Mexico Hear The Voices of the Exterior

I call on the candidate of the Right to accept a review of the voting records and a vote by vote recount"


from La Jornada, published in Rebelion July 17th 2006
Friends,

My deep thanks to all of you for your presence in this Second Information Assembly. With all my heart, many thanks to those of you who have come from different parts of the country marching, in an organized caravan or on your own account, in all those cases, of your own free will and paying the cost out of your own pockets.

There are citizens here from Aguascalientes, Baja California, Baja California Sur, Campeche, Coahuila, Colima, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Durango, Estado de México, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Michoacán, Morelos, Nayarit, Nuevo León, Oaxaca, Puebla, Querétaro, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosí, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tabasco, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala, Veracruz, Yucatán, Zacatecas and from the Federal District. You and I know that this effort is not in vain. The cause we are defending is of great historic importance for Mexico.

You are here not just to support one person, but to defend the right of a people, that can never be given up, to elect its government freely. That is precisely why we ought to have the central object of our movement very clear. We are not only battling for the right to our legitimate triumph in the presidential election but for a higher cause, that of making democracy prevail in our country.

We cannot accept a regression, a retreat from democracy. In our country's recent political history, opening the space to be able to have free, equitable, clean elections has cost many sacrifices, including the lives of thousands of Mexicans.

We cannot accept that with illegality, money and tricks a privileged group wants to impose an illegitimate president. We cannot accept that the right of our people to a better life by democratic means be wiped out.

We cannot permit that they take away from us the right to hope. That is why, I repeat, the general objective of this movement is the defence of democracy.

In the use of our faculties and rights, we are applying to the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Power to order the opening of the electoral packets and to carry out an authentic recount of the votes.

It is no accident that the slogan "vote by vote, box by box" has come from the people and has a good basis and solid reasons. I can inform you that as well as the hostile disposition of the IFE (1) during the electoral campaign, and the manipulation of the count systems and the inequity in the purchase of publicity in the communications media and the war of dirty tricks and the use of public programs and resources to help the candidate of the Right, and likewise the determined intervention of the President of the Republic, I can now tell you, and on top of all that, the results of the voting control records and the count were falsified.

For example, from the review we have carried out, 60 per cent of the total number of 130,788 voting records have "arithmetical errors" in quotes, that is to say there are thousands of voting control records where the total vote plus the unused ballots is greater or less than the number of votes received, thousands of voting control records where the total vote is greater or less than the number of ballots deposited and thousands of voting control records where the total vote plus the unused ballots is greater or less than the nominal list, by 10.

I can clarify further., there are more than a million and a half votes that are not based on electoral ballot papers or, put another way, the voting control records do not reflect the true vote because they add up to more or to fewer votes than the votes actually deposited in the ballot boxes.

From our point of view, this explains, in good measure, why, when it was permitted to open some electoral packets and do a recount in the District Councils, cases appeared where the candidate of the Right, fraudulently, had 100 to 200 votes more than they should and ourselves up to 100 votes less than we should, according to the box.

All this evidence was duly presented in the dissenting appeal that we made to the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Power. So this institution has the quantitative and qualitative elements to be able to order the opening of the electoral packets and that they be counted vote by vote, box by box.

I am absolutely certain that if a recount is carried out it will be shown that we won the elections of July 2nd cleanly, legally and legitimately.

From this public square I call on the candidate of the Right to act responsibly and accept without any excuses, a review of the voting records and a vote by vote recount of all the boxes in the country. If he argues that he won, he has no reason to say no. Who owes nothing, fears nothing. I suggest that he considers the fact that not all the water of all the world's oceans can wash away the stain of a fraudulent election.

I also remind him that Mexico, our great country, and its people do not deserve to have a spurious President of the Republic with neither moral nor political authority.

Furthermore I repeat : it is not good enough for our adversaries to take refuge in legaloid arguments, or arguments of lack of time or of a technical nature in order to refuse to open the electoral packets when what is at stake is the country's democracy and political stability No one should be afraid that an election gets cleaned up, resolved and accepted before the eyes of Mexico and the world.

Transparency is not much to ask for. We repeat every last one of our demands:

For the political, economic and financial stability of the country ... vote by vote, box by box!
To move on and leave behind the political culture of mistrust.......vote by vote, box by box!
So all we Mexicans can be at peace with our civic conscience and with our selves....vote by vote, box by box!
To contribute to social peace....vote by vote, box by box!
So money no longer wins out over the people's dignity and morale.... vote by vote, box by box!
So not one Mexican who voted on July 2nd is left feeling dissatisfied or insulted....vote by vote, box by box!
So the doors to democracy are never slammed shut.......vote by vote, box by box!
To hold up high the honour of Mexico....vote by vote, box by box!
To strengthen the institutions......vote by vote, box by box!
To keep faith with legality....vote by vote, box by box!
To banish irrational confrontation .....vote by vote, box by box!
To build reconciliation and unity among Mexicans....vote by vote, box by box!

Friends,

While the Tribunal deliberates on our demand, I put for your consideration the following actions:

1. To reinforce the citizen camps located outside the 300 District Councils where the electoral packets are located. These camps are essential to avoid the illegal introduction or wihdrawal of ballots from the electoral packets The proposal is that these 300 camps turn into centres for decision making, information and communication in support of our cause where people from civil society, artists and intellectuals can meet and participate.

2. To carry out starting this week the first actions of civil peaceful resistance. For that purpose a citizen committee will be formed to decide what type of actions and in what circumstances they will be carried out in practice.

3. To celebrate the Third Informative Assembly on Sunday July 30th with a march like today's from the Museum of Antrhopology and History to the Zocalo at 11 in the morning. We know that our adversaries are counting on, among other things, the demoralisation and exhaustion of our movement. We are going to show them once more that when they want to trample on citizens' dignity and rights and attack democacy there are always women and men of principle and conviction who neither weary, nor much less surrender. As Carlos Monsivais has said, “anyone who only knows despondency and depression will never be worthy of pessimism".

Friends

All of those present and those who could not come, we ought to be proud of living these moments, so decisive for Mexico's public life.

I am convinced that not even with all the apparatus of the State, used menacingly, nor with all the money of a privileged elite, nor with all the manipulation that has been put into play will they be able to crush the free conscious and responsible will of millions of Mexicans. Let us not forget that we are millions of Mexicans ready to make our rights prevail. And this is the most powerful force.

I take this chance to acknowledge the leaders of the parties of the Coalition, the PRD, the PT , the Convergence and the networks of citizens and civil society for their fitting and faithful behaviour. We are living through times of definition and trial and all of us will know how to measure up to things.

As for my part, I again say to you : you can trust me that I am not going to betray the people of Mexico. Furthermore, I am convinced I am not alone, because we are all united.

Translated from Spanish into English by toni solo, a member of Tlaxcala (http://www.tlaxcala.es), the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation is Copyleft.

Translator's Notes
1. Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute

IN THIS MESSAGE:

1) Presentation: Mass Rallies Throughout Mexico on July 30 to Demand
Vote-by-Vote Recount in Presidential Election -- By Alan Benjamin
(Member, Exec. Bd., SF Labor Council)

2) Call to Rally in SF on July 30 in support of demands of Mexico
Mobilizations -- Letter from Frank Martin del Campo (SF/LCLAA)

3) California Federation of Labor COPE Convention Unanimously
Endorses "Vote-by-Vote" Recount Resolution submitted by San Francisco
Labor Council

4) Caravan to Mexicali, Mexico (across the border from Calexico) to
join July 30 march and rally to demand "Voto Por Voto" Recount

********************


1) Giant Mass Rallies Throughout Mexico on July 30 to Demand
Vote-by-Vote Recount in Presidential Election

Dear Sisters and Brothers:

On Sunday, July 16, an estimated 1.5 million people marched in
downtown Mexico City to protest the widespread fraud committed July 2
against Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the presidential candidate of
the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD).

The protesters, many of whom traveled one or two days by bus to
attend the rally, joined López Obrador in calling for a vote-by-vote
recount of the 41 million votes cast.

During the week leading up to this mass rally, the PRD submitted a
900-page document to the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) with
concrete evidence of vote tampering and computerized manipulation of
the results.

In his July 16 rally speech, López Obrador said that "credible
evidence of irregularities" existed in 72,000 of the 130,000 polling
stations across Mexico. He summoned the Mexican people to take to the
streets in even larger numbers on July 30 -- both in Mexico City and
across the country -- if the election officials did not comply with
the people's demand that every vote should be counted.

At a press conference in Mexico City on Thursday, July 27, López
Obrador noted that the Federal Electoral Institute had not budged in
its refusal to count every vote. He proclaimed himself
president-elect of Mexico, called upon all supporters of democratic
rights in Mexico to take to the streets once again this coming July
30 "in far greater numbers," and announced a "mass campaign of civil
disobedience beginning next Monday [July 31] to ensure that the will
of the Mexican people is not violated yet again."

López Obrador was referring here to the widespread fraud that
prevented then PRD presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas from
becoming president of Mexico in 1988. Subsequent investigations
revealed that the fraud committed against Cárdenas was systematic and
incontrovertible. But, unlike López Obrador, Cárdenas at the time
refused to call upon the Mexican people to reject the fraud. By the
time the full story of the massive fraud came to light, it was
already too late; the vote had been stolen, the PRI remained in power.

The Mexican people have not forgotten what happened in 1988 -- nor
have they forgotten that this fraud paved the way for the signing of
the NAFTA Treaty, which has represented a wholesale attack on the
Mexican people and their long-cherished gains and rights (just as it
has represented a devastating attack on working people in the United
States and Canada).

The Mexican people were witness this past year to one of the most
vicious election campaigns in the history of Mexico -- a campaign
where the two major parties of the ruling rich in Mexico, the PAN and
the PRI, brazenly violated the Federal Election Institute's own
guidelines regarding election ads on radio and TV. Day after day,
these ads portrayed López Obrador as an ally of terrorists hell bent
on destroying the Mexican economy and body politic. This campaign was
coordinated by a U.S. PR firm and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.

The Mexican people know that if the PRI and the PAN are allowed to
get away with electoral fraud this time around, new and far-deeper
attacks upon the Mexican working class and oppressed sectors of
society will take place at the hands of Felipe Calderón, the
presidential candidate of the PAN.

Calderón has pledged to privatize PEMEX, Mexico's cherished national
oil corporation. He has pledged to implement the new round of
NAFTA-plus agreements, which would mean the total dismantling of
Mexico's subsistence agriculture beginning Jan. 1, 2008. He has
pledged to deepen the destructive privatization agenda of his
predecessors.

López Obrador, hardly a radical candidate, has nonetheless opposed
the privatization of PEMEX and the NAFTA-plus agreement. This is the
reason the U.S. multinational corporations, who are champing at the
bit to get their hands on Mexico's oil, have financed this dirty war
against López Obrador ... and against the Mexican people, who refuse
to have their country and their resources pillaged any further by
foreign interests.

The Mexican people voted on July 2 to make López Obrador their next
president -- and he is the duly elected president of Mexico --
because, as thousands of banners and signs proclaimed in Mexico City
last July 16, "La Patria No Se Vende! La Patria Se Defiende!" This
means that "Our Country Is Not For Sale! Our Country Must Be
Defended!"

Support for the Mexican people's demand for a vote-by-vote recount
has extended way beyond Mexico's borders. One recent and extremely
important example is the unanimous vote that took place on July 26,
2006, at the COPE Convention of the California Federation of Labor,
held in Los Angeles, in support of the resolution submitted by the
San Francisco Labor Council calling for a vote-by-vote recount. [See
below.]

This coming Sunday, July 30, a demonstration will take place at the
Civic Center in San Francisco in solidarity with the Mexican people
and their demand for a recount -- "voto por voto." [See letter below
from Frank Martin del Campo.] Similar rallies will be taking place in
other cities across the United States.

We urge you to join these July 30 protest actions. This is not just a
Mexican question. To the extent the "free trade" agenda of the U.S.
government continues to be forced upon the Mexican people, including
by electoral fraud, more U.S. jobs will be exported to Mexico's
"maquiladora" sweatshops, and countless more Mexican people will risk
their lives crossing the border through the Arizona desert to find
any possible means to sustain their families back home in an
increasingly devastated Mexico.

We hope to see you there.

- Voto Por Voto!
- Sí Se Puede!

In solidarity,

Alan Benjamin
Member, Executive Board
San Francisco Labor Council

********************


2) Call to Rally in SF on July 30 in support of demands of Mexico Mobilizations

Sisters, Brothers, Compas,

Please join SF/LCLAA and all progressive and democratic trade
unionists this Sunday, July 30th at a Civic Center in San Francisco @
11:30 A.M.in a Solidarity Rally called in support of the massive
rally in Mexico City to demonstrate our support for the Vote by Vote
Count in the Mexican Presidential Election.

Music by Francisco Herrera. Please pass the word!

Favor de unirse a un rally este domingo, el 30 de julio a partir de
las 11:30 de la manana para manifestar apoyo con la mobilizacion en
el Zocalo por el Voto por Voto y la democracia en Mexico.

Cantante Francisco Herrera ofrece la musica.

Favor de pasar la palabra!

Paco Martín del Campo
Member, SEIU, US, SF/LCLAA
Cell (415) 407-7117
email: poderpopular@sbcglobal.net

********************


3) California Federation of Labor Endorses SFLC Resolution Urging
Vote-By-Vote Recount in Mexican Election 2006

[Note: The following resolution was adopted unanimously by the COPE
Convention of the California Federation of Labor, held July 25-26 in
Los Angeles. The resolution was submitted by the San Francisco Labor
Council. The resolution below has been left in the form presented by
the SF Labor Council. We do not yet have the final version adopted by
the California Federation of Labor. -- A.B.]

Whereas, the San Francisco Labor Council has provided concrete
assistance to ensure the participation of sisters and brothers of
Mexican nationality in the Mexican presidential election of 2006, and

Whereas, these sisters and brothers traveled over 1,000 miles to
secure their voting rights in said elections,

Whereas, complaints of election irregularities including, but not
limited to, uncounted ballots and corporate media manipulation have
been submitted and raised in said election, and

Whereas, the issue of election irregularities and the exclusion of
the disenfranchised is an increasing component of many elections here
and abroad, and

Whereas, the progressive Mexican union movement, the UNT, has
supported the call for a recount and has asked for support to all
other labor organizations, nationally and internationally;

Therefore be it resolved, the San Francisco Labor Council supports
the demand of a recount in the Mexican Presidential Election 06 vote
by vote (voto por voto).

Be it further resolved, this resolution shall be forwarded to the
California Federation of Labor and all other affiliated bodies for
their consideration and adoption.

********************


4) Caravan to Mexicali, Mexico (across the border from Calexico) to
join July 30 march and rally to demand "Voto Por Voto" Recount

Students from U.C. Irvine will be traveling to Mexicali, Mexico to
participate in the protests, scheduled to take place Sunday, July 30
in the afternoon.

If you are interested in driving to Mexicali to join the protest
actions, please contact Coral at or Gemma
Lopez Limon in Mexicali at .

# posted by Nancy T. @ 1:43 AM 0 comments

NEWS FROM RWDSU
Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union/ UFCW
30 E. 29th Street, New York, NY 10016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Zita Allen: 917-309-2210
July 27, 2006

Immediate Recount in Mexican Election Demanded by Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union Delegates at 20th Quadrennial Convention

Orlando, Florida -- The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union today called for a complete and immediate recount of all the votes cast for President in Mexico’s July 2, 2006 national elections. Delegates to the RWDSU 20th Quadrennial Convention unanimously passed a resolution calling for the recount following an address by Talia Vazquez, the U.S. representative of the Party of Democratic Resolution (PRD) and Lopez Obrador’s coordinator for Mexicans abroad.

RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum said, “The RWDSU represents many workers who are immigrants from Mexico and many of these joined with almost 40 million other Mexicans to vote in the July 2, 2006 elections to choose a new President and Legislature. The RWDSU is a democratic trade union that supports the will of the Mexican people to choose through free elections their representatives in government just as it supports the right of all peoples around the world to democratically elect their own leaders.”

The initial count in Mexico’s as yet unresolved national election has Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) coming in second to Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN) with the two separated by a razor thin 0.58 of one percentage point. The election has been clouded by widespread accusations of voter irregularity. Many Mexican trade unions have expressed deep concern and called for a recount.

Talia Vazquez told the RWDSU delegates that the fight for a vote-by-vote recount in Mexico is a fight for truth and fairness, “You are our brothers and sisters because you protect people’s human and civil rights. We don’t want you to say Lopez Obrador is the President of Mexico. We want you to join us in calling for a vote-by-vote recount. We are sure in that case Lopez Obrador is going to be the next President of Mexico.”

Recalling this country’s own controversial 2002 election and the role Florida played then, Appelbaum said, “What the RWDSU is saying here is that there has to be a fair and real count vote by vote. The only way that is going to happen is not if people sit back and say that it would be nice to hold a recount, but if the government of Mexico hears from not just the people who are pouring into the streets in Mexico but from people all over the world saying that we demand democracy.”

###
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union represents 100,000 workers throughout the U.S. and Canada. The RWDSU is affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

Sisters, Brothers, Compas, Amigos y Colegas

Please join SF/LCLAA and all progressive and democratic trade unionists this Sunday, July 30th at Civic Center @ 11:30 A.M.in a Solidarity Rally called in support of the massive rally in Mexico City to demonstrate our support for the Vote by Vote Count in the Mexican Presidential Election.

Music by Francisco Herrera. Please pass the word!

Favor de unirse a un rally este domingo, el 30 de julio a partir de las 11:30 de la manana para manifestar apoyo con la mobilizacion en el Zocalo por el Voto por Voto y la democracia en Mexico.

Cantante Francisco Herrera ofrece la musica.

Favor de pasar la palabra!


Paco Martín del Campo
Member, SEIU, US,SF/LCLAA
Cell (415) 407-7117
email: poderpopular@sbcglobal.net

By Jorge de los Santos
The Washington Post
Thursday, July 27, 2006; A25

The 2000 U.S. presidential election was a bitter episode in American
history. It was one of the closest elections ever, with 537 votes in the
state of Florida separating the candidates. It took a month of court
challenges and recounts before the election was finally certified.

