud, and Catholic bishops called for a week of prayer to heal the divisions widened by the bitter dispute.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador implied that the country could plunge into instability if courts don’t order a vote-by-vote recount. His supporters demonstrated outside an airline in the latest in a series of blockades and protests.

Lopez Obrador lost the July 2 election to conservative ruling-party candidate Felipe Calderon by less than 0.6 percent, according to official vote tallies. He has called for a manual recount of all ballots and a campaign of civil disobedience.

“The election for me is illegitimate,” Lopez Obrador said in a radio interview. “I am not going to recognize the results of a fraudulent election.”

“The recount can be done in six days, in order to have six years or more of economic, political and financial stability, and if not there will be a lot of dissatisfaction,” the former Mexico City mayor said. Presidential terms in Mexico last six years.

Courts set to hear appeals
Mexican courts are weighing Lopez Obrador’s appeals, and will declare a president-elect before Sept. 6.

Calderon issued a call “for all of us to do our part for peace, starting with avoiding provocations and violence.” To counter Lopez Obrador’s protests, Calderon has launched a campaign called “Paint Mexico White,” the color he says represents peace and respect.

Calderon is urging supporters to wear white ribbons, bandannas, clothing or wristbands. In a speech Thursday, he promised “the biggest investment in infrastructure in the history of the country,” saying “infrastructure reduces poverty.”

Roman Catholic Bishops called on Mexicans to pray for the healing of political rifts opened by the election.

“There is room for differences and divergent opinions in a family. It is inconceivable that there be hatred and much less violence,” the Mexican Council of Bishops said in a full-page ad published Thursday in El Universal newspaper.

Threats of violence
With no sign of a final ruling from Mexico’s electoral court before September, what has so far been a war of words is threatening to escalate into violence.

Vandals this week ripped up a poster exhibition along Mexico’s main avenue by leftist artists charging vote fraud and supporters of Lopez Obrador pounded on Calderon’s car as he was leaving a meeting, swearing and screaming abuse at him.

“We need to strengthen the climate of peace in our country, because when this is destroyed it causes enormous suffering to everyone,” four of the predominantly Catholic country’s top bishops said in full-page insert placed in newspapers.

The council called for a week of prayer “for reconciliation, peace and harmony,” from July 31 to Aug. 6.

Officials announced Wednesday that a partial recount of ballots from the most questionable polling places did little to alter vote results.

The ballots from 2,873 polling places — 2.2 percent of the total — were recounted by hand in a routine process three days after the election, but the findings had not been made public.

They showed that all candidates got votes they did not deserve because some election workers put vote totals in the wrong box.

Lopez Obrador had claimed such errors benefited Calderon, but the conservative actually got fewer erroneous votes than the other main candidates, officials said.

Lopez Obrador’s campaign team said the counting errors discovered justified their demand for a total recount.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[CheyenneWoman]

How do you say "revolution" in spanish?

[minnie]

I think is REVOLUCIONE .

[xanadu]

morning Cheyene revolución


I say VIVA LA REVOLUCION

uh maybe I don't... we will just have more coming across the border to escape the insanity... talk about jumping from the pan into the fire (that's fueling the revolucion)

[CheyenneWoman]

I think is REVOLUCIONE .

Thanks, Minnie> My spanish is pretty much confined to words that should not be repeated.

[CheyenneWoman]

morning Cheyene revolución


I say VIVA LA REVOLUCION

uh maybe I don't... we will just have more coming across the border to escape the insanity... talk about jumping from the pan into the fire (that's fueling the revolucion)

And Good Morning to you too!!

I'm hoping Lopez Obrador decides to "keep his people home" and shuts down the border from the Mexican side. Wouldn't that be a hoot

[Brian503a]

Former title before they changed it.

Mexican election tangle on brink of bloodshed



http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/4061916.html

July 21, 2006, 12:09AM

Mexican presidential tangle has kept just shy of violence
In Guerrero, Lopez Obrador supporters wait for his command
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

COYUCA DE BENITEZ, MEXICO - The showdown over Mexico's troubled July 2 presidential election has remained peaceful so far, but backers of both men claiming the presidency warn that things can spiral into bloodshed.

"There were many warnings that they were going to proceed in a violent manner," said German Martinez, a senior aide to Felipe Calderon, after protesters attacked the conservative hopeful's car in Mexico City earlier this week.

"Without a solution," supporters of leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador say, "there will be revolution."

But here in the coastal mountains of southern Mexico, where political violence ricocheted through much of the 1990s, lots of people are taking a decidedly more temperate view.

"There won't be violence," assured Miguel Ceron, a leftist city councilman in Coyuca de Benitez, a town about 25 miles north of Acapulco.

"Things can't be like they were before," said Ceron, who took part in a 1990 showdown with state police that left three of his companions dead. "There is more maturity now, more tolerance on all sides."

