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Tribunal finds no evidence of fraud Wire services El Universal August 29, 2006 The nation's top electoral court announced Monday that a partial recount of the votes in the disputed presidential election found no evidence of widespread fraud, a ruling that placed conservative Felipe Calderón tantalizingly close to victory. In a 7-0 ruling, the Federal Electoral Tribunal said it had found only minor mathematical and administrative errors in the initial vote count of the July 2 election. The tribunal said Monday its recount subtracted just 4,183 votes from Calderón's margin of victory, reducing it to about 240,000 over left-leaning candidate...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's top electoral court threw out leftists' allegations of massive fraud in last month's presidential election on Monday, handing almost certain victory to conservative candidate Felipe Calderon. The seven judges voted unanimously to reject most of the legal complaints by left-wing candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said he was robbed of victory in the July 2 vote. His supporters have paralyzed Mexico City with protests this month and he has vowed to make Mexico ungovernable if the court declares Calderon the winner of the country's most bitterly contested election in modern history. The initial result...

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador: "They are stealing the presidency from me" Which are the elements making it possible to establish that there was fraud at the time of the elections of July 2 in Mexico? For more than three years we were victims of a campaign of all the state apparatus with the active participation of the President of the Republic because we represent an alternative project. Our adversaries wanted to destroy us politically. They tried to discredit me with the help of videos, but it was demonstrated that it was the acting out of a plot of former...

In the more than three weeks since the firebrand populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador began his protests in Mexico City to dispute the slim victory of his conservative rival Felipe Calderon in the July 2 presidential election, the Federal Electoral Tribunal has rejected a full recount and, after conducting a limited recount, found no evidence of fraud or serious irregularity. Mr. Lopez Obrador's opposition has become more vehement, however, most likely in anticipation of a final decision due from the Federal Electoral Institute on Sept. 6. The protests have caused problems for commuters and turned away tourists and visitors, costing...

The PRD: Solid in its decision to fight the imposition of Calderon The national director of the the PRD warns that "if they perpetrate the imposition [of Calderon as President] we are going to mobilize wherever they attempt to give proof of his majority." Leonel Cota Montaño made clear that "we are not going to modify a single line of resistance which the For the Good of All coalition has maintained in demanding the transparency of the presidential election." The national leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) said that it will solidly oppose "the decision to...

Andrés Manuel López Obrador´s call for an ongoing "convention" of supporters to act as an extra-governmental political force underscores a tactical shift that has already changed the tone of the post-electoral dispute and also could define how Mexico is governed over the next six years. The proposed National Democratic Convention (CND), set to meet for the first time in Mexico City´s Zócalo on Sept. 16, seems designed to convert the current López Obrador-led civil resistance movement into a permanent political movement functioning outside the confines of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD). It also promises to be a permanent thorn...

Perredista,1 one third of the "Simulated Republic" AMLO wants to bring down Yesterday AMLO invoked constitutional Article 39 with everyone and made his appeal to the "people (who) have at all times the inalienable right of altering or modifying the form of their government." And he justified his appeal with the example of the Zapata uprising against President Madero, even though the Zapatista "Ayala Plan"2 was lauched in 1911, six years before the promulgation of the Constitution of 1917 and the vigorous entrance of its now publicized Article 39. But this inconsistency (of a grade school history book) is...

Will a fair vote stand? IN THE 6 1/2 weeks since he narrowly lost Mexico's presidential election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has turned the nation's politics into a public spectacle. A fiery populist with a messianic streak, Mr. López Obrador has led thousands of his supporters to pitch tent cities in downtown Mexico City, occupying the Zocalo, its main square, and a two-mile stretch of the Paseo De La Reforma, one of its major boulevards. He has denounced the election as a fraud and the product of a vast conspiracy, without furnishing even remotely convincing proof. Now, after a...

AMLO Summons a National Democratic Convention The PRD member evokes Article 39 of the Constitution to affirm that the people are the only ones who can change the government; he recalls the "Ayala Plan," signed by Emiliano Zapata. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador launched his call for a "National Democratic Convention For the Good of All," with its basis in Article 39 of the Constitution, to be held the 16th of September in the Zocalo capital square [in Mexico City]. The PRD member read said constitutional precept aloud and recalled that therein it is indicated that national sovereignty resides in...

Encinas warns that an institutional political crisis is near He indicates that the GDF1 will not permit elements of the Federal Preventive Police to go out from their assigned perimiters. The Head of Government of the Federal District, Alejandro Encinas, warned that [the country] is on the brink of passing from a post-electoral conflict to an institutional political crisis. "I believe that there are three objectives in the situation which our country is living through. I believe that we are passing from a post-electoral conflict to an institutional political crisis. Whoever does not want to see it as such,...