After Election Day, several weeks of legal maneuvering by the Bush and Gore
teams followed. Neither side was satisfied with the vote counts, and both
crafted plans of action and created their own "recount commissions." At the
end, after hearing all the arguments, the courts ultimately ruled, clearing
the way for a Bush presidency.

Independent studies by universities and news organizations concluded that
the different methods of counting the votes yielded different results. For
example, a lenient standard of counting the hanging chads gave the victory
to George W. Bush, while a strict standard gave it to Al Gore. But the
courts played the final part in the episode. They brought certainty and
finality to the dispute.

Now Mexico has its own soap opera version of an election. After a
nerve-racking election night, contradictory exit polls and preliminary
recounts that went up and down like a roller coaster, the conservative
candidate, Felipe Calderón, is holding a razor-thin lead over the
left-leaning candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. With a margin of
200,000 votes separating the candidates, and allegations of serious
irregularities, Mexico is still waiting for its new president.

This was a highly polarized campaign. Below-the-belt attacks and challenges
were widespread. Companies, nonprofits and even local governments interfered
and swayed public opinion. It was a take-no-prisoners battle for the
presidency. In some cases, flat-out lies and off-color comparisons were so
far from reality that the Mexican Electoral Institute resorted to outlawing
some TV ads.

The problems in the election are ubiquitous. Charges of ballot stuffing,
vote buying, misreported vote tallies and blatant support from elected
officials raise serious concerns about the quality and, most important, the
equality in this election. The good news for Mexico is that, as in the
United States, there are courts that will bring closure to the election.

The Federal Electoral Tribunal in Mexico will decide on the validity of any
allegations or irregularities. This court is the single institution with the
authority to announce the winner of the election. It has experience with
high-profile elections and difficult decisions and has even overturned the
elections in two Mexican states. It will be up to the court to officially
declare the winner.

A truly democratic electoral process is still a challenge in Mexico. López
Obrador is leading peaceful civil resistance to appease the frustrations of
the millions of people dissatisfied with the electoral process. These
frustrations can also be alleviated by the court, through a new recount.

A full recount of the votes, and transparent legal proceedings, would be
good for Mexico for several reasons. First, it would strengthen Mexico's
young democracy. Mexico has a long history of electoral fraud, and there are
still sour memories of the 1988 election, in which left-leaning Cuauhtémoc
Cárdenas was allegedly robbed of victory. A vote-by-vote count would ease
these worries and bring credibility.

Second, it would make government more effective. Either Calderón or López
Obrador will need to negotiate with Mexico's deeply divided Congress to
approve critical reforms. A genuine and lawfully recognized winner will be
able to negotiate across party lines. Since none of the parties will be
holding a majority in Congress, it will be impossible to govern without full
authority.

Third, it will bring legitimacy to the winner of the election. Each one of
the front-runners received only about one-third of the votes, and regardless
of who wins the election, the victor will win with less than one percentage
point difference. Approximately 65 percent of Mexicans will not have voted
for the new president, whether it is Calderón or López Obrador. That is why
the president will need as much clout as possible.

López Obrador has said that if he loses the recount, he will accept the
results, though under protest, and will call off any demonstrations. He has
also said that he will work over the next few years to create a civil
organization that will promote a national democracy project.

But Mexicans still have a month and a half before they know the outcome of
their election. In 2000 the United States also waited to find out who the
winner was. Thankfully, Mexico has an advantage over the United States in
its electoral process: enough time for legal challenges.

On Sept. 6, the Federal Electoral Tribunal will declare the winner. The
winner takes office on Dec. 1, which means that he will have ample time to
create a transition team, come up with a cabinet and get ready to tackle the
business of running a nation. Mexico just needs a little bit of patience.

The writer is currently U.S.-Mexico affairs adviser to Andrés Manuel López
Obrador. He is also director of the Pan-American initiative office at
Arizona State University and special adviser to the university president.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Fewer than 1 percent of presidential votes came from abroad
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Regina Reyes - Heroles
ASSOCIATED PRESS

TIM JOHNSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
Del Rosario Perez applied for an absentee ballot in January, but so few others did that Mexican officials might change the procedure.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico's first attempt at absentee voting was a flop, collecting a mere 33,111 ballots, but officials hope to make it cheaper and easier for Mexicans to vote from abroad in the next presidential election.
Millions of Mexicans living abroad were allowed to mail in presidential ballots for the first time in the July 2 election, a right migrants living in the United States spent years fighting for.
Electoral authorities counted 32,632 absentee ballots on July 2. Of those, 28,335 came from the United States — home to about 9 million Mexican expatriates. Officials annulled 479 ballots for irregularities.
The results confirmed fears that the effort, despite a $42 million budget, wasn't well publicized and was too complicated.
"It is a new right, and people aren't used to voting from abroad," Patricio Ballados, who coordinated the effort, said.
To get an absentee ballot, Mexicans had to be registered in Mexico, have a voting card and give a valid street address in the country where they were living. The next step was asking for a ballot by registered mail, which cost $9.
Many migrants couldn't afford registered mail. Even fewer had voting cards with them, and almost none wanted to make their addresses public.
Electoral officials plan to ask the new Congress, which will be sworn in Sept. 1, to allow voters to register from abroad and seek other ways to simplify the process.
Jose Jacques Medina, of the California-based Front of Mexicans Abroad, said the current procedure excluded many poorer Mexicans who might have voted for leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
The presidential race is undecided, with Lopez Obrador disputing an official count that gave ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon a slim lead.
Calderon won the absentee vote, receiving 58 percent of the ballots that arrived from other countries. Lopez Obrador got 34 percent of the absentee ballots and Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party received 4 percent.
"If they had allowed the votes of every Mexican living abroad, then Calderon would have lost," Medina said.
Of the more than 40 million votes cast July 2, less than 1 percent were from absentee ballots. Analysts say absentee ballots had little impact.
Al Rojas, national coordinator of the Front of Mexicans Abroad, said changes must be made so all Mexicans abroad can participate.
"They are Mexicans, here or there, and they should have the same rights as all Mexicans," he said.
It took months of negotiating to agree on the absentee-voting law. Making significant changes could be difficult.
Genaro Borrego, a senator who backed the law, said allowing people to register from abroad was "legally and logistically complicated."
With the next presidential race six years away, changes to the absentee-voting law could get shoved aside after the new Congress is sworn in.
"It will be hard to convince political parties to make important changes,"said Guadalupe Gonzalez, with the Center of Economic Teaching and Research. "I predict not much will happen."

Mexico, Jul 21 (Prensa Latina) Por el Bien de Todos leftwing
coalition presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO)
asserted he will not recognize any ruling of the Judicial Power
Electoral Court (TEPJF) without a vote-by-vote recount.

AMLO ratified his stance in an interview on Friday, describing the
July 2 elections as a fraud and condemning the triumphant seizure of
power by governing candidate Felipe Calderon, of the National Action
Party (PAN).

"Vote recount is the best for the nation," noted ANLO, who buttressed
his request by producing 21 packages of 30,000 votes with alleged
arithmetic errors.

He said his coalition possesses evidence of errors in 50,000 polling
booths, although there are indications of 72,000, accounting for
nearly 1.5 million votes.

Lopez Obrador, once more, urged Calderon to back the recount to
contribute to the clarification of electoral results.

Collaborators of Por el Bien de Todos are preparing complaints
against advisers of the Federal Election Institute as they maintain
that their conduct and handling of numbers was dubious and
irresponsible.

Civil and religious organizations have made it clear democracy cannot
be put in danger because social violence is likely to ignite if the
law is not respected.

Neither Felipe Calderon is the president-elect to call official
meetings or organize cabinets, nor AMLO is the defeated candidate who
has become a menace for the country, they contended.

Amid this situation, Calderon has only said election is over and
votes were counted. He is currently engaged in lobbying with PAN
governors, deputies and senators, and businessmen of various sectors
to take the streets and defend his "victory."

ef/ecq/rl/mf


Mexico Jacks up Anti-Fraud Actions

Mexico, Jul 21 (Prensa Latina) The symbolic closing of public
buildings and protest actions in front of government offices are
Friday among the actions by the civil resistance against what they
consider a fraud in the Mexico July 2 elections.

Officials from the For the Good of All coalition and the citizen
committee are coordinating daily demonstrations on the elections
results and demand from authorities a vote-by-vote recount.

Today afternoon, they will present new evidence over the
irregularities in more than 50,000 polling booths.

On Thursday, a group of coordinators of the coalition runner Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador denounced illegal fixing by the Federal
Government to prioritize the electoral criterion above the
demographic ones and marginalization to win votes in favor of the
ruling National Action Party.

According to them, the current administration used the budget for
social programs to gain votes in favor of pro-government candidate
Felipe Calderon and used 17.3 percent of oil income to support the
electoral political spending.

The opposition alliance rejected the idea of annulling the elections
and warned it will present all possible proof to demonstrate
electoral fraud, mishandling of resources and manipulation of
citizens with promises and menaces by authorities.

Contested Vote Puts Electoral Reforms, Institutions to Test
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/24/AR2006072400991_pf.html


By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 25, 2006; A11



MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's political future -- thrown into a state of uncertainty by a three-week electoral crisis -- will be decided in a boat-shaped building in this city's working-class south.

The modernist structure did not exist in 1988 during Mexico's previous disputed presidential election. Nor did the seven-magistrate electoral court it houses. Nor did a genuine Mexican democracy.

