MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Demonstrators protest the election of Peña Nieto as Mexican president
“Peña Out” and “Fraud, Fraud” were the slogans but the number of demonstrators was less than on July 7 Thousands of people marched through Mexico City to denounce the July 1 election of Enrique Peña Nieto as president, though the protest was smaller than one held earlier this month.
Peña Nieto's capture of the presidency for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has been challenged by his rival, leftist runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who alleges the PRI resorted to vote-buying and money laundering to win.
Lopez Obrador is seeking to invalidate the PRI victory at the federal electoral tribunal, and the former mayor of Mexico City has pledged to keep the pressure up on Peña Nieto with rallies around the country starting at the end of this month.
On Sunday, student groups dominated the crowd that marched to the capital's main square, chanting slogans like “Peña Out,” “Fraud, Fraud” with banners decrying what the protesters called the “imposition” of the PRI candidate on Mexico.
The PRI ran Mexico for 71 straight years until it was ousted in a 2000 election. The party's rule was marred by allegations of corruption, vote-rigging and violent repression of dissent.
Officials in the capital estimated about 30,000 people turned out for Sunday's protest, less than half the number seen at an anti-Peña Nieto demonstration there on July 7.
The PRI has dismissed Lopez Obrador's claims and accused him of being a sore loser. The 58-year-old also fought the outcome of the 2006 election, which he narrowly lost to President Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
In 2006, the margin of Lopez Obrador's loss to Calderon was less than 250,000 votes. This time he lost by over 3 million votes to Peña Nieto, who is due to take office in December.
The country's electoral tribunal must rule on Lopez Obrador's challenge by early September. Analysts do not expect the election result to be overturned
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Read all commentsPopulist and radical leftist movements have been defeated election after election, but they never recognize their defeat. Mexico has just saved another populist bullet, another Hugo Chavez, another Evo, another Correa, another latin american anti-democratic and anti-free trade demagogue.
Jul 23rd, 2012 - 12:58 pm 0#1 And instead got a corrupt party that everyone from the aforementioned leftists to the right wing PAN see as illegitimate vote riggers. Good luck with that. And next time, with PAN pretty much out of the game, PRI will win
Jul 23rd, 2012 - 02:23 pm 0#2,
Jul 23rd, 2012 - 04:26 pm 0First, PAN recognizes Peña Nieto´s victory, that doesn´t mean that they will not point out irregularities in the election. But Lopez Obrador is out trying to discredit the whole election, which is unreal, more than 45 million mexicans voted, in secret, in private, and in freedom. So Lopez Obrador is constructing a fraud on false premises.
And all political parties are corrupted, none has exclusive rights on corruption in Mexico, neither elsewhere and everywhere around the world, in Brazil there have been plenty of corruption charges in Dilma´s cabinet, for example.
The left has launched a campaign against Peña Nieto, a young politician with no records of corruption, his campaign staff, like Videgaray and others, have no charges of corruption either, many in the PRI have been caught and charged of corruption, but many in PRD and PAN as well. In fact, Lopez Obrador himself had plenty of charges of corruption, documented in videos, while he was major of Mexico City.
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