Haiti struggles to deal with major cholera outbreak

Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince is bracing itself for an outbreak of cholera as the disease which has killed 200 in the countryside makes itself known in the city. The five confirmed cases in the capital are among more than 2,000 people who were infected in an outbreak mostly centred in the Artibonite region north of Port-au-Prince. At least 208 people have died with that figure likely to rise in the country’s first outbreak of cholera since 1960. The outbreak is the latest disaster to hit the poverty-stricken country still struggling to recover from the devastating 7.0 earthquake which left much of the country in ruins last January. (photo: David Darg)

Medecins San Frontieres sent assessment teams to the Artibonite region including the coastal town of St Marc, 70km north of Port-au-Prince. MSF said St Marc’s hospital was becoming overcrowded and does not have the capacity to handle a cholera epidemic. MSF staff are giving patients an oral rehydration solution to replace fluids lost from diarrhoea and vomiting symptoms of a cholera infection. Patients too sick to drink the ORS are given infusions intravenously. “The most important thing is to isolate the cholera patients there from the rest of the patients, in order to best treat those people who are infected and to prevent further spread of the disease,” the local MSF coordinator said. “This will also enable the hospital to run as normally as possible. We are setting up a separate, isolated cholera treatment centre now."

David Darg, of the US-based Operation Blessing International, drove the two hours from Port-au-Prince to find a “horror scene” at St Marc hospital. Darg said he had to fight his way through the gate through crowds of distressed relatives while others carried dying relatives into the compound. “Some children were screaming and writhing in agony, others were motionless with their eyes rolled back into their heads as doctors and nursing staff searched desperately for a vein to give them an IV,” he said. “The hospital was overwhelmed, apparently caught out suddenly by one of the fastest killers there is.”

Cholera is an acute intestinal infection caused by bacteria carried in human faeces and can be transmitted by water, some foodstuffs and, more rarely, from person to person. The main symptoms are watery diarrhoea and vomiting, which lead to severe dehydration and rapid death if not treated promptly. According to the World Health Organisation, there are an estimated three to five million cholera cases every year causing between 100,000 to 120,000 deaths. The WHO is worried about the emergence of a new and more virulent strain of cholera that now predominates in parts of Africa and Asia, as well as the unpredictable emergence and spread of antibiotic-resistant strains. And because brackish water and estuaries are natural reservoirs of this strain, cholera could increase where there are rising sea levels and increases in water temperatures.

While it is too early to tell what is causing the Haitian outbreak, conditions in the IDP camps remain primitive and conditions were ripe for disease to strike in areas with limited access to clean water. 230,000 people died in the quake. 1.2 million people were displaced as of August 2010 and a further 1.8 million are affected. According to a post-earthquake fact sheet produced by USAID, the majority of IDPs in Artibonite are “residing with host families, straining resources and creating housing space issues for both groups.” It noted deficiencies in disease reporting processes. As well there has been a mass migration of 120,000 people from Artibonite to Port-au-Prince in search of a better life.

So far there has been no reports of cholera in the camps, but if it does a public health crisis could be imminent. "It will be very, very dangerous," Claude Surena, president of the Haitian Medical Association, said. "Port-au-Prince already has more than 2.4 million people, and the way they are living is dangerous enough already. Clearly a lot more needs to be done."

Arias appeals for more time to end Honduras stalemate

(Picture: Zelaya in the stetson in conversation with Arias in less stressful times.) Costa Rica President Oscar Arias has asked for more time to resolve Honduras’s political stalemate and warned that civil war was possible if the three-week crisis isn’t ended soon. Arias has met separately with ousted president Manuel Zelaya and his replacement Roberto Micheletti in the Costa Rican capital San Jose but has been unable to get either man to agree to the seven-point solution he presented on Saturday. “I want to take 72 hours to work more intensely,” said Arias. Because the alternative he said was “civil war and bloodshed that the Honduran people don’t deserve.”