Now, pressures are building on Mexico to hold together that democratic system, which is still in its infancy six years after the end of one-party rule and a little over a decade after broad electoral reforms were enacted. The strain has raised questions about the integrity of vote-counters, and the electoral court faces major challenges ahead.

"Our transition to democracy is now entering a moment of great difficulty, of great danger," said Roger Bartra, a self-described leftist historian in Mexico City.

Stoked by ever-more incendiary rhetoric, the capital has tensed since the July 2 presidential balloting ended with a result that remains disputed. Felipe Calderón, dubbed the "virtual" winner by the Mexican news media, redoubled security after the parked sport-utility vehicle he was sitting in was kicked by protesters screaming obscenities. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the runner-up, has called for "peaceful civil resistance." And there are fears that López Obrador's mostly poor followers could resort to violence if their calls for a full recount fail.

Dozens of large posters, installed downtown by well-known artists who support a recount, have been torn apart, presumably by vandals who don't. Other demonstrators who want a recount have gone on a hunger strike and moved into tents outside the electoral court, known as the Federal Judicial Electoral Tribunal.

The votes were counted by the 16-year-old Federal Electoral Institute, an internationally respected government body. López Obrador accuses the institute of rigging computers to ensure Calderón's half-percentage-point victory and of ignoring manipulation of vote tally sheets in tens of thousands of polling places. His complaints, and Calderón's counterarguments, will be heard by the 10-year-old electoral tribunal, which has until Sept. 6 to certify a winner.

"It's good that we have the institutions to channel the challenges," said Carlos Heredia, who became a leading adviser to candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas after his loss in the contested 1988 presidential election. "What has me concerned is whether the institutions have the confidence of the citizenry -- that's the big question in the air."

A huge López Obrador rally earlier this month suggested that at least some do not have faith in the process. The candidate's supporters lampooned the system, booing each time the name of the electoral institute's chief, Luis Carlos Ugalde, was mentioned. Homemade banners read "No to the Institute of Electoral Fraud," and a sign, accompanied by a traditional Mexican skeleton figure, said "Democracy is dead."

Meanwhile, demonstrators have accused President Vicente Fox, of Calderón's National Action Party, of siding with Calderón and trying to limit their free-speech rights. Fox and Ugalde have responded to the attacks by vigorously defending the integrity of the electoral system.

But there are serious questions about the integrity of the elections court. A month before the election, the court's chief magistrate, Leonel Castillo, told Milenio magazine that the court would reject any recount request, a statement that would likely have led to demands for a recusal in a U.S. case.

Both the electoral institute, known as IFE, and the tribunal were created in the reform movement that followed international condemnation of the 1988 presidential election, which was won by the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, immortalized as "the perfect dictatorship" by author Mario Vargas Llosa.

Cárdenas, the left-leaning candidate who lost in 1988 after a suspicious election night computer failure, conceded following a brief attempt to use street protests to force a reevaluation of the results. He had no choice, said Manuel Camacho Solís, a top aide to the winning candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Camacho Solís, who later switched parties and has become a top López Obrador adviser, is now viewing an election crisis from the opposite side -- the one declared the loser.

"It was a completely different world in 1988," Camacho Solís said in an interview. "There was no IFE, we didn't have an open press, the United States government was supportive of the PRI; so was [Cuban President Fidel] Castro. The government was authoritarian, it controlled everything."

Faced with those obstacles, Cárdenas called off demonstrations, averting unrest and earning an enduring reputation for statesmanship.

López Obrador and his followers have something Cárdenas never had, Camacho Solís said: real hope that someone in authority, magistrates of an electoral court, will listen. But that sense of hope could vanish in an instant, he said, if López Obrador's core supporters in Mexico City's poorest neighborhoods think they aren't getting a fair hearing from the court.

"What's at risk now is our democratic progress backsliding," he said. "The society could become ungovernable. The choice is simple: recount or disorder."

Calderón's campaign advisers argue that a recount is unnecessary, and they accuse López Obrador of being a provocateur. In a recent television interview, López Obrador called his opponents "fascists" and suggested that subliminal messages were inserted by his opponents in potato chip and juice advertisements.

"One of the most important success stories of Mexico has been the normalizing of democratic elections," Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican consul general in New York and a Calderón adviser, said in an interview. "We have to make sure that the whims of one man, of one party, don't undermine the credibility of that system."

Top Calderón campaign officials concede that they have been losing the public relations war with López Obrador since both candidates claimed victory on election night. López Obrador's recount message is concise and catchy: "Vote by vote, polling place by polling place."

Calderón's pitch, which will form the basis of his legal argument against a recount, is more nuanced and doesn't fit neatly into a slogan. And his message has been less consistent.

Calderón argues that Mexican law allows recounts of polling places only where clear inconsistencies have been found. The vote-by-vote count, he says, already took place on election day. And the count was conducted, he says, by citizen poll workers who were given authority under election reforms that took vote-counting power away from the government.

The New York Times and the British newspaper, the Financial Times, have each called for a recount, as has the human rights group Global Exchange, which sent election observer teams to Mexico. Calderón has been courting influential publications in phone calls, and his top aides have been flying to the United States to plead his case to editorial boards and financial markets.

"I won the election. It's very important for people to know that," Calderón said in a recent telephone call to a top Washington Post editor. "The real dilemma is not whether the election was free and fair. The real dilemma is whether Mexico is going to solve these issues through mobilization in the streets or by following our laws and institutions."

López Obrador and his legal team now hold news conferences almost every day, each featuring new fraud allegations or new takes on old allegations. But some of the claims have not held up to scrutiny, raising questions among many observers about the strength of his case. At one polling place, a representative from López Obrador's own party rebutted the candidate's claims that a video showed a man there illegally stuffing a ballot box.

The tribunal that will decide the case is described as activist by many Mexican legal scholars. It has been more inclined to annul elections than to order recounts.

The magistrates are poring over 38 boxes of evidence presented by López Obrador. The court has shifted to 18-hour daily schedules to meet its Sept. 6 deadline. Out on the sidewalk, protesters keep vigil. They squint upward at the office wing of the court complex, which has balconies covered with potted plants, giving the place the appearance of an upscale apartment building.

The magistrates at work inside are limited to 10-year terms, and all but one -- a replacement for a magistrate who died -- is hearing the biggest case of his career as he prepares to step down. When the new president takes office in December, six of the magistrates who put him there, members of the first electoral tribunal of Mexico's young democracy, will already be gone.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Cliffhanger: Mexican Elections and Their Aftermath
LInk: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071901593_pf.html

Julia E. Sweig
Special to washingtonpost.com's Think Tank Town
Thursday, July 20, 2006; 12:00 AM

Cliffhanger. That's the best way to describe Mexico's still unresolved July 2 presidential elections. Conjuring memories in the United States of butterfly ballots and hanging chads, it may be as long as the end of August before Mexicans and the rest of the world know who will govern their country for the next six years.

The initial vote tally in the days immediately following the election showed that Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN) won by a slim margin of 35.89 percent over the 35.31 percent votes cast for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known by his initials, AMLO, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Of 41 million votes cast, the margin of difference is under a quarter million, exposing Mexico's deep divides, between north and south, rich and poor.

Although only Mexico's federal electoral tribunal -- the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TRIFE) -- is legally empowered to pronounce who will be the next president, Calderón has declared himself the president-elect and is assembling his team, traveling around the country thanking his supporters. President Fox has offered his congratulations, as have several other heads of state, though not, as yet, President Bush.

That's because AMLO and the PRD have presented evidence of fraud and other irregularities to the TRIFE, challenging the results and asking for a vote-by-vote or partial recount. Ever since 1988 when the PRD's candidate won the election but was denied the presidency by the regime then in power, the Mexican left, the PRD and AMLO have harbored suspicions that playing by the rules set by Mexico's electoral institutions might never deliver the presidency. Calderón has been acting presidential and the media, and business elite have called for strict adherence by the TRIFE to the law, which does not affirmatively allow for a total recount. But AMLO and the PRD have staged mass mobilizations throughout Mexico as a form of counter-pressure to encourage the TRIFE to accept demands for a recount. Whatever the outcome, observers expect AMLO to respect the court's decision. The risk of not conducting some form of recount is that Mexico's electoral institutions will lose their legitimacy and, as a result, significantly weaken Mexico's hard-won democracy.

Both candidates recognize Mexico's profound poverty and social divide as a core challenge. AMLO's campaign platform focused on helping Mexico's poor and ending privileges for the wealthiest Mexicans in order to close the income gap. He promised to increase social spending while keeping a close watch on inflation and maintaining fiscal discipline. Calderón campaigned on a promise to continue President Fox's largely successful macroeconomic policies in order to stimulate growth and employment, promising more private investment and education spending.

Whether or not a recount is ordered, and whoever is declared the winner, the shallow mandate of this election and its legacy of political polarization and distrust will weaken the next president's capacity to build a coalition in the legislature and to carry out the numerous reforms left incomplete by the Fox government. According to Pamela Starr, author of a newly released Council on Foreign Relations Special Report, Challenges for a Postelection Mexico: Issues for U.S. Policy, the next Mexican president will have to contend with Mexico's domestic policy issues, including "fiscal dependence on volatile petroleum revenues, enormous pension liabilities that expand with Mexico's aging population, insufficient investment capital in the energy sector, declining global competitiveness, weak job creation and growth, corruption, inadequate rule of law, and increasing crime." Entrenched business and labor interests and vastly inadequate revenue from taxes will further erode the weakened mandate of either of the two candidates.

