Mexico: Tens of thousands protest vote fraud, imposition of PRI candidate

2012-07-10 · first published in New Politics · 194 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to newpolitics.mayfirst.org”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

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July 8, 2012 -- Links via New Politics --

Carrying signs denouncing fraud, tens of thousands of students and other voters marched through Mexico City on July 7 to protest what they see as the government’s imposition on the country of presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Peña Nieto received 38 per cent of the vote, compared to 32 per cent for Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-of-centre Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and 25 per cent for Josefina Vázquez Mota of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). López Obador claims that the election was fraudulent and has called upon the election authorities to investigate claims of vote buying.

Students, however, have led the protests. In addition to the mass march in Mexico City, they also marched in smaller numbers in several other major Mexican cities, including an impressive demonstration by an estimated 7000 in Guadalajara on July 6. The protest was organised largely through social media by the “I am #132” movement which has dogged Peña Nieto for two months, criticising in particular his close ties to the powerful Televisa television network.