Day after big rally, acrimony grows in Mexico election

MEXICO CITY — Compromise seemed more elusive than ever in Mexico's bitter presidential election dispute Monday, one day after leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador mounted the largest protest in Mexican history.

Analysts said the demonstration, during which more than 1 million people jammed this city's main square and the surrounding streets, didn't change anything — the dispute still must be resolved by the Federal Electoral Tribunal, known as TRIFE.

But the rally sparked an unusually indignant response from the July 2 election's apparent winner, conservative Felipe Calderón, and many of the capital's commentators, promising more acrimony in the weeks ahead.

César Nava, a Calderón spokesman, said that the election would be decided "by votes, not by marches," and that the National Action Party, or PAN, wouldn't succumb to the "blackmail" of street protests.

One Mexico City newspaper, Milenio, dubbed the demonstration "the great yellow beast," referring to the swarms of yellow-clad López Obrador supporters — many of them elderly and poor — who believe the election was stolen.

John Ackerman, a law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said the outpouring of support for López Obrador raises the stakes for the election judges, who have the power to annul the election or order a recount.

"It's a clear demonstration that it's not going to be easy to sweep the apparent irregularities under the rug," Ackerman said. "They're going to have to take this seriously. They can't be a rubber stamp."

Many legal observers say there is nothing in Mexican law to prevent a total recount in the election, which Calderón won by a margin of less than 1 percent out of 41 million ballots. But Pamela Starr, a Latin America analyst for the Eurasia Group in Washington, D.C., said the court is unlikely to go that far, noting that in the past, "it has expressly limited itself to reviewing only those ballot packets that have been specifically challenged."

López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, has said he would abide by the court's decision. But he has also said his street mobilizations will continue unless there is a recount.

This has opened him to accusations that he is trying to bully his way to the presidency through political, rather than legal, means.

"Unfortunately, we live in a country where pressure groups are used to getting their way if they make enough noise," columnist Sergio Sarmiento wrote in Monday's edition of the Reforma newspaper. "The incentives for big demonstrations and blockades are huge."

Rallying his supporters Sunday, López Obrador called for a continuing campaign of "peaceful resistance," including constant vigils outside the nation's 300 district election offices, as well as another massive march on the capital in two weeks.

"You can't wipe away the stain of a fraudulent election with all the water in the oceans," he said.

No one knows how far López Obrador is willing to go to test the nation's fragile election institutions, which were created a decade ago in a wave of political reform.

The central argument of López Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, is that a recount would best serve the interests of political stability.

His opponents argue that democracy depends on adhering strictly to the rule of law, whether or not that leads to a reopening of the ballot boxes.

"There's no need to improvise or invent new ways to do things," former treasury secretary José Ángel García told Reforma. "The law is what it is, and it's our main guarantee that things will move ahead with total transparency."

"The beauty of López Obrador's position is that he offers an opportunity for closure," said Robert Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at American University. "The worst outcome is one in which a third of the voters are left thinking the election was fraudulent or stolen."