What does this all mean for the United States? According to Starr, with a 2,000-mile shared border, the United States needs a politically and economically stable Mexico to find a mutually viable solution to the migration question, to coordinate efforts to control drug trafficking, and to enhance the competitiveness for the U.S. economy. Whoever is the next president, the United States can expect him to govern with a more nationalistic tone and to shun the openly warm embrace Fox extended to the United States for much of his presidency. Starr's report concludes that, "the United States should take the lead in changing the tone of the relationship by reaching out to Mexico's new president as a valued policy partner, and Mexico should reciprocate by thinking realistically about migration and attacking its pending domestic economic and security agenda." The report recommends that the United States enhance technical and financial assistance to improve the training, pay, and effectiveness of Mexico's federal and state police forces. Mexico for its part "needs to overcome its historic sensitivity to joint operations with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies."

Because of the unpredictable outcome of these elections and their overall polarizing effect on Mexico's democracy, no one in Washington should have any illusion that a bilateral agenda with the new president will be any easier to carry out than it was with Fox, who came in with a much stronger mandate. Moreover, Mexico policy in the United States may well fall victim to our own domestic political calendar, at least until after the midterm elections. Fortunately, because Mexicans won't inaugurate their new president until December 2006, there may well be some breathing space before the U.S. presidential election season gears up for both countries to map out future directions for the bilateral relationship.

Julia E. Sweig is the Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America studies and director for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is author of Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century.

© 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

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James K Galbraith
July 17, 2006 11:30 AM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/james_k_galbraith/2006/07/the_mexican_standoff.html

The election was stolen. It's not in doubt. Colin Powell admits it. The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute both admit it. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana - a Republican - was emphatic: there had been "a concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse"; he "had heard" of employers telling their workers how to vote; yet he had also seen the fire of the resisting young, "not prepared to be intimidated".


In Washington, Zbigniew Brzezinski has demanded that the results be set aside and a new vote taken, under the eye - no less - of the United Nations. In The New York Times, Steven Lee Myers decried "the use of government resources on behalf of loyal candidates and the state's control over the media" - factors, he said, were akin to practices in "Putin's Russia".

I wrote those words two years ago, for Salon. They referred, of course, to the election in the Ukraine, where the presidential candidate favoured by the powerful neighbouring state (Russia) had claimed a tainted victory in a tight race. The thunder from America, citadel of democracy, was overwhelming. Nothing mattered more than to see the vote annulled, a new election held. The subsequent installation of Viktor Yuschenko as President of Ukraine was widely celebrated as a great triumph for democracy.
But that, of course, was in another country. Two weeks have now passed since the presidential vote in Mexico, pitting Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the party for a Democratic Revolution (PRD) against Felipe Calderón of the ruling National Action party (PAN). The candidate who trailed, López Obrador, has explicitly charged that the count was cooked. He has challenged the result in court. No final resolution is due before September.
Yet the stalwarts of democracy outside Mexico are silent. Bush has congratulated Calderón, not waiting for the court to rule. Reuters and Bloomberg echo the confidence of the elites that Calderón will win in court - never mind whether he won at the polls. When The New York Times is heard from, the headlines tell us of the "leftist claims" about the occurrence of fraud, while Calderón is described as "presidential." The Times never doubted that fraud did occur in Ukraine. In Mexico on the other hand, it seemingly renounces any duty to examine the facts on the ground.
Here's one difference between the two situations. In Ukraine, it was extremely hard to learn exactly what the evidence of fraudulence actually was. In Mexico, it is extremely easy. That is because the Mexican electoral authority, known as IFE, posted the ongoing count on its website in real time, an initiative called PREP. Independent scholars kept a record of PREP as the night progressed. A statistical analysis of that record does not, of course, constitute proof. But it brings to mind Henry David Thoreau's remark that circumstantial evidence can be very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
To begin with, a simple matter. According to an article by Roberto González Amador in La Jornada, the vote totals don't match the percentages reported. Given the just over 15m votes Calderón was said to have earned, the percentage reported for him, 35.89%, could only be obtained by including invalid ballots in the total reported. If, on the other hand, one takes the overall vote total and the percentage reported for Calderón as correct, then his total vote must have been substantially less than was reported.
The same is true for AMLO and the other candidates, and there is a total shortfall of over a million votes between what can be justified by the official percentages of the valid votes, and the sum of votes reported. The discrepancy proves nothing, but even if it is only a simple error, it certainly seems to cast doubt over the competence of the count.
Let's turn to the harder stuff. An analysis by the physicist Luis Mochán of UNAM based on the realtime evolution of the vote count and the distribution of vote totals by polling place can be found here, and in greater detail in Spanish, here. It's not easy reading, but is immensely worthwhile. It's possible that Mochán's work inaugurates a new era in realtime checking for vote fraud, made possible by the simplicity of Mexico's first-past-the-post direct vote and the rich electoral data sets that can be made instantly available. Call it the age of transparency, in collision with an oligarchy of thugs.
Mochán's work calls attention to at least four important anomalies in the count.
1. Calderón's percentage lead in the count started at around seven percentage points, and diminished steadily in percentage terms through the first part of the count. This corresponded to a remarkably constant absolute differential between Calderón and AMLO as the count progressed. Is this normal? The count depended on the arrival of the boxes; if this were absolutely random then the proportions should have held roughly constant while absolute differentials widened, as actually happened to the differential between Calderón and the third major candidate, Madrazo of the PRI, for most of the evening. Why did the Calderón-AMLO differential follow a different rule?
2. The PREP results went on view only after the first 10,000 boxes had been processed. If those first 10,000 boxes resembled what came later, then extrapolating backward should produce a line intersecting the origin - each candidate should have started with zero votes. For Calderón this is the case, but for AMLO it is not: the AMLO intercept is actually at minus 126,000 votes. Thus, the first 10,000 boxes were markedly different from those that followed. How?
3. There are gross anomalies in the number of votes counted per five-minute interval as the count finishes. Over the course of the evening, the pattern of vote counts set a normal range for this variable. As the last boxes came in, however, it was radically violated, with many more votes piled in, per interval, than was normal before. Moreover, toward the very end, PREP reset the box count, which regressed from 127,936 at 13.17 on July 3 to 127,713 at 13.50, meaning that records for 223 boxes disappeared. 33 minutes had by then passed with no updates. When they resumed, there were updates with absurd results: more than 6000 votes per box at 13:57, and then updates with large negative votes per box at 13:57 and 14:03.
4. From a statistical point of view, the distribution across boxes of votes earned by each candidate should be smooth. For Madrazo it is. But for Calderón and AMLO it isn't. In Calderón's case, the distribution appears to be shifted out, with the shift localized among the last 40,000 boxes counted. In the case of AMLO, the distribution tails off abruptly from its peak. It is in the difference between the slightly fat distribution for Calderón and the shaved distribution for AMLO that the difference in the final outcome is to be found. A graph of the differences in Calderón and AMLO's votes per box, which ought to follow a normal curve, does not. Over a certain range, Calderón's margins appear abnormally large.
Professor Mochán does not claim to explain these anomalies. More time and closer investigation remain necessary. But he does conclude that it "is reasonable to suspect that there could have been a manipulation of the results reported by the PREP." It is true that the PREP is not an official count - that was done at the district offices, with equally serious anomalies alleged. But PREP reported the box-by-box results as they flowed in-and as such it constitutes a vital instrument for the detection of patterns of manipulation and fraud.
Let me go further than Mochán. The evidence he assembles is consistent with the following possibilities:
1. That Felipe Calderón started the night with an advantage in total votes, a gift from the authorities.
2. That as the count progressed this advantage was maintained by misreporting of the actual results. This enabled Calderón to claim that he had led through the entire process - an argument greatly repeated but spurious in any case because it is only the final count that matters.
3. That toward the end of the count, further adjustments were made to support the appearance of a victory by Calderón.
Add these elements together, and there is no reason to accept the almost universal view that the election was close. AMLO might have won by a mile.
If you want sound and colour, there's plenty of that too: actual tally sheets showing that votes counted for AMLO were reduced, taped conspiratorial telephone conversations, videotapes that may or may not show guilty behaviour; the endorsement of Calderón by Fox; the inclusion of PAN themes in corporate advertising. As a Mexican correspondent writes, "the fraud is a p-r-o-c-e-s-s." In late news, La Jornada on July 16 charges that 40% of the vote packets have been illegally reopened by the IFE since the election. This amounts to a pre-emptive strike against the credibility of any recount. The charges, if true, are tantamount to proof of fraud, evidence prima facie that AMLO won the election.
Is it time to move on? The numbers suggest otherwise. By demonstrating the possibility of detecting fraud before the results of an election are officially decided, they also inaugurate a new phase in the struggle for the recognition of a democratic vote. The Mexican people, who marched through their capital today, appear determined to carry that struggle forward until justice is won. Unlike the so-called Democratic Party in the United States six years back, Andres Manuel López Obrador appears, for now, determined not to compromise with fraud.
And for those of us outside Mexico, we must decide where we stand: with democracy ... or quietly on the sidelines?

