Huge turnout in Mexico City for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s protests against the July 2 election result. The crowds are supporting their favored candidate, AMLO, as he cries massive electoral fraud in Mexico’s July 2 vote.

A vast protest flooded Mexico City today as reportedly 1,100,000 people (Reuters reports that it’s probably closer to 200,000, AMLO’s own people say 900,000) gathered to protest the July 2 election result, whose results showed that leftist candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador losing the presidency by just 0.58% percentage point, or 244,000 votes, in the hard-fought election where nearly 42 million Mexicans voted.

AMLO today declared that he would launch a campaign of “civil resistance” to protest his electoral loss. He did not specify exactly what that meant, but that in itself may be part of the pressure he’s trying to put on the electoral authorities, who officially are nonpartisan.

Lopez Obrador charged that fraud had been committed both before and after the election, something the electoral authority can probably do something about. But it’s not legal for the electoral authority to just open all the ballot boxes, which had been certified at the polling sites by observers from all parties in a bid to keep the election free and fair – there would need to be a reason to open the things and thus far, AMLO has not provided any evidence of that, despite his claim of having many tapes showing it.

However, he does have other beefs: He charges that sitting Presidente Vicente Fox had illegally campaigned for the PAN candidate – and I suspect that’s at least sort of true, it would be hard for it not to be, given that election. In addition, AMLO charges that PAN overspent its campaign limits, specifically citing PepsiCo and Jumex as funders of it. Again, it might be true.

But down there at that technical level, there’s probably a lot of stuff he wouldn’t want to be well known about himself, either – such as forking out spoils in exchange for votes, something that was done on a much wider scale among the PRD regions, by AMLO’s PRD political operatives. In addition, there is the question of his secret meeting in Maracaibo last January with Hugo Chavez, as well as potential ties between the two, something that has yet to be clarified. And there’s also the matter of the AMLO pal who got implicated in a bona fide bribe scam, he was caught on film taking a bribe. Does AMLO want all that brought to life? I wonder.

There are turbulent times ahead for Mexico but as far as I can see, the institutional momentum still leans toward the Calderon side. That’s why there’s the nasty threat of AMLO turning this thing ugly. Stay tuned.

BLOG, NEWS, PHOTO AND OP-ED ROUNDUP:

UCSD political scientist Matthew Shugart at Fruits and Votes has a good backgrounder on how the electoral tribunal actually works. That’s important because those guys on it are the ones being pressured by these street protests. The item is here.

Georgia Tech political scientist Michelle Dion at La Profesora Abstraida has valuable links to new tapes on the AMLO Web site, which they claim provide proof that third parties were giving illegal help to Calderon’s campaign. You can go see them for yourself and make up your own mind in these links here and here. And don’t miss this backgrounder on AMLO’s original beefs to the electoral board, delivered Monday.

Andres Oppenheimer, on his Oppenheimer Report blog, has a link to his interview with Felipe Calderon here. He’s a little wary of the latter’s desire to mend fences with the hemisphere’s dictators in Cuba and Venezuela, but says there’s reason to hope it’s just post-election fence-mending. Calderon talks of many more issues in the wide-ranging interview, an excellent read here.

Jorge Castaneda, writing for The Washington Post, points out that although AMLO has some options, he really doesn’t have much chance of winning his case based on claims of widespread fraud. He points out that Calderon’s got to reach out to AMLO’s voters and the U.S. ought to be extremely relieved that a leftwing populist is not in the saddle over in next-door Mexico. Via RealClearPolitics, his essay can be read here.

Washington Post has a really terrific photo gallery of today’s protests at this link here.

Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit has additional links, along with some good straightforward questions for AMLO about just whether he really meant it when he said he would accept the results of the election. The excellent post is here.

Glenn at Instapundit has found a Dallas Morning Herald item that seemed to cover the event in earnest on Pajamas Media here. Hat tip: Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit.