by Jen Lawhorne 

Sunday in Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rejected a high Mexico court’s resolution for a partial recount of votes from the presidential election and announced that civil resistance will continue until demands for a full recount are met. 

The Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) announced the day before that only 9 percent of the votes cast in the July 2 national election will be recounted. Before a rally of hundreds of thousands of people Sunday, AMLO signaled that resistance would intensify. He called for the installment of an encampment in front of the TEPJF’s offices. Nightly national assemblies that have been held in the city center will now occur in front of the tribunal. 

With a continuous onslaught of civil disobedience and a political encampment occupying its downtown for a week, Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world, has been the center of a determined struggle demanding a vote recount of the national presidential elections. 

Last Thursday entrances to the Mexican stock exchange were blocked for several hours while some main thoroughfares of downtown and the main plaza the Zocalo are the site of a massive encampment with large tents representing each of the Mexico’s 31 states and different social and organizations. Outside of Mexico City, citizens are taking action. The international airport of Acapulco is currently occupied by proponents of the vote recount. 

Two million people filled Mexico City’s streets July 30, in possibly the largest protest in the history of the country. More than a million marched just two weeks earlier. Shouts of “Voto por voto, casilla por casilla”  (vote for vote, ballot for ballot) are heard everywhere as these people believe a recount will change the official results of the presidential election. 

Most of the people protested in support of center-left presidential candidate AMLO. The candidate from the Coalition for the Good of Everyone is contesting the official results of the Federal Election Institute (IFE), which handed the victory to opposition candidate Felipe Calderon by a margin of .58%. AMLO and his coalition immediately repudiated the results, claiming that voting inconsistencies and fraud smudged the electoral process.  

Both candidates, Calderon from the National Action Party (PAN) and AMLO, whose Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) makes up part of the coalition, have asserted their victories. AMLO believes that he should have won by more than 3 million votes. 

Since the July 2 voting day, AMLO has been at the TEPJF presenting evidence to convince the court to order a recount of the votes. The body responsible for vindicating the election, the TEPFJ has until the Aug. 31 to declare a definitive winner. Among the impugnable offenses the coalition is declaring are the stuffing of ballot boxes, voter intimidation, manipulation of tally results and the questionable annulment of 900,000 votes. 

AMLO supporters and individual citizens have been mobilizing for more than a month to demand the vote recount. By looking at the protest numbers, one would assume that a remarkable change is occuring in Mexico. People are convinced that dirty politics are at hand in the election decision. In a country where old school corruption and ruling class legacy call the shots, the protesters are fed-up with the political status-quo.

The 2006 election proved that if anything Mexico is a geographically polarized country with the northern conservative states and its Catholic base favoring the PAN while the poor southern indigenous states voted for AMLO.  Much of AMLO’s discourse involves populist themes of elevating the poor out of poverty and nostalgia for historic nationalism.  

The poverty that exists in Mexico today can be credited to the neoliberal program adopted more than twenty years ago where heavy borrowing, privatization of national industry and removal of subsidy protections have created a class of more than 40 million people who live in dire economic straits. 

AMLO has not presented a program to take Mexico off its neoliberal trajectory. He supports the North American Free Trade Agreement, while stating that some aspects would have to be adjusted. He said some provisions of NAFTA that remove importation tariffs on corn and beans would have to be renegotiated. The corn and bean sectors of the Mexican economy were hit hard after the implementation of NAFTA, after subsidized U.S. products were dumped in the Mexican market. All tariffs on all agricultural products are set to expire in 2008 for NAFTA countries. 

Instead, AMLO’s  50 campaign compromises to “restore national pride” present a large band-aid of a sentimental alternative project while affirming the continuance of the current macroeconomic model. 

Nonetheless, the center-left politics of the PRD could be a better option than the ultraright manifestations of the PAN. Since July 2, Calderon has purported himself as the rightful victor, arguing that the elections were clean and democratic. In efforts to delegitimatize the opposition, his speeches have painted the protests as violent and claimed himself to be a man of peace. A main promise of his campaign was to counter delinquence with hard action from the government. 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of CASA.