Wednesday, 12 July 2006, 8:34 am
Press Release: Council on Hemispheric Affairs


Council On Hemispheric Affairs
MONITORING POLITICAL, ECONOMIC AND DIPLOMATIC
ISSUES AFFECTING THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
uesday, July 11th, 2006
Press Releases, Mexico, Releases

Mexican Election Still Far from Over, as the Plot Somewhat Thickens
• More than a week after Mexico’s presidential election, there is still no clear winner

• Although ruling PAN party candidate Felipe Calderón ostensibly won by the slimmest of margins in last week’s re-tabulation of votes, a long and what could prove to be a turbulent legal process lies ahead before he can actually be certified as president-elect

• Left-leaning PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador has rightly protested the results of the election, citing mounting evidence of fraud and malfeasance. He is seeking victory not by means of violence and hysteria, but by a vote-by-vote recount

• While the electoral authorities have repeatedly preached about their body’s own accomplishments, in fact, IFE’s credibility is flagging. Given the process in which it evolved, candidate López Obrador has every right and reason to challenge IFE’s role and the manner in which the ruling party conducted itself. The PRD’s search for validation of the election is merited


Less than a week since a retabulation of gross vote totals from Mexico’s July 2 ballot gave him a razor-thin margin, Felipe Calderón has begun to lay out plans for a yet-to-be confirmed presidency. But while he is somewhat presumptuously behaving as a president-elect and receiving congratulations from Bush, Harper and Zapatero among others, the president of the U.S. and the prime ministers of Canada and Spain would be well advised to take note of the fact that the election is still far from having witnessed a definitive outcome. The final tally, released last Thursday by Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), has been repeatedly challenged by Calderón’s opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD, who has asserted that the vote was plagued by irregularities and possibly even fraud.

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Late Sunday night, the PRD filed a massive brief with the country’s Supreme Electoral Court (TEPJF) which presented evidence of various election-day missteps and misdeeds (often on the part of the IFE itself), and petitioned the judicial body to order a vote-by-vote recount. The TEPJF – the only body officially empowered to declare a winner in the election – has yet to put its stamp on Calderón’s victory, and is unlikely to do so quickly, as it is not legally required to announce a winner until the beginning of September. Given the mounting evidence of electoral malfeasance, an uneventful ratification of a PAN triumph is unlikely to be forthcoming, despite the child-like eagerness of Washington, business leaders, and a friendly media to unwrap their July Fourth present to the Mexican people, in this instance a Calderón presidency.

Exposing the Underbelly

On Saturday, López Obrador rallied over 250,000 supporters to the Zócalo in Mexico City for an “informative assembly.” The perredista called on the crowd to participate in numerous future civic demonstrations in defense of the vote, yet exhorted it to respect the rights of the citizenry by not disrupting daily life with such actions as highway blockades. If López Obrador repeatedly emphasized that the effort was to be a peaceful one, he was vehement in his assertions that the election had been tainted by wrongdoing. It is becoming increasingly clear that these allegations are not just hot air.

At the meeting, PRD campaign coordinator Jesus Ortega revealed tapes obtained by the party which purportedly pointed to officially sanctioned fraud. The recordings included conversations between the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governor of Tamaulipas and dissident priista cum Calderón-backer, Elba Ester Gordillo, as well as discussions between the governor and the Secretary of Communications and Transport. While the tapes fell short of explicitly detailing fraud, they suggested that PRI leaders, aware of their party’s freefall, were prepared to privately defect to the PAN, offering Calderón the services of their still-powerful (and frequently fraudulent) electoral machinery in exchange for later political considerations.

Complaints in All Directions

Monday morning witnessed further scandal, as López Obrador presented damning videos which apparently showed ballot boxes being stuffed in Queretaro and Guanajuato. The reemergence of such instances of vintage PRI era fraud, however isolated such instances may turn out to have been in this election, has begun to project a tainted public perception of the vote. Such new evidence added to an already lengthy list of PRD complaints about the lack of transparency of the July 2 election, may have produced, in retrospect, a deeply blemished product. The complaints lodged with the TEJPF include further allegations of ballot box tampering and charges about the manner in which some IFE personnel conducted the election and processed the results – these are important claims and deserve the dignity of being heard.

An Impartial Referee?

The IFE, which prior to the July 2 vote received high marks for public confidence, has watched its prestige sedulously evaporate in the past week. The Institute’s lauded system of preliminary results, the PREP, came under heavy fire as a series of baffling and unclear decisions seemed to point to pro-Calderón manipulation of the numbers, including the move to exclude nearly three million votes from the initial totals, which gave the panista a considerably larger apparent margin than he ultimately was able to attract.

Even the retabulation of vote totals has come under fire, as the PRD has asserted that the process had been overly hurried and that evidence of purported tampering was not adequately addressed in some cases. IFE president Luis Carlos Ugalde’s smug and self-serving assurances that the results were unimpeachable, are new clashes with the growing evidence that the process was far from perfect and represented an attitude of utmost imprudence, especially considering that the margin was so slender that a difference of two votes per polling place could have swung the election.

Indeed, despite the IFE’s supercilious effort to sell itself as infallible to both Mexican society and the international community, the glimmering reputation that the body sought to create has been revealed to be more myth than fact. The Institute, which had gained considerable renown for its role in promoting a smooth transition and bolstering democracy in the 1997 midterm and 2000 presidential elections, has now lost much of its credibility as an impartial and competent administrator of elections.

The IFE’s current general council, elected by the Chamber of Deputies in 2003, was effectively imposed by the PRI and PAN, as the PRD lacked sufficient representation to win approval for its nominees. Since then, partisan leanings have been clearly detected in the council members’ votes, with numerous sources – including the prominent Mexico City daily Reforma – highlighting the panista or priista tendencies of various supposedly independent representatives on its panel. Some have alleged that the IFE has a heavy pro-government bias, citing the body’s unhurried attempts to control defamatory PAN television ads comparing López Obrador to Chávez, and its “slap-on-the-wrist” sanctions for such actions. In this episode alone, IFE’s behavior was far from the image of austere autonomy and rectitude that it sought for itself, and gave the appearance of throwing the election in Calderón’s direction.

An Imagined President

This predisposition to rule in favor of the status quo may have been compounded in the days after July second. In June, COHA noted that “In the event of even isolated incidents of contested results in what could be an extremely close election, the IFE would face tremendous pressures to resolve the dispute quickly.” Sadly, this situation did emerge, and Ugalde, spurred perhaps by ambition or hubris, may ultimately have bowed to such pressure: for example, his decision to declare a Calderón victory was seen as usurping the power of the TEPJF, and seemingly went beyond the yardage allocated to him by the rules.

Despite the growing evidence of election day wrongdoing, and with IFE’s authority and credibility waning, there has been a rush among certain sectors to anoint Calderón as Mexico’s next president. This was nothing short of premature. The panista may indeed ultimately be confirmed by the TEPJF (also referred to as the TRIFE), yet this has yet to occur, and there is certain to be a protracted legal battle before such a resolution is attained.

In this unresolved and unsettled context, it is crucial that the media, both Mexican and international, not present the false impression that Calderón’s victory is a fait acompli, plainly inevitable, and that the PRD’s protests are merely sour grapes. Numerous intellectuals and statesmen have affirmed the propriety of López Obrador’s legal strategy, arguing that it is a responsible and perfectly constitutional measure. Unfortunately, when it comes to Mexico, the U.S. press finds it easy enough to turn to such reliable pro-panista warblers, as Enrique Krauze and Jorge Casteñada, the latter a peripatetic ideologue who has become a spin doctor extraordinare for the Calderón campaign, while the former concerns his unwarranted disdain for López Obrador by emitting an illegitimate farrago of concoctions that does the author no great honor.

Not only is it premature to proclaim Calderón victorious, it is also irresponsible: if the media continues to perpetuate this misleading image, to which the aforementioned Calderonistas have mightily contributed in their mythologies in the U.S. media, the country’s citizenry will be ill served. They may also be laying the groundwork for instability in the event of a TEPJF ruling in favor of a recount. All concerned—and this means the entire Mexican political spectrum—must believe in but one god and that must be of obeying the law, eschewing violence, respect in peaceful protest and honor the will of the majority, however it manifests itself.

Calderón Hunts for Backing

It is not so much to charge that Calderón’s squalid tactic of inventing a scenario in which Hugo Chávez would run Mexico through the pliable hands of López Obrador came with the encouragement of the International Republican Institute, a U.S. entity that specializes in using National Endowment for Democracy public funds to influence the outcome of elections throughout Latin America, including in recent years: Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and now Mexico.

Using relatively small amounts of highly targeted funds, IRI’s funds ostensibly go for voter mobilization and other bland-sounding election projects, but in the end, allow Washington to buy the elections. It is likely that later investigative journalists will establish that this is precisely what happened in Mexico, because in every analogous situation elsewhere in the hemisphere, NED funds were slipped to the IRI to abort popular movements like that of López Obrador. In fact, the IRI and the Republican Party have had a long relationship with PAN that goes back at least to Calderón’s father. Republican party funds were given to PAN during its early days, with which workshops were organized and airline tickets were dispersed. At the same time, Washington office spaces and services were provided to PAN on an informal basis to visiting dignitaries. In a sense, with the critical issue of whether Mexico would join with the Banana Republics of Central America in preventing Venezuela from being awarded Argentina’s seat on the UN Security Council, Washington apparently decided that too much was at stake to leave things to chance. Beltway policy makers undoubtedly decided to give a little help to their panista colleague, hoping that he would remember this assistance at the time that the UN Security Council vote was being taken.

