From the AP
In his first briefing since the July 2 election, Ruben Aguilar said Fox spoke with ruling-party candidate Felipe Calderon after electoral officials gave him a slight lead in the official vote tally. But he said Fox would stay out of the contest until a president-elect is named.
sígame…
Aguilar said he was confident that a campaign launched by Calderon’s rival, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, to overturn Calderon’s lead would be peaceful. And he dismissed the idea that the country, torn between the two candidates, would come to a standstill.
The Mexican people have not had confidence in their electoral system in a very long time. Decades of fraud and corruption involving centralized power, bribes for votes, secretive counting, etc. have done their number on the country’s democratic system. Sound familiar? It does to this United States citizen’s ears as I watched the horrors of 2000 and 2004 unfold.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Democratic Revolution Party’s candidate, is moving forward with the challenge of last week’s election. With a vote margin of 244,000 out of 41 million cast (a little over .5%), and widespread accounts of shadiness at polling places, he is making a simple demand.
As the United States media continues to do a hatchet job on AMLO the “leftist” candidate in the mold of that evil Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, remember this dear reader: the talking heads are continuing to lull you into a mental coma that spits in the face of democracy. They are the voices of the corporate board rooms who are basking in the sunlight of secure pension plans while the rest of us figure out whether we’re going to scrape up enough money to pay for groceries or the electric bill this month (as an example of the effects of the U.S. Minimum Wage which hasn’t been raised since 1997). But I digress.
The streets of Mexico were filled over the weekend with hundreds of thousands of people to demand a defibrillator for democracy. I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping the shockwave sent out by their grassroots movement makes its way past the lines of Minutemen and various military forces across la frontera. Piolin y El Cucuy agree
Los Angeles disc jockeys Piolin (Tweetybird) and El Cucuy (the Bogeyman) said they will work with the National Council of La Raza and other organizations to push Latino immigrants living in the United States to become U.S. citizens and register to vote in time to cast ballots in 2008.
Crossposted at The Left End of the Dial and my humble blog