MB Civic

Lopez Obrador Urges Civil Resistance
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
The Washington PostMonday 17 July 2006

Mexican runner-up summons support for vote-by-vote recount at massive rally.

Mexico City – Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the runner-up in Mexico’s presidential election, called on a massive crowd Sunday to commit acts of “peaceful civil resistance” to force a vote-by-vote recount.

López Obrador’s exhortation significantly intensified his efforts to use public pressure to reverse his apparent half-percentage-point loss to Felipe Calderón, a free-trade booster.

The rally in Mexico City’s downtown square, the Zocalo, was the latest and largest flash point in a two-week electoral crisis expected to last two months while a special elections court hears López Obrador’s fraud allegations and decides whether to conduct a recount.

Hundreds of thousands of supporters poured into the Zocalo, chanting: “You are not alone.” Some walked for six days or took long bus rides to attend the rally after López Obrador called for a nationwide march on the capital.

Mexico City police estimated the crowd at 1.1 million.

López Obrador, who led a march to the square, walked to the stage through a corridor of metal barricades that cut through the huge crowd as supporters yelled: “Presidente! Presidente ! ” He tried to start his speech several times but was drowned out by wild cheering.

Once he began to talk, the crowd went silent as men and women dressed in the signature yellow color of López Obrador’s Democratic Revolutionary Party craned their necks to see his image flicker on a large screen dangling from a crane.

López Obrador stoked the crowd with allegations of voter fraud, saying Calderón would be an “illegitimate” president. He repeated his contention that the Federal Electoral Institute, an internationally respected independent organization, rigged computers to ensure Calderón’s victory. And he made a new claim, saying his supporters should protest because “errors” were committed in 60,000 of the country’s 130,000 polling places.

“We’re going to start – to defend democracy – a peaceful civic resistance,” López Obrador said.

López Obrador said he would leave it up to each individual to choose the form of civic resistance. There are growing fears among conservative commentators that López Obrador’s mass rallies and claims of voter fraud will lead to violence.

There was an undercurrent of rage at Sunday’s mostly peaceful rally, which drew an amalgam of farmworkers, union members and the urban poor, that seemed less present during a similar gathering a week earlier. A few supporters hefted signs that read “Death to Calderón” and compared the apparent winner to Adolf Hitler.

“In Mexican history, the only way to bring change has been through force,” said Gerardo Salazar, 43, a teacher from the southern city of Oaxaca, where violent protests paralyzed the downtown for weeks before the election. “If necessary, we will have to turn to what has always worked for us.”

Behind Salazar, hundreds of people squatted on sidewalks, watching marchers pour into the square in a scene reminiscent of a holiday parade. Vendors sold coffee mugs bearing López Obrador’s face along 20th of November Avenue, a street named to commemorate the Mexican Revolution.

During his 30-minute address, López Obrador invited his supporters to another rally in Mexico City in two weeks.

“We cannot accept a regression, a pulling back of democracy,” he said.

Juana Jimenez Torre, 63, who said she walked more than 80 miles over six days to attend the rally, thrust her arms in the air as López Obrador spoke. The mother of 11 said she makes less than $4 a day in the bean fields outside her hometown of San Pablo Citaltepec, southeast of Mexico City.

“We can’t take this,” she said before the rally began. “We have to fight.”

Many in the Zocalo crowd were disaffected voters who had cast ballots in 2000 for Vicente Fox, whose victory ended seven decades of one-party rule. Now they see Fox, whose National Action Party nominated Calderón as its standard-bearer, as an enemy. Thousands whistled derisively when López Obrador accused Fox of illegally campaigning for Calderón.

But the crowd’s fiercest reactions were reserved for the Federal Electoral Institute, which was created after the widespread vote-stealing allegations of the late 1980s to ensure that Mexico’s elections are fair.