Mexico leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rejects the ruling that Enrique Peña Nieto won the election and calls for protests, saying the PRI cheated.
© Eduardo Verdugo, Associated Press Police officers stand guard Friday during a demonstration outside the Federal Electoral Tribunal in Mexico City.
Mexico City - Dismissing arguments that recent elections were rife with fraud, Mexico's electoral tribunal on Friday officially declared Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Enrique Peña Nieto the president-elect, a ruling that was defiantly rejected by leftist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the second-place finisher who, for the second presidential contest in a row, called his followers into the streets of the capital to protest.
The unanimous ruling by the seven-judge panel clears the way for the return of Peña Nieto's party, known as the PRI, to power. It had lost the quasi-authoritarian grip on the country that it had enjoyed for more than seven decades in 2000, after numerous democratic reforms.
Though there were scattered protests throughout Mexico City, they have not yet risen to the levels of 2006 when, after an even closer election, Lopez Obrador's followers choked the city center for weeks, bringing the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis. Lopez Obrador - who has declared the latest elections neither "clean, free or authentic" - has called for a protest Sept. 9 in the Zocalo, the capital's historic square.
The president-elect arrived at the tribunal chambers late Friday to receive the judges' blessing. In a short speech, he urged Mexicans to unify despite their differences, and had words that, while not mentioning him by name, were obviously meant for his vanquished opponent:
"Legality is fundamental to our democratic system," Peña Nieto said.
"There are rules, deadlines and procedures," he said. "All of the competitors accept them, and we have an obligation to respect them."
The judges' decision was widely anticipated by observers here who had assumed that the tribunal would not deem the PRI's electoral sins sufficiently grave to warrant overturning an election that Peña Nieto won by nearly 3.2 million votes.
Comment: What we are seeing today in Syria - that is, ALL of the massacres and car bombs etc. - is the work of the 'Free Syrian Army' and it is precisely the same kind of tactic that has been playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 10 years. This is a NATO 'proxy Army', trained and funded by the intelligence agencies of NATO countries to sow chaos in the targeted nation as an alternative to a 'boots-on-the-ground' invasion by NATO country armies. Even in the case where an invasion takes place, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, this proxy army war takes over fairly quickly because such proxies can kill and maim with impunity whereas regular Western soldiers cannot do so to the same extent. There are two main benefits of such proxy army tactics:
1) In the case of Syria, they can be used to try and create such chaos that NATO countries can ultimately invade or start a bombing campaign for "humanitarian reasons".
2) In the case of Iraq, for example, they can be used to justify the continued occupation by NATO in order to fight these same proxy armies that NATO created.
See also: 'Free Syrian Army' aka 'al-Qaeda' aka US, Israeli and British Mercenaries, Use Syrian Man as 'Suicide Bomber'