MEXICO CITY - The Mexican leftwing presidential candidate, Andrés López Obrador, received support for his contention that government circles and the politically powerful had plotted against him, when a businessman revealed that a number of videos were aired in 2004 with the aim of bringing the politician into disrepute.

On Friday, a radio station broadcast a tape recording in which Argentine-born businessman Carlos Ahumada, in prison on fraud charges, declared that a series of videos, showing associates of López Obrador committing alleged acts of corruption, had been handed over to television channels by government authorities.

Supporters of Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador protest outside where rival candidate, Felipe Calderon, was meeting with businessmen in Guadalajara, Mexico on Thursday Aug. 17, 2006. Supporters of Lopez Obrador, who are demanding a vote by vote recount of the past elections, said their once-peaceful protest movement would become openly defiant of Mexican law if a full recount isn't ordered in the disputed presidential race.(AP Photo/Arturo Pena-Romano)

The videos, broadcast on television when López Obrador was mayor of Mexico City, were filmed by Ahumada and given to the leftwing politicians's opponents, among them former president Carlos Salinas (1988-1994), according to the businessman's statement.

They then reached the hands of the Vicente Fox administration, Ahumada said, and were subsequently handed on to the media with the intention of damaging the political aspirations of López Obrador, who belongs to the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

Ahumada's statements form part of an 11-minute video which apparently portrays an interrogation of the businessman in Cuba, where he was arrested in 2004 and subsequently deported to Mexico.

It is not known for sure who delivered Friday's tape to the local media. However, the Monitor radio station, which aired part of the recording, said that its investigations suggest that it was the PRD, which probably obtained it directly from Cuba.

According to López Obrador, the government of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and "the powers that be" have been trying to undermine him by different methods for several years, and he maintains that Ahumada's actions were a part of this conspiracy, and also that fraud was committed in the Jul. 2 presidential elections.

According to the official count, the election was won by governing party candidate Felipe Calderón by a narrow margin.

PRD spokesman Carlos Noroña told IPS that Ahumada's story that emerged this Friday "substantiates what we have been saying for a long time: that the government and others were behind the idea of pushing López Obrador out of the presidential race."

He added that now a "fraud" is being planned to illegally impose Calderón as president. He said that thousands of ballot papers had unaccountably gone missing, while others have appeared inexplicably, which will allow the "right" to declare themselves the winners. The PRD, which is demanding a vote-by-vote recount, filed a number of legal challenges regarding irregularities allegedly committed in thousands of voting stations on Jul. 2. The Federal Electoral Court, which ordered a partial recount of the vote, has until Sept. 6 to declare a president-elect or annul the elections.

The government, the business community and many analysts say there is no evidence of fraud, but are urging people to await the Electoral Court's decision. The left, which has been holding protests and blocking traffic, has warned that it will not accept the ruling unless the election is shown to be clean by a complete recount, or unless López Obrador is declared the winner.

A statistical analysis carried out by political scientists Alejandro Poiré of Harvard University and Luis Estrada of the University of California, San Diego, found no evidence whatsoever of fraud or manipulation of the election.

IPS learned that this study is one of the documents under consideration by members of the Electoral Court.

However, Víctor Romero Rochín, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico's Physics Institute, and Bolívar Huerta, a science professor at the university, said the vote tally by the Federal Electoral Institute's (IFE) Preliminary Electoral Results Programme (PREP), designed to carry out a quick vote count, had reflected "unusual" and "unlikely" statistical patterns.

In an interview with a local radio station, W Radio, Rochín explained that he and other researchers had carried out their own count of the votes, based on the results that IFE had made available on its web site, and said they found "strange patterns."

"Statistically speaking, the results fall outside of any reasonable pattern. Either there was meddling, or I don't know what happened," he said.

Salvador García, a columnist for the newspaper El Gráfico, said the appearance of this latest tape recording of statements by Ahumada is probably a PRD ploy to strengthen public support and sympathy for López Obrador. "It attempts to reinforce the idea that there has been a conspiracy against him for a number of months or years."

Ahumada said he used the video recordings of López Obrador's associates to obtain promises of protection from the government and other actors against accusations of corruption that he was facing, but that this protection never materialised.

Ahumada owns a construction company and had several contracts with the Mexico City mayor's office, until López Obrador became mayor in 2001. According to the businessman, López Obrador cancelled his contracts and through his associates subjected him to extortion -- allegations that are strenuously denied by the presidential candidate.

After the videos were broadcast in 2004, Ahumada fled to Cuba, where he was arrested and deported back to Mexico. Since then, he has remained in prison pending trial for alleged fraud and money laundering.

The videotapes, filmed with hidden cameras, show close associates of López Obrador receiving thousands of dollars from Ahumada. Another shows the former secretary of finance of the city government, Gustavo Ponce, gambling large sums of money at casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Senator Diego Fernández de Cevallos, of the governing PAN party, acknowledged Friday that he had seen the videos before they were aired on television, but denied that he had given them to the media.

"And even if I had, it doesn't matter now. The only thing that's certain is that the videos show associates of López Obrador taking part in acts of corruption, and that's the truth," he said.

Opponents of the leftwing candidate criticised him in 2004 for not admitting that his colleagues were corrupt, and for delivering instead a speech in which he maintained that the video scandals were all part of a smear campaign against him.

As mayor, López Obrador was accused by the attorney-general's office of contempt of court after allowing the construction of a short access road to a city hospital to continue. The road was being built on a disputed plot of land expropriated by the city government. Congress even stripped him of his immunity as a legislator so that he could face prosecution.

But the case, which López Obrador -- who was ahead in the polls for several years -- dismissed as a maneuver to bar him from running for the presidency, merely increased his popularity.

Eventually Fox instructed the attorney-general's office to drop the charges, and López Obrador's path was open for him to stand for president.

Copyright © 2006 IPS - Inter Press Service

###