Well, you really didn't expect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to actually honor or even pretend to honor any actual recount, did you? What is interesting is that the government is apparently finally running out of patience and is dispersing protesters who are trying to blockade buildings. Protesters are complaining because the police "beat" them when they wouldn't move.
"We were badly beaten … they tossed teargas at us and they beat us about the body, on the legs, shins, arms, elbows and nose," Congresswoman Dolores Padierna told Formato 21 radio on Tuesday.
Padierna said the police raid came late Monday as a group of her colleagues and 200 followers of leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador were setting up camp outside Congress to press for a full vote recount of the presidential election.
She said the camp was not obstructing traffic nor access to the congressional building, but that hundreds of soldiers and police officers suddenly appeared on scene "to evict us" from the area.
The police said in a statement it had deployed to clear access to the building after trying but failing to talk with the protesters.
Some media photographers covering the event also complained that police beat them up.
An official with Lopez Obrador's campaign claimed on Monday that his conservative rival Felipe Calderon lost 14,140 votes in the recount of nine percent of the ballots.
But a spokesman for Calderon, of the ruling National Action Party (PAN), rejected the claim, saying there was a difference of only 1,500 votes "for one side or another," and insisting the partial recount confirmed the conservative victory.
AMLO's leftist math says that the election commission has to throw out a lot of ballots and simply give the presidency to him. Note that EU monitors of the elections said there was no evidence at all of irregularities. Yet AMLO will certainly never admit that. One hopes someone is looking into who is funding these festivities on behalf of AMLO.
