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News > Latin America

Mexico: AMLO Won the 2006 Elections, PRI Rival Candidate

  • Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador addresses supporters at the Zocalo, Mexico City's main square, during his 2006 presidential campaign.

    Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador addresses supporters at the Zocalo, Mexico City's main square, during his 2006 presidential campaign. | Photo: EFE

Published 4 October 2018
Opinion

Roberto Madrazo, third place in the 2006 elections, said that Lopez Obrador won according to his party's data.

The ex-presidential candidate for the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) Roberto Madrazo declared that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador actually won the tight 2006 presidential elections, but electoral authorities refused a recount and declared right-wing Felipe Calderon as president-elect.

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“If the IFE [the Electoral Federal Institute] had taken the decision to recount, as a part of the opposition demanded, polling station by polling station and vote by vote, I knew Lopez Obrador would have won, but that was not my struggle,” said Madrazo in the show Tele Reportaje by Emmanuel Sibilla on Wednesday.

Lopez Obrador declared the 2006 elections were a fraud orchestrated by the political establishment to let Calderon, from the conservative National Action Party (PAN), to take over the presidency.  According to official numbers, the center-left candidate got 35.3 percent (14,756,350) of the votes, just 0.6 percent (243,934) behind the PAN candidate. Madrazo was left far behind in third place.

“In my preliminary results, Andres Manuel was winning,” declared Madrazo. When asked why he didn’t give the results to the runner-up, Madrazo argued that the evidence would have destroyed the democratic life of the country, as people would have lost their confidence in the electoral system and also, because Lopez Obrador “didn’t ask for them.”

The former candidate suggested that the electoral fraud was one of the reasons for the surge of violence in Mexico, as it was during the presidency of Calderon that things started to go wrong.

“They imposed the president and to legitimize himself he declared the war on drugs, stupidly hit with a stick the wasp’s nest and since then there’s a lot of violence in Mexico.”

He also said Calderon’s team asked him for his official recognition after the elections, but he denied to do so.

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“I couldn’t give the lead to Felipe Calderon because I wasn’t certain he won. Calderon is a very vengeful, resentful man. Calderon wouldn’t leave it just like that.”

After Madrazo’s declarations echoed media outlets in Mexico, Calderon joined Ciro Gomez Leyva’s pro-government show to declare he indeed won the 2006 elections “by a very tight margin.”

“If he has those results, he should present them. I can assure that’s fake. No party has different results than the electoral authorities,” said Calderon.

During a meeting in Cuernavaca with Cuauhtemoc Blanco, Morena’s governor in Morelos and a former soccer star, Lopez Obrador reaffirmed he’s certain that, had the 2006 fraud been avoided, Mexican people wouldn’t have suffered that much.

“I always say, and there’s evidence, that there was an electoral fraud in 2006,” said Lopez Obrador. “That’s why the electoral packages weren’t opened.”

He also pledged that electoral frauds will vanish from Mexico’s future.

Lopez Obrador, now the president-elect, claims declared himself the ‘legitimate president’ after the 2006 fraud and his followers staged a month-long sit-in in Mexico City’s historic center to demand a vote recount.

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