Candidate calling shots
Lopez Obrador insists that he won the vote, which official results show him losing by 244,000 ballots out of nearly 42 million cast. And he and his aides have called the elections "fraudulent" and have insinuated that big money and crooked politics robbed Mexico's poor of the presidency.

The final outcome is in the hands of a federal electoral court, which has until early September to decide who is Mexico's next president. Annulment of the election is possible, with an interim president named and a vote scheduled.

In calling last week for nationwide protests to force a recount, Lopez Obrador has vowed that his movement will remain peaceful. But after pro-Lopez Obrador protesters hurled insults and kicked Calderon's car on July 18, the leftist daily La Jornada scolded both the activists and their candidate for flirting with violence.

Speaking to construction executives Thursday, Calderon urged calm.

"We must do everything we can to promote peace," he said.

Lopez Obrador has said that the protests will go as far as his supporters demand. But in Guerrero, party activists said, Lopez Obrador is calling the shots — at least for now. But some added that bloodletting may come no matter what he might wish.

"How far are we going to go? As far as Lopez Obrador says we go," Francisco Ramirez, a local leader of Lopez Obrador's party in Coyuca de Benitez. "But Lopez Obrador has a certain limit and the people might go beyond him."

By far the country's poorest region, Guerrero was once a bastion of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. In recent years, it has become an anchor of Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party.

In the July 2 vote, Lopez Obrador's candidates won all nine of Guerrero's federal congressional seats and two of its three senate posts. Guerrero's governor belongs to Lopez Obrador's party, as does the mayor of Acapulco, the state's largest city.

But the transformation did not come easily. Apart from southernmost Chiapas state, where hundreds of indigenous Maya farmers died in a brief 1994 uprising and its aftermath, no part of Mexico suffered more violence in the final decades of undemocratic rule than did rural Guerrero.


Troubled region
A little history:

•An army crackdown during the 1970s on a leftist rebellion in the mountains near Coyuca de Benitez left hundreds dead.
•Sporadic uprisings and government crackdowns following the fraud-marred 1988 presidential elections killed scores more people along the coast as leftists battled the PRI.
•In 1995, state police on a rural road near Coyuca de Benitez stopped a truckload of militant farmers heading for an anti-government protest and opened fire. Seventeen men were killed, and more than a dozen injured.
•A small guerrilla group, the People's Revolutionary Army, appeared at a commemoration ceremony of the massacre the following year, and in August 1996 attacked a number of towns in Guerrero and neighboring Oaxaca.
•In 1998, army troops attacked a schoolhouse south of Acapulco where armed rebels were meeting with community leaders, killing 11 people.
"There is the risk of a guerrilla outbreak," said Ramirez. "The guerrilla groups have been in remission, but they could break out again."

But Silvestre Resendiz, a poor farmer who has worked the past 18 years for Lopez Obrador's movement near Coyuca de Benitez, doesn't expect a bloody replay of the past.

"We just want all this to be solved by legal means," said Resendiz, 58, whose nephew was killed in the 1995 massacre. "Violence never brings good things."

dqalthaus@yahoo.com

[2ndamendsis]

I think is REVOLUCIONE .

Thanks, Minnie> My spanish is pretty much confined to words that should not be repeated.

MINNIE
can you translate it into REDNECK MEXICAN too?

[Brian503a]

http://www.latimes.com

Disputed Election Puts Strain on Mexicans
Even in families, voters are increasingly strident over whether Calderon robbed Lopez Obrador of victory. But most urge a peaceful resolution.
By Héctor Tobar
Times Staff Writer

July 21, 2006

MEXICO CITY — Manuela Camacho says she prays every day to the saints to protect her hero the presidential candidate. Sitting a few feet away, her 25-year-old granddaughter, Lorena Morales, rolls her eyes in exasperation.
Although the two women have a deep and abiding respect for each other, on this topic grandmother and granddaughter don't agree: Morales voted for the other guy.

With each day that Mexico's election controversy drags on, the topic of who really won July 2 and whether the votes should be recounted is becoming harder for the Morales family to talk about, pitting matriarch against loving grandchild, husband against wife.

Across Mexico, in private and public spaces, it's the same: Feelings are becoming more strained, the opinions more strident.

Was the election fraudulent or the cleanest in Mexican history? Was the conservative Felipe Calderon indeed the winner? Or is leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador right when he says he was robbed by a corrupt and inefficient system? Mexico's Federal Electoral Tribunal is deciding the case, but the judges may not reach a verdict for weeks.

"They say there's fraud, but the only proof they offer is the fact that they say so," Lorena Morales tells her grandmother. The younger woman voted for the conservative Calderon — mostly because she can't stand the "big mouth" Lopez Obrador.

