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 Editorials | At Issue | September 2006 
Obrador Must Decide on Post-Election Tactics
 Alistair Bell - Reuters
Mexican leftists decrying election fraud will decide on Saturday whether to make their fight with President-elect Felipe Calderon a radical struggle on the streets or to adopt a less confrontational stance.
Supporters of leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will hold an open-air convention in the capital's sprawling Zocalo square to hammer out strategy after losing the July 2 vote by a marginal 234,000 votes.
Organizers predict 1 million people will turn out at the event, which could name Lopez Obrador the leader of a civil resistance campaign or the head of an alternative government.
Delegates will likely take the second path and symbolically declare Lopez Obrador president, a softer option which means fewer street protests against Calderon, who is set to take office on December 1.
A sporadic civil resistance campaign in August that involved preventing highway toll collections and trying to stop access to foreign banks did little to help the left win support for its claims of vote-rigging.
A court last week named Calderon winner of the election after throwing out Lopez Obrador's claims of fraud.
STRATEGY SHIFT
Lopez Obrador aide Manuel Camacho Solis said leftists were leaning away from street protests and toward challenging Calderon more like a traditional political opposition.
"We are getting to the point where there should be a space for politics and a space for protest. It's not just protesting against Calderon anymore," he said.
The convention is likely to approve plans to draw up a new constitution, he said.
The political feud, which has sharply polarized Mexico's left and right, soured the country's most important national fiesta when two opposing leaders hosted rival ceremonies ahead of independence day on Saturday.
Tens of thousands of raucous leftists celebrated the traditional independence "grito," or cry, in the Zocalo square on Friday after forcing conservative President Vicente Fox to mark the occasion outside of the capital.
Leftists had paralyzed the Zocalo and main streets in the capital for six weeks to protest what they say was vote-rigging but ended those demonstrations this week to allow a military parade to be held on Saturday.
Some other protests are planned before Calderon takes office, Camacho Solis said, and Lopez Obrador supporters are adamant they will not go quietly.
"It is going to be very rough for Calderon. Wherever he goes, we'll be there to remind him he became president through fraud," said nurse Lidia Alvarado, 51, in the Zocalo.
Presidents traditionally deliver the grito in the Zocalo, once the heart of the Aztec world, but the threat of leftist protests forced Fox to go elsewhere.
Several thousand people turned out in heavy rain to see Fox, dressed in the presidential sash, give the cry and ring a bell in the same church in Dolores Hidalgo town where priest Miguel Hidalgo began Mexico's fight for independence in 1810.
(Additional reporting by Greg Brosnan) |
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