Mexico: Tens Of Thousands Protest Against New President

At least 32,000 protesters marched through Mexico City on Sunday to protest the “imposition” of the new president. They accuse president-elect Enrique Pena Nieto, a member of the old ruling party, of electoral fraud.

Protesters have dubbed the country’s TV giant Televisa a “factory of lies.” Demonstrators marching through to capital claimed that Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won the election by vote-buying and an aggressive PR campaign through major media outlets such as Televisa, which they claim was well paid for positive coverage of Nieto’s presidential campaign.

Enrique Pena Nieto, 46, won the election with 38.2 per cent of the vote against 31.6 per cent for the leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Nieto’s victory brought the Institutional Revolutionary Party back to power after being in the opposition for 12 years.

The ruling President Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party came in third.

Opponents of the victorious candidate demanded urgent domestic reforms.

The PRI in turn accuses the losing leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of “disqualifying the entire electoral process with lies.” Televisa has also denied all allegations.

The last presidential election in Mexico in 2006 also ended with the defeat of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who narrowly lost to the ruling conservative president. In 2006 Obrador organized hundreds of thousands of his supporters to rally in downtown Mexico City for weeks. This time, however, Obrador announced that his victory is evident and he has no intention of calling his supporters to the streets.

According to local authorities, the demonstration on Sunday gathered 32,000 people whereas the protesters claim their number was twice as large. The latest demonstration is the second of it since the July 1 elections. The first rally on July 7 gathered 50,000 protesters.

The final results of the elections are left to be certified in September by the Federal Electoral Tribunal. Some political movements have urged its supporters to disregard the inauguration of the new Mexican president set for December 1.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party at one time ruled Mexico for a 71-year stretch. Those years, party critics say, were marked with corruption, nepotism and multiple cases of voter fraud.