Defending Democracy

The PRD’s decision to protest the official results of the July 2 election through legally defined channels is nothing less than a test of the strength of Mexican democracy. It is no easy task that now confronts the TEPJF, as it must sort through hard evidence and heated rhetoric to make a decision which it will undoubtedly be forced to justify to either the PAN or the PRD, according to the circumstances. Dealing with the uncertainty that will undoubtedly dominate Mexico until that ruling is announced is a formidable task, and one which has been complicated by the IFE’s incessant self-promotion. In the weeks to come, all actors, including the media, must behave in a responsible manner. At this point, the only certainty about the Mexican presidential election of 2006 is that it is far from over.


*************
This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Fellow Michael Lettieri

From the Los Angeles Times

The best way to neutralize presidential loser Lopez Obrador is to give in to his vote-count demand.
By Denise Dresser

DENISE DRESSER is a columnist at the Mexican newspaper Reforma and a professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

July 13, 2006

TODAY, MEXICO is a house divided, a deeply polarized place where some believe that Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party won the election and others insist that he stole it.

Ten days after the election that split the country in two, the word "fraud" has become an integral part of a bitter national debate. The challenger, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is raising sharp questions about the outcome of the vote, and if he doesn't get answers, it is increasingly clear that he will make it hard for Calderon to govern. In a country where deep doubts about the cleanliness of the electoral process have resurfaced, both sides now need to dispel them.

Lopez Obrador, of course, has every right to legally question the results of a close election, just as the country has every right to demand that he respect its results. A vote-by-vote recount would leave him no recourse but to do so.

Mexico needs to review the votes in order to move beyond the paranoid style of its current politics — especially now that Lopez Obrador seems intent on destroying the country with the hope of governing it someday. Instead of keeping a cool head, he is butting it against everything he can: President Vicente Fox, the Federal Electoral Institute, the media, international observers and all those who believe that although irregularities might have occurred, massive fraud did not.

Once again he has resorted to the "all or nothing" approach that has become his trademark. He is confronting his opponents, encouraging conflict; he wants the presidency or else he vows to unleash civil unrest.

Paradoxically, the only way to rein him in would be precisely through the recount he has been pushing for. The best mechanism to neutralize Lopez Obrador and his followers would be to give in to their demands. To call their bluff. To smoke them out. To push the Federal Electoral Tribunal to order a recount, as it is legally allowed to do. To insist that Lopez Obrador accept whatever the electoral authority decides.

Total transparency might be the only way to deal with Lopez Obrador's aggressive political posturing and the social discontent it has fueled. This may be the last chance Mexico has to force him to play by the rules instead of challenging them at every turn.

The partial or total review of votes cast shouldn't be viewed as a concession to Lopez Obrador but as a way of taming him. The objective of a recount shouldn't be to question the majority's will but to clarify its intent. As the opening of 67 electoral packages in District 29 of Mexico City during the official count revealed, human error does indeed happen. In 62 out of the 67 that were opened (out of a total of 450 packages), the tallies on the outside didn't match the votes inside. It would take only one mistake in every 400 votes for the official results of the election to change. They could still do so, or perhaps not, but both people who worship Lopez Obrador and those who loathe him need to know for sure. Otherwise, uncertainty will prevail, and Mexico's warring factions will take advantage of it.

Yet many members of Mexico's political and economic establishment don't understand this. They believe that by presenting this election as a done deal, they are standing on principle and weakening Lopez Obrador, who they believe is no more than a demagogue. But, in fact, they are empowering him. Their resistance to a recount is feeding the growing perception that massive fraud may have taken place, even though it probably didn't. People are marching and mobilizing because the country's elites keep providing them reasons to do so.

Every time Fox argues that those who voted for Lopez Obrador are "renegades," he creates more of them. Every time Calderon starts speaking about his future cabinet and acting as if he won, he only angers those who question whether he really did. And soon they will be pouring into the streets of Mexico City, ready to prove that Lopez Obrador wasn't dangerous until his enemies forced him to act that way.

In order to move beyond this tense stalemate, Calderon would have to accept some form of recount, and Lopez Obrador would have to promise to unequivocally abide by its results. The Federal Electoral Tribunal has until Sept. 6 to give a final verdict and declare a president-elect. As an institution created to deal with post-electoral conflicts, the tribunal must show that it can use a vote-by-vote recount to defuse them.

Only then will winners and losers be able to put the country back together again, instead of threatening to tear it apart.

Recount in Mexican Election, 2006

Whereas, the San Francisco Labor Council has provided concrete assistance to insure the participation of Sisters and Brothers of Mexican Nationality in the Mexican Presidential Election 2006, and

Whereas, these sisters and brothers traveled over 1000 miles to secure their voting rights in said elections,

Whereas, complaints of election irregularities including, but not limited to, uncounted ballots and corporate media manipulation have been submitted and raised in said election, and

Whereas, the issue of election irregularities and the exclusion of the disenfranchised is an increasing component of many elections here and abroad, and

Whereas, the progressive Mexican Union Movement, the UNTS, has supported the call for a recount and has asked for support to all other labor organizations Nationally and Internationally

Therefore be it resolved, the San Francisco Labor Council supports the demand of a recount in the Mexican Presidential Election 06 vote by vote (voto por voto).

Be it further resolved this resolution shall be forwarded to the California Federation of Labor and all other affiliated bodies for their consideration and adoption.

Submitted by SF/LCLAA

Passed Unanimously at the Executive Committee and Delegates Meeting of the San Francisco Labor Council - July 10, 2006.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE VOLATILE POLITICAL SITUATION IN MEXICO:
Premature congratulations, conniving conversations...

The recent outrageous and shameful events in the already volatile political situation in Mexico, have been now crowned by the government's authorization of Luis Carlos Ugalde (IFE) published last July 7 by the Diario Oficial de la Federacion (Federation Official Journal) to pronounce Mr. Calderon Hinojosa as the winner of the Presidential race, so Mr. Ugalde's announcement last Sunday is not considered illegal, only ratify the need of a vote recount and a thorough scrutiny of the entire process by TRIFE (Federal Electoral Tribunal), demanded by millions of Mexican citizens who have clearly expressed their rejection of the suspicious handling of the election by IFE, which long before July 2, had shown its partiality in favor of right-wing candidate Felipe Calderon and his dirty war against left-wing candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The disregard and disdain these politicians show for the intelligence of citizens, in their renewed attempts to con us with such authorization to Mr. Ugalde, not only tramples on our rights but also violates Constitutional Article 105 which establishes: "Federal and local electoral laws shall be promulgated and published at least 90 days prior to the start of the electoral process where they are to be applied, and therefore, no fundamental legal amendments shall be made outside such time period" (Addendum by official decree published by the Federal Official Journal on August 22, 1996).

Of course, this would not be the first time these rapacious, corrupt and unethical politicians step on our maximum law, the Mexican Constitution. And if all these criminal actions were not sufficiently repugnant to outrage millions of citizens, the situation gets even worse with the barefaced conversations held by Pedro Cerisola, Secretary of Communications and Transportation, Elba Esther Gordillo (the disreputed former leader of the SNTE - National Education Workers Union) with the Governor of the State of Tamaulipas, Eugenio Hernandez Flores, which once again exhibit the profound decay prevailing in a historically corrupt political system that does not hesitate in incurring in the most flagrant maneuvers to cling to power so they continue enjoying the same privileges and prebends in detriment of the poor and disenfranchised social sectors in Mexico.

Finally and just as a "big cherry" on a cake already adorned with ingredients of the most refined corruption, we have the sadly shameless role of the TV duo-polio: Televisa and TV Azteca, in their constant attempts to manipulate public opinion in favor of Mr. Calderon who will, of course, write his name in Mexican history as one of the most pathetic, twisted, rapacious and mediocre presidential candidates in the annals of Mexican politics.

All the citizens who feel deeply concerned about the future of our country, so victimized by al these obscure individuals, would be incurring in a grievous omission of our civic duty if we would surrender to the manipulation of all this apparatus and would thereby allow the consummation of this shameless electoral fraud.

