On July 1, our neighbors to the south held a presidential election. In a stinging rebuke to the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and President Felipe Calderón—whose six-year term has been marked by an increasingly violent drug war and a lagging economy—Mexicans elected Enrique Peña Nieto, a former governor from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which controlled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. Like Calderón in 2006, Peña Nieto received less than 40 percent of the vote but still beat Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an old-school leftist from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and former mayor of Mexico City. (Josefina Vázquez Mota, the PAN candidate, finished third.) While the result was long seen as a foregone conclusion (Peña Nieto led in the polls throughout the election), López Obrador closed the gap in the final weeks of the campaign thanks in part to a growing student movement fed up with the Televisa-TV Azteca television duopoly, which runs 95 percent of the country's stations and which a June 7 Guardian report claimed favored PRI candidates over their PRD counterparts. 

 

In Peña Nieto's victory speech, he promised to try to meet the demands of those that voted against him and applauded the election for being an authentic democratic fiesta. López Obrador, who garnered 31 percent of the vote, was quick to write off the election as a sham, alleging that it "was plagued with irregularities before, during, and after the process." Protesters, many of them belonging to the mostly student movement YoSoy132 (see below), took to the streets in Mexico City and across the country the next day in an "anti-fraud" march. Videos of the protests flooded YouTube; in one, marchers' demands in an underpass—México votó, Peña no ganó!—translate to: "Mexico voted, Peña didn't win!"