Posted on 09/10/2006 5:16:26 AM PDT by Flavius
Mexico faces a plunge into political chaos after a senior aide to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said that the Left-wing former mayor of Mexico City will set up a "resistance government" and declare himself president, despite being declared the loser of July's election.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Mr Lopez Obrador's campaign refuses to acknowledge defeat, and has set up sprawling protest camps in Mexico City's main square
"Even though the official institutions, like a spent force, have recognised the Right-wing candidate, we are not going to," Gerardo Fernandez Norona, a senior strategist in Mr Lopez Obrador's campaign, told The Sunday Telegraph. "There have been other moments of crisis in this country when you could indeed have two presidents at the same time."
In fact, the last time a candidate refused to admit defeat was in 1913, in the middle of the Mexican revolution – and it led to civil war.
An electoral court last week declared Felipe Calderon, Mr Lopez Obrador's conservative rival, the winner in the elections by a little more than 200,000 votes, out of 42 million cast. The court rebuffed the Left-winger's protests that he was a victim of electoral fraud. Mr Lopez Obrador's campaign refuses to acknowledge defeat, and has set up sprawling protest camps in the capital's main square, known as the Zocalo, and along a central street.
Thousands of protesters from across the country live, eat and sleep in a small city of tents, well-provisioned and fed from communal field kitchens on the Zocalo, surrounded by posters denouncing Mr Calderon and Vicente Fox, the outgoing president, as "traitors".
"We aren't talking about a parallel government, we are talking about a legitimate government," said Mr Norona. "We are talking about assuming the responsibilities of the presidency and the government in a legitimate fashion with the backing of the people."
Mr Lopez Obrador's party, the Democratic Revolutionary Party, is to hold a huge convention on Saturday, Mexico's Independence Day, at which it hopes to gather one million people to discuss how exactly the rival government will operate, and how to force Mr Calderon to relinquish power.
Protesters on the Zocalo this week talked of a huge programme of civil disobedience, strikes and blockades.
"We will continue with civil disobedience," said one housewife on the Zocalo. "We will stop paying taxes, we will stop doing a great many things … and maybe it will stop being peaceful."
In the meantime, Mr Norona said the 52-year-old party leader, who espoused large scale spending on infrastructure projects, social reforms and subsidies for the poor, would set up his own presidential office from where he would run a "government in resistance to fight the usurper".
"There will be a duality," he said. "He will be helping the citizenry and doing many things to fight the usurpation."
The tensions have put a huge strain on Mexico's fledgling democracy, which only emerged in 2000 from seven decades of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which often rigged ballots to ensure its tenure in power. After the accusations of fraud, opinion polls show that almost a third of Mexico's population of 106 million believe that Mr Calderon is not the legitimate president, which will undermine his authority, already shaky after garnering the narrowest electoral win in Mexico's history.
Mr Calderon, a bland, Harvard-educated technocrat who held the post of energy minister in Mr Fox's administration, has said he is open to dialogue with the charismatic Left-winger – who dismisses the ruling Right-wing National Action Party as "fascists" – but Mr Norona insisted that there would be no talks.
"We will never have dialogue or make an agreement, nothing," he said. "They want to steal the presidency from us, we are never going to tolerate it. We will not betray millions of voters, people who trust us. So I can tell you the crisis here is going to sharpen."
Both men find themselves in increasingly difficult positions: Mr Lopez Obrador's own party, which runs Mexico City's council, has called for his supporters to leave their protest camps, which are blocking some of the capital's main business districts and have cost the city millions in lost revenue.
Mr Calderon, on the other hand, is faced with potentially millions of determined dissenters, and may have to temper his own free-market agenda with some of his rival's structural economic reforms.
But that would set him at odds with the PRI, with whom he will probably have to seek an alliance in Congress.
Human rights groups fear that the government may use force to clear the protesters from their camps, leading to an explosion of violence.
The United States will be nervously watching developments south of its border, fearful that Mr Lopez Obrador's campaign to bring down the government will hurt Mexico's economy, and drastically increase the flow of illegal migrants heading north.
"If the situation gets worse, immigration could become an exodus," said Denise Dresser, a Mexican political scientist.
I'd like to thank Al Gore and the Stalinist Left for paving the way in 2000 to this kind of sore-loser nonsense.
They always emphasize the negatives so as to favor the communist revolution.
If one third does not believe in the legitimacy of the newly elected president the converse is that two thirds DO.So the TWO-thirds need to tell the ONE-third to grow up and get to work .
Nothing will change.
I bet Jimmy Carter is supporting him in these efforts.
Sounds like it is time to kick our border protection into high gear - We need troops in number on the border NOW. If anything at all in the article is true, illegal border crossings could bet far more active.
I think this is as good an excuse as any - that maybe even some pro-illegals might could go with, to seal the border and actively enforce it.
Nervous my ass! If this gets ugly we better have US troops at the border fast and the duly elected government of Mexico better arrest this guy and hang him for treason.
Civil war on our southern border?
Now that is just what the heck we need.
Where is that border fence? And why isn't our military there to keep the illegals out?
What the heck is wrong with our politicians?
This was all caused by some hanging chads in Miami/Dade/Broward, and "voter suppression" in Ohio...
Could the man behind the curtain be Algore? Or J. Kerry Heinz?
Seriously, I think that Hugo Chavez is helping to stir this pot.
It's already an exodus.
We need the NatGuard along the border. Now- and well equipped with machine guns. This invasion looks like it is about to get serious. Perhaps we need to drop troops into Mexico City.
If there is chaos in Mexico it will open the Guatemala border and we will have half of Latin America swarming north.
The ends always justify the means for liberals. Tyrants always rise under the banner of a reformer/liberal only to impose their will on others once in office! Sadly, I am not surprised one bit by this news.
I saw the alamo once, what a disappointment.
In the same vain as the corn palace.
~See my tagline~
I am afraid Bush and the Republican Senators and all the Democrats will see this as a heaven sent opportunity to get a few million more illegals into the country quickly and a major new argument for Amnesty or just giving Citizenship to anyone who says he was born north of Tierra Del Fuego.
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