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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | April 2005 
As Protests Continue, Case Inches Forward
 Wire services
| | PRD lawmakers meet at the Angel of Independence in the capital before Tuesday's hunger strike (Photo: EFE) |
Opposition senators voice their anger against President Vicente Fox by going on a hunger strike outside his residence.
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) senators went on a hunger strike Tuesday in front of the president's residence to protest the probable prosecution of Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Twenty senators set up a white tent and said they would remain there until April 22.
They accuse President Vicente Fox of plotting against the mayor to take him out of the 2006 presidential elections.
Jesús Ortega, head of the PRD in the Senate, said the hunger strike is to protest "the state coup against democracy."
It is part of a growing protest movement that includes a boycott of Congress by PRD legislators. Outside of Mexico City other hunger strikers supporting López Obrador pitched camp in front of the State of Mexico's governor's mansion. They said they will stay until this weekend, and then join a march through the state capital, Toluca.
A decision whether to arrest the ousted Mexico City mayor could come this month, the main federal prosecutor in the case said Tuesday.
Carlos Javier Vega Memije, assistant attorney general for federal crimes, said he expected to put the case before a judge "within five to 10 days." The judge would then have 10 days to decide whether to issue an arrest warrant.
That ruling could come "possibly in the final days of this month," Vega said.
Heated at times, Vega insisted that López Obrador and his allies "lied" in saying that politics was behind the case or that President Vicente Fox was involved in the decision to prosecute the mayor.
He said the judge had issued his complaint only after an appeals court agreed that the city had violated the court order.
Vega said that occurred only because López Obrador and his subordinates had exasperated the judge by ignoring four court orders to halt construction of a hospital access road across disputed land.
The mayor denies the charges. |
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