The TEPJF will begin alleviation of appeals of electoral inconformity The Ex-Executive Secretary of the IFE,1 Maria del Carmen Alanis Figueroa, assures that they will not open a single additional electoral packet. With the end of the partial recount of votes in the 11,839 electoral packets of the presidential election, the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) now has all the elements to begin to alleviate the 374 appeals of electoral inconformity, according to Maria del Carmen Alanis Figueroa, Ex-Executive Secretary of the IFE. In her analysis of the phase that the tribunal is about...

The For the Good of All coalition1 asks for an annulment of the votes of the 11,800 electoral packets under revision2 In light of the scant variations which the partial recount of votes ordered by the Electoral Tribunal has shown, the strategy of the For the Good of All coalition spun towards the nullification of the more than 11,800 electoral packets which began to be opened the 9th of August. Horacio Duarte, representative of the PRD in the IFE3, asserted that in 5,177 electoral packets of which he has reports, [the coalition] has detected 18,142 ballots overcounted4 and 51,658...

Election authorities on Wednesday began a court ordered partial recount of the July 2 presidential vote that revealed minor errors during the first day´s ballot reviews. Officials from the Federal Electoral Institute supervised by 192 federal judges began reviewing ballots from 9 percent of more than 130,000 polling places. The recount is part of the process for the court to settle challenges brought by second-place candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who claims fraud. The court-ordered recount will probably narrow Calderón´s margin of victory, said Chappell Lawson, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Such an outcome could...

AMLO is moving informative assembly1 to the TEPJF The candidate of the For the Good of All coalition2 called on his sympathizers to come together tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. at the offices of the Electoral Tribunal to carry out an assembly. The candidate of the For the Good of All coalition, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, announced that tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. the coalition will carry out an informative assembly in front of the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation. During his fourth informative assembly in the Zocalo capital plaza, Lopez Obrador insisted on the necessity of...

TEPJF rules against vote by vote recount The Electoral Tribunal presented the legal-electoral obstacles that the For the Good of All coalition1 did not surpass to attempt a precinct by precinct, vote by vote recount. The Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) rejected this morning the aspiration of the For the Good of All coalition that they carry out a recount of all the votes of all the precincts set up for the presidential election of this past July 2. To the hope of leaving it to judge this aspect of the vote, the Secretary...

The TEPJF Decides Tomorrow if There Will Be a Recount of Votes The Superior Court of the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) will convene1 a public session at 10:00 a.m. this Saturday, to resolve 175 received incident reports and will make a special pronouncement with reference to the challenges to the presidential election. The seven magistrates who make up the Superior Court should pronounce their decision with respect to the electoral packets2 to determine whether or not it will carry out a recount of votes of the presidential election of July 2. At 10:15 a.m....

I am posting this independent blog for the benefit of my fellow Freepers who have been watching the post-election controversy in Mexico, following a ping I received from Freeper SAJ -- thanks again SAJ -- to another thread posted earlier today on a Christian Science Monitor article reporting the closure of a popular foklore festival in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca due to local political protests and relating the matter to the larger post-election controversy in Mexico. To get to the point of why I am posting this separate from that thread, beyond the mere length of what I...

So states César Nava, Adjutant Secretary General of the white and blue1, that this self-proclamation is in the style of Antonio López de Santa Ana. The National Action Party (PAN) assured today that the statement of the presidential candidate of the For the Good of All coalition, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, given to the Univision channel:2 "Yes, I am the President of Mexico. I am the President of Mexico by the will of the majority," is "one more occurence of a messianic impudence." César Nava Vázquez, Adjutant Secretary General of the PAN Party, said that this self-proclamation is "in the...

Coalition threatens to harden protest mobilizations Fernández Noroña, spokesman for the For the Good of All Coalition,1 asserts that, if after the meeting of July 30th,2 the PAN Party continues to reject the opening of the electoral packets,3 the coalition will initiate "energetic radical actions." Gerardo Fernández Noroña, spokesman for the For the Good of All coalition, made known that after the protest meeting that will take place Sunday July 30th, "if the PAN Party continues to reject the opening of the packets, we are going to make important decisions for absolutely forceful and energetic radical actions that will not...

Says the country is calm, there is no nervousness The PAN national leadership accused the ex-presidential candidate of the PRD, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of carrying out an "inadmissible blackmail" after assuring that Mexico will not have peace so long as it does not open the electoral packets1 and count vote by vote. The Adjutant Secretary General of PAN, César Nava Vázquez, assured that a possible civil resistance promoted by the PRD and its candidate is not viable, since the votes already "were counted by a million citizens, as precinct officials," one by one. He added that the pretension [that...