Mexico Trucker Online

MEXICO CITY — Vowing they won’t let the ruling party cheat them out of victory, angry supporters of populist presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador took to the streets Tuesday in what likely was the first wave of larger demonstrations to come.

Chanting and sign waving came on the eve of a review of preliminary, but far from complete, election results that showed the conservative ruling party’s Felipe Calderón was ahead by about 1 percentage point in an election in which about 42 million votes were cast.

Tensions were ratcheted up with the news that the preliminary tally made after the Sunday election would change as about 3 million more ballots weren’t included initially due to problems ranging from legibility to administrative procedures, such as a party observer not signing a tally sheet at an individual voting station.

The ballots weren’t missing or hidden as part of any fraud, said election officials who stressed they would be included in an official and exhaustive review to start today to determine the official tally.

That process could take several days as Mexicans await the naming of the winner in the tightest presidential race in this nation’s history.

Leaders of López Obrador’s Democratic Revolution Party assured the public they would demand a full accounting of the vote and would fight through legal channels if their candidate loses.

“If we legitimately lost, we are going to recognize it,” said Leonel Cota, the party’s national president. “If we legitimately won, we are going to battle. We are going to fight for the legitimacy of the electoral process.”

Late Wednesday, López Obrador’s team was reported to be preparing a massive campaign to discredit the preliminary vote count and hand out some 5 million fliers saying, “We won.”

In response, the PAN held a news conference to affirm Calderón had won.

“It seems sad to us that there are people who want to … question the legitimate victory of Felipe Calderón,” said Manuel Espino, president of the PAN.

Espino said that the final vote count, which begins tomorrow, “will only serve to confirm what we already know: Felipe Calderón won the presidency.”

López Obrador’s supporters are to rally again today in Mexico City’s historic central plaza.

Emotions are especially heated because the election was seen as a showdown between the interests of the poor masses and the middle and upper classes.

Luis Carlos Ugalde, the Federal Electoral Commission’s president, repeatedly has said there will be no official winner until after the final count.

Complicating matters is that late Sunday, both López Obrador and Calderón announced their party information indicated they had won the election, and each declared themselves the president-elect.

Since then, it has become a battle of appearances, with neither camp backing down.

In the streets, López Obrador’s supporters said they believe the election, including the electoral commission, were manipulated by outgoing President Vicente Fox and his National Action Party, which was founded by Calderón’s father.

“No more fraud! No more fraud!” supporters chanted as they stood near the Angel of Independence monument.

They hoisted signs saying López Obrador was their president.

“We will not let them do it — they are robbing it from us,” said college student Ariadna Araujo Saucedo, 20.

Commentator and Fox critic Guadalupe Loaeza said that as López Obrador had a slight lead in polls before the election, his supporters were stunned by preliminary results, and don’t yet know how to respond.

“The people in the street cannot believe he did not win,” she said. “It is like they have been hit in the head.”

The next step, she said, will be to evaluate the official tally, but results might not be known until as late as Sunday.

And then, should López Obrador take his fight to the courts, the case might not be resolved until September.

“Knowing López Obrador’s personality, he will fight to the very last vote,” she said.

That’s exactly what López Obrador supporters want.

Many said they won’t tolerate a repeat of 1988, when they contend the political left was denied the presidency.

In that election, Democratic Revolutionary Party presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was ahead in early returns, but after a mysterious computer crash, totals came back strongly in favor of Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had ruled for generations.

Jorge González, a Trinity University economist and native of Mexico, said the nation will be harmed if López Obrador refuses to concede, should he lose the final tally.

“If he does not recognize his defeat, if he goes public and says, I won the election and the government is trying to steal it from me, that could be a big mess,” González said.