Tens of thousands of protesters marched through Mexico City on July 7th chanting "Fraud! Fraud! Fraud" Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS On July 7th, tens of thousands protesters marched down one of the main streets in Mexico City, calling the country’s recent presidential election a fraud, and denouncing the return of the PRI, a party that ruled the country as a pseudo autocracy for 71 years being pushed from office in 2000. Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI’s candidate, won the election, but has also attracted negative attention from urban, educated protesters. Omar Rodriguez, a 26 year old with a degree in psychology who studied at UNAM, Mexico’s largest public university, held up a sign that said “Mexico voted, Peña Didn’t Win.” Rodriguez, wearing RayBan sunglasses, explained his belief that Mexico’s business elite, the same group that had supported right of center governments for the previous twelve years, now supported the PRI, and had helped Peña Nieto win. “They had to buy out the IFE,” Rodriguez said, referencing the country’s Federal Election Institute, Mexico’s electoral oversight body. The crowd, making its way towards the Zocalo, the main plaza in Mexico City’s center, chanted “no more fraud!!!” One marcher held up a sign that called the IFE, the “Electoral Fraud Institute.” Despite the protests, IFE has confirmed that Peña Nieto received 38% of the vote. His rival, leftist politician Andres Manuel Lopez Obredor, garnered 31% of the vote. The allegations that hundreds of votes that were allegedly bought and that thousands of ballots were miscounted, do not erase the millions of votes that separate Peña Nieto from Obredor. Fernando Dworak, a Mexico City based political analyst, told me later that “on election day, there was vote buying, [and] all parties participated.” But, he qualifies “Was it enough to delegitimize or annul the election? No.” At the march, I met up with one of my friends, a diplomat from Europe who acted as an international observer during the election. He explained “the fraud was not in the vote.” Behind him, a band of teenagers with spikey hair and black clothing held up flags that displayed the logo of the anarchist movement. “Fraud! Fraud! Fraud!” the crowd chanted. My friend, who identifies himself as a supporter of AMLO and asked that I not include his name in this article because he was not authorized to speak on the topic, visited voting booths in Peña Nieto’s home state, on election day. He says he saw a number of “irregularities” but no evidence of massive electoral fraud. After the election, he reviewed the vote tallies at the stations he visited and also analyzed records from other parts of the country. “I don’t believe it was fraud, I believe it was human error,” he said, of the problems he saw relating to vote tallies. “There was no systemic fraud,” he said. Page 1 2 3 Next Page »
Tens of thousands of protesters marched through Mexico City on July 7th chanting "Fraud! Fraud! Fraud" Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS
On July 7th, tens of thousands protesters marched down one of the main streets in Mexico City, calling the country’s recent presidential election a fraud, and denouncing the return of the PRI, a party that ruled the country as a pseudo autocracy for 71 years being pushed from office in 2000. Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI’s candidate, won the election, but has also attracted negative attention from urban, educated protesters.
Omar Rodriguez, a 26 year old with a degree in psychology who studied at UNAM, Mexico’s largest public university, held up a sign that said “Mexico voted, Peña Didn’t Win.”
Rodriguez, wearing RayBan sunglasses, explained his belief that Mexico’s business elite, the same group that had supported right of center governments for the previous twelve years, now supported the PRI, and had helped Peña Nieto win. “They had to buy out the IFE,” Rodriguez said, referencing the country’s Federal Election Institute, Mexico’s electoral oversight body.
The crowd, making its way towards the Zocalo, the main plaza in Mexico City’s center, chanted “no more fraud!!!” One marcher held up a sign that called the IFE, the “Electoral Fraud Institute.”
Despite the protests, IFE has confirmed that Peña Nieto received 38% of the vote. His rival, leftist politician Andres Manuel Lopez Obredor, garnered 31% of the vote. The allegations that hundreds of votes that were allegedly bought and that thousands of ballots were miscounted, do not erase the millions of votes that separate Peña Nieto from Obredor.
Fernando Dworak, a Mexico City based political analyst, told me later that “on election day, there was vote buying, [and] all parties participated.”
But, he qualifies “Was it enough to delegitimize or annul the election? No.”
At the march, I met up with one of my friends, a diplomat from Europe who acted as an international observer during the election. He explained “the fraud was not in the vote.” Behind him, a band of teenagers with spikey hair and black clothing held up flags that displayed the logo of the anarchist movement.
“Fraud! Fraud! Fraud!” the crowd chanted.
My friend, who identifies himself as a supporter of AMLO and asked that I not include his name in this article because he was not authorized to speak on the topic, visited voting booths in Peña Nieto’s home state, on election day. He says he saw a number of “irregularities” but no evidence of massive electoral fraud. After the election, he reviewed the vote tallies at the stations he visited and also analyzed records from other parts of the country. “I don’t believe it was fraud, I believe it was human error,” he said, of the problems he saw relating to vote tallies. “There was no systemic fraud,” he said.
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