MEXICO: Leftist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador suffers fresh blow in election

Mexican leftist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, struggling after losing his bid for the presidency, suffered a fresh blow on Sunday (October 15, 2006) in an election in his home state of Tabasco. Under heavy police guard, the people of Tabasco cast their votes on Sunday (October 15), and early official results indicate that Cesar Ojeda, the candidate from Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution, is trailing Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Andres Granier by 12 percentage points. Exit polls by television networks put the margin of Ojeda's loss in Tabasco, where Lopez Obrador was once an Indian welfare worker, at 11 to 16 percentage points. The apparent defeat was a personal blow to Lopez Obrador after he campaigned heavily on behalf of Ojeda in the tropical state of about 2 million people. Lopez Obrador lost the July presidential race by a whisker to conservative Felipe Calderon. After the vote, he claimed fraud and brought central Mexico City to a standstill with protests, alarming many with strong rhetoric against his rivals. A former Mexico City mayor, Lopez Obrador won a majority of votes in Tabasco in July. But Sunday's poor showing for his party suggests voters may be turned off by the post-election protests and fraud allegations. Granier suggested the same. "He (referring to Lopez Obrador) who deserves my respect because he is a man with national recognition and I respect him. But for Tabasco, we are going to govern, those of us who live in Tabasco and Tabasco does not want another Reforma Avenue because we lived with him for more than 12 years and we know all about violence, blockades, taking oil wells. We want peace. We want development. We want there to be progress on this land," he said. Police stepped up their patrols of the state's capital Villahermosa on election day, as gangs of supporters of both candidates drove round in trucks carrying sticks and blocking polling booths. In the days before the election, more than 30 people were arrested for fighting or carrying guns, machetes and baseball bats. PRI officials said one of their members was hospitalized in serious condition after being beaten with metal pipes. In the small town of Macuspana, police fired on a group of people believed to be PRI supporters. Assailants in cars also fired shots on Saturday at the houses of PRI mayoral candidates in the towns of Centla and Huimanguillo, state police reported. No one was injured. "And what we want is that order is maintained here in Tabasco and we don't see any violence," Institutional Revolutionary Party member Juan Pariente said. Leading polls for months ahead of the July election, Lopez Obrador was heralded by the left as the next in a wave of Latin American presidents critical of Washington. With just over a third of Sunday's votes tallied, Ojeda suggested he would challenge the result, alleging his opponent's party bought votes with government funds. "The final verdict of the ballot boxes has not been presented yet, but we have confidence in the strong citizen support in our favour and in the case of irregularities we are sure that the judicial authority will grant us justice in the end," he said. Granier lured support from the left in Tabasco by promising economic help for the elderly, single mothers and the handicapped -- the kind of handouts that made Lopez Obrador popular as Mexico City mayor. Lopez Obrador himself lost a Tabasco governor's election widely seen as rigged in 1994, and staged mass protests afterward. Since the demonstrations in Mexico City wound down, Lopez Obrador has declared his own parallel government and promised more protests against Fox and President-elect Calderon, but his presence on the political stage is dwindling.

ITN Source | October 17, 2006

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