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29 March 2024

Thousands march against ruling party in Mexico

Published
By AP

Tens of thousands young demonstrators clogged Mexico City streets Sunday to protest the likely return to power of the country's long-ruling party, marching just hours before the party's front-running candidate squared off with his rivals in the final official presidential debate.

Enrique Pena Nieto, who went into the matchup in Guadalajara maintaining a double-digit lead in most polls, said he planned to use the opportunity to explain his proposals and plans for change in a country wracked by drug violence and lackluster economic growth.

Still, "if the rest of the candidates decide to use the time to attack me, I'm prepared to respond in a swift manner to every one of their points," he wrote on his official website Sunday.

Attacks were expected all around as negative advertising has spiked the last two weeks among all three major parties — Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, the current ruling National Action Party and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party.

The rhetoric is heating up in the final weeks before the July 1 vote as Mexico contemplates the return of the PRI, which ruled for 71 years with a combination of iron fist and corruption before being voted out in 2000.

Pena Nieto, who has about a 13-point lead in polls, vows that he is the new face of a PRI that has become more democratic since its defeat by the PAN's Vicente Fox.

Mexican voters appear ready to kick the PAN out of office after 12 years of Fox and current President Felipe Calderon, who launched an assault on drug cartels and whose term has seen more than 47,000 deaths from drug violence. PAN candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota has faltered throughout the campaign and is third in some polls.

Meanwhile, a slight surge by PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has brought attacks on the leftist candidate from the PRI and the PAN, who are reminding voters how he paralyzed Mexico City with hundreds of thousands of protesters after he narrowly lost to Calderon in 2006.

Negative ads have called him an authoritarian and even violence-condoning politician "who doesn't believe in democracy." They mirror attacks in the 2006 race, when Vazquez Mota was Calderon's campaign manager and shadowy groups allied with him ran ads calling Lopez Obrador "a danger for Mexico."

"The center of the debate will be Lopez Obrador. Both Pena Nieto and Vazquez Mota will have to direct their questioning at him," political analyst Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez said of Sunday night's event.

The fourth candidate in the debate, Gabriel Quadri of the New Alliance party, has been drawing single digits in the polls.

Analysts believe protests by young people, mostly students, have caused the recent slight sag in Pena Nieto's lead.

Some 90,000 protesters gathered in the city center Sunday shouting "Not one vote for the PRI!" and "Out with Pena!"

Some of the demonstrators were commemorating June 10, 1971, when pro-government agents killed at least a dozen students at a leftist political demonstration in Mexico City.

But the vast majority of the marchers were connected with a movement that sprang up last month after students heckled Pena Nieto in a campaign appearance at Iberoamerican University. PRI officials later questioned if they were students and accused them of being planted by rivals. They responded by showing their student ID card across social media venues.

Candidates focused on Pena Nieto in the first debate in May, accusing him of lying about his record as governor of the state of Mexico and maintaining ties to unsavory elements of the PRI, which was known for buying votes and all-out coercion to stay in power for seven decades but is also credited with building many of

Mexico's institutions and its social security safety net.

There were no damaging gaffes that night to change the overall dynamic of the race.

Now all the candidates are trying to paint rivals as the most corrupt.

Pena Nieto's foes have sought to link him to two former PRI governors in the border state of Tamaulipas, one whose properties were raided by Mexican officials and the other who US prosecutors allege had ties to drug cartels.

Rivals also accuse Pena Nieto of paying Mexico's giant Televisa network for favorable coverage. Both the PRI and Televisa have vehemently denied this.

Two weeks ago, a leaked audio tape was released in which a Lopez Obrador supporter is heard asking businessmen for $6 million in campaign donations, which would be a violation of electoral laws. But the leaked version did not include the full conversation, in which another supporter is heard telling the businessmen that the leftist was not aware of or involved in the request.