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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | August 2006 
Leftist Mexican Protesters take Battle for Disputed Presidency to the Catholic Church
 Ioan Grillo - Associated Press
| | Catholics block the main access to the Metropolitan Cathedral to prevent supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution from entering the catholic church to promote a full recount of the disputed July 2 presidential election, in downtown Mexico City. (Reuters/Tomas Bravo) |
Mexico City - Leftist militants protesting Mexico's disputed presidential election have sparred with electoral officials, the courts and the president. Now some of them are appealing to a higher power as they pick fights with a particularly mighty adversary: the Roman Catholic Church.
Many of the protesters occupying Mexico City's downtown have appealed to God and invoked religious images in their political struggle even as they suspect the church hierarchy supports the conservative presidential candidate.
During two recent Masses in the imposing Metropolitan Cathedral, supporters of presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador burst through the gates accusing Cardinal Norberto Rivera, Mexico's most prominent cleric, of participating in a conspiracy against their candidate by criticizing the street protests.
"Hell awaits you, Norberto Rivera," shouted one middle-aged man as he was dragged off by security.
Lopez Obrador supporters also marched to the city's Basilica of Guadalupe to ask for divine intervention from the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's most-revered religious figure, to help their candidate triumph in the drawn-out struggle over the July 2 presidential election.
Conservative Felipe Calderon led Lopez Obrador by about 240,000 votes, or less than 1 percent, in the official but still uncertified count of votes. Lopez Obrador has challenged the result, and the nation's top electoral court must announce its decision by Sept. 6.
Mexico's left has a long history of anticlericalism and many militants oppose conservative Catholic beliefs on marriage and sexuality. However, many of the poor, who are the base of Lopez Obrador's support, also are fervently religious, and Mexico remains predominantly Catholic.
In the protest camps that have clogged the heart of Mexico City for three weeks, drawings of the Virgin _ some showing the brown-skinned incarnation of the Virgin Mary casting a vote _ hang next to their revered image of atheist Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
"We always ask the Virgin for her help in our daily battles, so why shouldn't we ask her for help in our political battles?" said Jose Luis Nunez, 60, who prayed at the Basilica with about 700 other leftist militants.
Some protesters say they're angry with Cardinal Rivera, who has complained that the protest camps infringe on the people's right to free movement.
Church officials also say that interrupting Mass with protests is a sin.
"The agitators try and shout and make political demands inside the temple during the most sacred moment of Christianity," said the Rev. Hugo Valdemar Romero, an archdiocese spokesman.
Lopez Obrador, for his part, says priests broke Mexican law by supporting Calderon, something church officials deny. Laws from the beginning of the 20th century ban priests from being involved in politics, a reaction to centuries of heavy church influence on government.
Calderon's ruling National Action Party has historic bonds with the Catholic Church, and the candidate's father worked with the hardline Cristeros movement, which raised arms in the 1920s against a leftist government that persecuted the church.
Some Lopez Obrador critics have even turned the church-state argument against him, calling him a false messiah who is leading the poor astray.
They complain that the leftist, an austere widower and fiery public speaker who promises to uplift the millions of Mexicans in poverty, enjoys a religious-like veneration from his supporters.
Prayers for Lopez Obrador cover the sides of the protest tents, and Lopez Obrador himself talks about the need to find Mexico's "salvation."
"He's a messiah, not a rational politician," said political analyst Oscar Aguilar. "He wants to purify the institutions and save Mexico."
Lopez Obrador rejects the criticism, saying that he is a good Christian who leads an ascetic lifestyle in a modest apartment where he rises before dawn.
"They criticize me and say I'm messianic. I remind them that a good Christian worries about his fellow man and fights for the poor and needy," Lopez Obrador told a crowd of cheering supporters at the protest camp. |
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