Mexican leftist claims vote fraud, rallies crowds

MEXICO CITY - Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a fiery leftist who finished second in Mexico's contested presidential election, claimed today he was the victim of fraud and called supporters to the streets in protest.

Lopez Obrador said the razor-thin election victory of conservative Felipe Calderon last week was plagued by irregularities. He said he would take his case to a large crowd in the capital's vast Zocalo square today.

"We are faced with a typical case of electoral fraud in Mexico," Lopez Obrador told foreign correspondents hours before the rally, where at least 100,000 people were expected to back the popular former mayor of Mexico City.

"We are sure we won the election," he said. "I am going to defend our victory."

Lopez Obrador will challenge the result in Mexico's highest electoral court, but Calderon is already looking presidential after a recount showed he won by less than 1 percentage point.

US President George W Bush and leftist Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero dealt fresh blows to Lopez Obrador when they called his rival yesterday to congratulate him on the election win.

Lopez Obrador said the party of Calderon and Mexican President Vicente Fox had "learned fast" the dirty tricks often used by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that ruled for 71 years until Fox toppled it in 2000.

He said election count figures flashed over national television had been rigged and were not consistent with the actual vote count.

"The electronic counting system was manipulated. Mathematically, we have the proof of how the manipulation was done," he said. "What was on the screen did not always correspond to reality."

Lopez Obrador has yet to produce concrete evidence of fraud, and a team of European Union observers has said there was no large-scale irregularity or vote-rigging.

The leftist, who has stayed mostly out of public view since Friday when recount results were released, has discouraged violence among his supporters, many of whom remember a 1988 presidential election widely believed to have been stolen from them by the PRI.

As several hundred people began marching toward the Zocalo today, Lopez Obrador said his protest rallies would be peaceful -- but he would not give in easily. "This is only just beginning."

The left is calling for a vote-for-vote recount, instead of a new count of polling station tally sheets as happened this week. But Mexican law does not allow for a count of every vote.

The Federal Electoral Institute, which ran the election, said officials from all parties, as well as a million citizens who were called at random to help out on voting day, staffed polling stations and few of them reported any problem.

Carlos Sedeno, 31, an architect, said another recount would be too much.

"It's like a vote of no-confidence in everyone who took part in the electoral process," he said. "There were representatives of all the parties. It's like doubting everyone's honesty."

Lopez Obrador was a master of civil resistance in his native state of Tabasco in the 1980s and 1990s when he shut down oil wells and blocked the workings of state government for weeks to protest vote fraud.

The electoral court has until August 31 to rule on Lopez Obrador's challenges to the vote and until September 6 to formally declare the election winner.

- REUTERS