Patricia Barba Avila

There is evidence that left-leaning voters have been scrubbed from key electoral lists in Latin America

Greg Palast
Saturday July 8, 2006
The Guardian


There's something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico's first "clean" election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist.
Just before the 2000 balloting in Florida, I reported in the Guardian that its governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered the removal of tens of thousands of black citizens from the state's voter rolls. He called them "felons", but our investigation discovered their only crime was Voting While Black. And that little scrub of the voter rolls gave the White House to his brother George.
Jeb's winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business - in Mexico - at the direction of the Bush government. Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked "secret", regarding a contract for "intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations".
Given that the memo was dated September 17 2001, a week after the attack on the World Trade Centre, hunting for terrorists seemed like a heck of a good idea. But oddly, while all 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the contract was for obtaining the voter files of Venezuela, Brazil ... and Mexico.
What those Latin American countries have in common, besides a lack of terrorists, is either a left-leaning president or a left candidate for president ahead in the opinion polls, leaders of the floodtide of Bush-hostile Latin leaders. It seems that the Bush government feared the leftist surge was up against the US's southern border.
As we found in Florida in 2000, my investigations team on the ground in Mexico City this week found voters in poor neighbourhoods, the left's turf, complaining that their names were "disappeared" from the voter rolls. ChoicePoint can't know what use the Bush crew makes of its lists. But erased registrations require us to ask, before this vote is certified, was there a purge as there was in Florida?
Notably, ruling party operatives carried registration lists normally in the hands of elections officials only. (In Venezuela in 2004, during the special election to recall President Hugo Chavez, I saw his opponents consulting laptops with voter lists. Were these the purloined FBI files? The Chavez government suspects so but, victorious, won't press the case.)
There's more that the Mexico vote has in common with Florida besides the heat. The ruling party's hand-picked electoral commission counted a mere 402,000 votes more for their candidate, Felipe Calderón, over challenger Andrés Manuel López Obrador. That's noteworthy in light of the surprise showing of candidate Señor Blank-o (the 827,000 ballots supposedly left "blank").
We've seen Mr Blank-o do well before - in Florida in 2000 when Florida's secretary of state (who was also co-chair of the Bush campaign) announced that 179,000 ballots showed no vote for the president. The machines couldn't read these ballots with "hanging chads" and other technical problems. Humans can read these ballots with ease, but the hand-count was blocked by Bush's conflicted official.
And so it is in Mexico. The Calderón "victory" is based on a gross addition of tabulation sheets. His party, the Pan, and its election officials are refusing López Obrador's call for a hand recount of each ballot which would be sure to fill in those blanks.
Blank ballots are rarely random. In Florida in 2000, 88% of the supposedly blank ballots came from African-American voting districts - that is, they were cast by Democratic voters. In Mexico, the supposed empty or unreadable ballots come from the poorer districts where the challenger's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR) is strongest.
There's an echo of the US non-count in the south-of-the-border tally. It's called "negative drop-off". In a surprising number of districts in Mexico, the federal electoral commission logged lots of negative drop-off: more votes for lower offices than for president. Did López Obrador supporters, en masse, forget to punch in their choice?
There are signs of Washington's meddling in its neighbour's election. The International Republican Institute, an arm of Bush's party apparatus funded by the US government, admits to providing tactical training for Pan. Did Pan also make use of the purloined citizen files? (US contractor ChoicePoint, its Mexican agents facing arrest for taking the data, denied wrongdoing and vowed to destroy its copies of the lists. But what of Mr Bush's copy?)
Mexico's Bush-backed ruling party claims it has conducted Mexico's first truly honest election, though it refuses to re-count the ballots or explain the purge of voters. Has the Pan and its ally in Washington served democracy in this election, or merely Florida con salsa?
· Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08 and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War
gregpalast.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexrally9jul09,0,1028341.story?coll=la-home-headlines

From the Los Angeles Times
Mexico's Runner-Up Remains Unbowed
By Richard Boudreaux
Times Staff Writer

July 9, 2006

MEXICO CITY — About a quarter of a million people chanting "Fraud! Fraud!" jammed Mexico City's central square Saturday to back leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's bid to overturn his narrow electoral defeat with court appeals and mass marches.

Lopez Obrador told the rowdy but peaceful crowd that he would present allegations of fraudulent vote tallies to the Federal Electoral Tribunal before tonight's deadline and demand a recount. He called for nationwide marches that would converge on Mexico City for another rally July 16 as the seven-judge panel weighed his appeal.

"There is convincing evidence that they took votes away from us," Lopez Obrador said. "We are certain that we won on July 2, and we are going to defend our victory."

Many in the crowd said they were ready for a fight if Lopez Obrador did not prevail. "To the death!" shouted Maria Irene Ramirez, a 53-year-old retired railroad worker from Hidalgo state.

Saturday's huge gathering, summoned on two days' notice, marks a critical point in what has been a peaceful challenge to the official result of the election, which gave governing-party candidate Felipe Calderon a winning margin of 244,000 votes out of 41 million cast.

Lopez Obrador, a fiery populist, has made a career of organizing mass demonstrations, several of which turned violent in the 1990s. That legacy and the tone of his statements last week have fed concern that the former Mexico City mayor could destabilize the country, undermining democratic institutions just six years after Mexico's emergence from decades of one-party rule.

But Saturday, he stopped short of calling for civil disobedience, eliciting groans from demonstrators when he asked them not to block highways.

"This is a peaceful movement, and we are never going to allow ourselves to be provoked by our adversaries," he said. "We have enough strength to validate our democracy using only peaceful demonstrations."

The crowd filled the Zocalo, the vast downtown square, and spilled into surrounding streets.

Mexico City police, subordinate to a government run by Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party, estimated the crowd at 280,000 people. Notimex, the semiofficial news agency of the conservative-led federal government, said slightly more than 200,000 people were there.

The challenger's party, known as the PRD, bused in loyalists from around the country. Organizers said they came from 18 states, some as far as Chiapas, on Mexico's southern border, and Southern Baja California.

They turned the Zocalo into a sea of yellow party flags and banners with slogans such as "No solution means revolution." They blew noisemakers, set off fireworks and sang the national anthem. One group carried a giant abacus, illustrating the demand, chanted incessantly by the crowd, for a recount — "vote by vote, poll by poll."

Carmen Garcia, 38, a Puebla homemaker, was defiant.

"We're not going to let them take it away from him," she said. "We're going to fight with everything against all who don't want him in power. He will be our next president, whether they like it or not."

Most political analysts say Lopez Obrador's campaign faces an uphill battle.

The European Union, which monitored the vote, has said it found no evidence of major fraud or irregularity in the preliminary count July 2 or in the official count that ended Thursday.

Calderon, the candidate of President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, said Friday that he was not worried about a legal challenge to the election because irregularities found in the initial count were minor. He said he opposed a full recount.

Lopez Obrador was hedging his bets. Meeting with foreign journalists Saturday before the rally, he said his party planned to file a separate appeal to the Supreme Court later alleging that the entire election was unfair.

Top aides to Lopez Obrador called Friday for a recount of nearly half of the votes cast.

Officially, Calderon cannot be declared president-elect until the electoral tribunal decides his case. It has until Sept. 6 to declare a winner.

Lopez Obrador ridiculed his rival for acting like a president-elect, and rebuffed Calderon's offer to join a unity Cabinet. He called Calderon "an employee" of Mexico's upper classes and said a victory by his opponent would be "morally impossible."

"It's illogical, therefore, that there could be any agreement with him," he told journalists.

Later, at the rally, the challenger spoke confidently and forcefully. Wearing a dark suit and yellow tie, he addressed the crowd from a raised platform after being introduced by a party leader as "the only one who deserves to be called president."

Anticipating the case to be filed in the Supreme Court, Lopez Obrador called the Federal Electoral Institute, which conducted and counted the vote, "a battering ram" for Calderon. He alleged that the ruling party candidate was allowed to defame him in TV ads, exceed the legal limit for campaign spending and tap government funds for the campaign.

And he denounced Fox, Mexico's first freely elected president, as "a traitor to democracy" for campaigning, in violation of the country's norms, on Calderon's behalf.

Lopez Obrador's speech was frequently interrupted by applause and chants of "You are not alone!"

The militancy of the crowd suggested that Lopez Obrador could sustain his movement at least until a ruling by the tribunal.

Last year, facing a legal challenge to keep Lopez Obrador off the presidential ballot, the PRD built a nationwide grass-roots network that mobilized for weeks of protest, culminating in a rally that filled the Zocalo in April 2005. The legal challenge failed, and the network evolved into a campaign organization that now serves as the engine of Lopez Obrador's protest movement.

The leftist leader proposed that his followers gather at 300 district vote-counting offices around the country Wednesday and begin marching to Mexico City. He urged everyone in the Zocalo on Saturday to bring 10 more people with them.

"Do you approve of this proposal?" he asked. The crowd roared in agreement.

Despite the potency of his protest movement, its long-term staying power is uncertain. Nor is it clear whether Lopez Obrador would continue to send his supporters into the streets if he lost his case in the tribunal.

Under questioning by foreign journalists, he said he was confident of prevailing in the tribunal, but declined eight times to say what he would do if he did not. Asked whether the tribunal was a fair and respectable body, he said, "That's what I wish, but it remains to be seen."

As for the risk that his protests will unsettle the country, he said it was the government that created an atmosphere of instability by having supported what he called an unfair election.

"If there is no democracy, there can be no stability," he said.

Political analysts said Lopez Obrador must walk a tightrope as he decides how far to push the protests.

If they turn violent, he could undermine the legitimacy of his party, which doubled its percentage of the national vote, enlarged its bloc in Congress and kept control of Mexico City. But if he concedes the election without a fight, he will risk losing support within his party. He is 52 and conceivably could run for president again.

"The PRD was born as a protest movement against electoral fraud, and he has to honor its culture of fighting to the end," said Juan E. Pardinas of the Center of Research for Development. "But if it wants to win a bigger share of the vote next time, the party has to move to the center."