"For me, there was fraud," the older woman answers. Camacho believes the former Mexico City mayor is one of the few leaders who really cares about the elderly and the poor.

"It's that yellow-bellied [President Vicente] Fox who's behind it."

Calderon won in the final official tally by about 244,000 votes, or less than a percentage point, but most Mexican newspapers have yet to proclaim him president-elect. The newspaper El Universal refers to him as Mexico's "virtual president."

Lopez Obrador has kept the controversy alive with a campaign to pressure the seven-judge tribunal to order a ballot-by-ballot recount. On Sunday, Lopez Obrador led hundreds of thousands of people on a march through Mexico City in support of his demand.

Calderon's backers have responded with a series of television commercials arguing that the vote was clean and fair. "We counted the vote three times, in front of the representatives of all the parties," Mexico City poll worker Manuel Castro says in one of the ads, sponsored by a group called "For a Mexico in Peace."

On Tuesday morning, a full-page ad in the daily newspaper Milenio called Lopez Obrador a treasonous demagogue and said he was starting a civil war. That same afternoon, a small crowd of Lopez Obrador supporters pounded the windows of Calderon's car, accusing him of stealing the election.

"People are not anxious, but they are angry," says Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent historian here. "The anger is strongest on the side of the left, because they feel cheated. Whether it's true or not, the perception is there."

For much of the 20th century, elections in Mexico were farcical affairs, rigged by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. In the 1990s, Mexican legislators created the Federal Electoral Institute to oversee all elections and prevent the blatant vote-stealing of the past, and in 2000 Fox, of the National Action Party, or PAN, won the presidency.

Now Lopez Obrador is calling into question the independence of Mexico's new electoral authorities. In some Mexico City neighborhoods where his support is strongest, the streets are lined with posters that transform the initials of the electoral institute into a swastika.

Morales' father, Juan Jose Morales, is in Lopez Obrador's camp. He makes his views known during the regular Sunday visit that he, his wife and daughter Lorena make to his mother's home near downtown Mexico City.

"This is the first time we've ever had an election where it takes three days to know who the winner is — that's what gave them time to organize the fraud," he says.

"But they can't do that anymore," his wife, Virginia Garcia, shoots back — she supports Calderon.

"Of course they can!" Juan Jose says. "This is the most mafia-controlled country that's ever existed."

"If Lopez Obrador had won, you would have said everything with the election was fine," Virginia answers.

"We had 70 years of the PRI," Juan Jose observes wryly. "Now we're going to have 70 years of the PAN."

But what about the international observers, Lorena asks her father. They came and said the election was clean. "If we Mexicans stop believing in our institutions, then what are we going to believe in?" Lorena says.

Commentator Sergio Aguayo is among many who have suggested that a recount of the votes is the only way to mend the growing ideological divisions in Mexico and allow the new president to take office with any sense of legitimacy.

"If the tribunal ignores the petition for a recount … it would be a stain that would forever haunt the administration and resume of Felipe Calderon," Aguayo wrote recently in the newspaper Reforma.

Lorena, a recent college graduate, agrees.

"To shut the mouth of Lopez Obrador and all the PRD people, the best thing would be to recount the votes," she tells her family, using the Spanish initials of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. "It would give Calderon credibility, even though I don't doubt his margin of victory would be smaller."

"But that's giving Lopez Obrador what he wants, and playing his game," her mother says.

"He doesn't respect anything."

Garcia and many other Mexicans see Lopez Obrador as a leader who is becoming increasingly unhinged.

Lopez Obrador didn't help his cause among these skeptics when he aired a video last week purporting to show ballot stuffing in the state of Guanajuato: His own party's representative at the polling place stepped forward to say he was wrong.

On Radio Formula in Mexico City, the morning talk show hosts are taking delight in what they see as the leftist leader's meltdown. They mock Lopez Obrador's allegations of fraud with their own "crazy" accusations.

For historian Meyer, the portrayal of Lopez Obrador as "a little crazy man" in much of the Mexican media misses an important point.

"If he's crazy, then millions of Mexicans are crazy too, and there's an epidemic of craziness," Meyer says. Even if Lopez Obrador loses in the court battle or a vote recount, his campaign could give birth to a social movement, Meyer adds.

At the Morales family home, there is one point of agreement: No one wants to see the recount controversy spin out of control.

"I'm afraid that even if they recount all the votes, Lopez Obrador is still going to say the process is tainted," Lorena says. "What will happen then?"

"I want them to recount the votes," her grandmother says. "But I want it to be done peacefully. There shouldn't be a war with the other side."

Lorena and her parents nod in agreement.

"We don't want a country where people take up arms," Juan Jose says.

A few minutes later, Camacho lights up a cigarette to try to relax after a stressful conversation. Her granddaughter points out that smoking is bad for her. But the grandmother doesn't listen. She keeps on smoking.