Arias may be grandstanding but he does have form as a peacekeeper. He won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in getting five central American presidents to sign the Esquipulas peace accord in Guatemala. His seven point plan for Honduras calls for the formation of a national reconciliation government to be led Zelaya. It would also move forward planned elections to October from November and offer political amnesty to those involved in the crisis. But neither the old nor the new leader have been particularly helpful. Zelaya threatened to resort to other means if he did not get his way while Micheletti repeated his demand that Zelaya not return to power before he agrees to stand down.

The Council for Hemisphere Affairs says negotiation fatigue is beginning to make itself evident among the two sides after three weeks of deadlock. The crisis started on 28 June, the day Zelaya had scheduled a controversial non-binding plebiscite to determine if citizens should vote in November elections to change the constitution. Zelaya claimed the plebiscite was a merely a survey, but his opponents saw it as a means of giving him a second term of government when his current term expires in 2010.

Zelaya had sacked the head of the armed forces who refused to give logistical support for the vote. The Supreme Court overruled him, saying the army chief should be reinstated. On the morning of the vote, over 200 troops arrived at his home and ordered him to surrender on pain of death. They drove him to the airport and put him on a plane to neighbouring Costa Rica.

Later that day, Congress produced what it claimed was Zelaya’s letter of resignation. Speaker and constitutionally second in line to the presidency, Roberto Micheletti, was sworn in as interim leader. The new government issued arrest orders against Zelaya on 18 charges that include betrayal of the country and failure to fulfil his duties. Protests against the coup began immediately with several thousand pro-Zelaya supporters gathering near the Presidential Palace in Tegucigalpa. On 2 July, social organisations of workers, farmers and citizens held a massive march to deliver a message of gratitude for support for democracy at the UN office. After two days, Congress had enough and approved a decree to enforce a curfew and declare a “state of exception” which banned meetings, curtailed travel, justify search without warrants and imposed restrictions on the media.

Zelaya continues to have the support of the OAS (Organisation of American States) but is no closer to getting home. On 5 July he tried to fly back home but his plane was blocked from landing. While Zelaya is a wealthy land-owning cattle baron and timber merchant he derives most of his support from Honduras’s poorest people. Almost half the population survives on $2 a day or less with one in five considered undernourished.

Honduras is hopeless corrupt, one of the least transparent countries in Latin America and is extremely dependent on US and multilateral organisations for financial support. The US suspended a significant amount of aid to Honduras in support of Zelaya but has been reluctantly to get fully involved in the crisis. In a statement after the coup, President Obama called on all sides to respect democratic norms and the rule of law. “Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference,” he said. The coup government has interpreted this as a green light to continue its rule.

Guatemala Twitter arrest brings local scandal to wider audience

A Guatemalan man has been placed under house arrest for sending a Twitter message that incited “financial panic” last week. Police arrested 37 year old Jean Anleu Fernandez last Tuesday but released him on bail overnight on condition he remains at home. Fernandez’s employer put up a loan for the $6500 fine ordered by a Guatemalan judge and his supporters are collecting PayPal donations to repay it. A new video released shows him still tweeting while in handcuffs.

Fernandez tweets under the label @jeanfer and last week he urged people in Guatemala to boycott a bank in the aftermath of a political scandal. He was arrested at home in the capital Guatemala City and had his computer seized after tweeting (in Spanish) that people should withdraw cash from Banrural and “break the bank of the corrupt”. Fernandez tagged the message with '#escandalogt' which refers to the alleged murder of prominent lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg.

Rosenberg was shot dead last Sunday while riding his bicycle in Guatemala City. On Monday, he appeared in a youtube video in which he accused President Alvaro Colom, his wife and his personal secretary of ordering his own death. "If at this moment you are hearing or watching this message, it is because Alvaro Colom assassinated me,” said Rosenberg in the video. Rosenberg also accused Colom of Khalil Musa, a Guatemalan industrialist who was shot dead with his adult daughter a month ago. Musa was Rosenberg’s client.

Musa had been appointed by President Colom to the board of Banrural (the subject of Fernandez’s tweet) a partly state-run bank. In the video Rosenberg said Musa was killed because he refused to co-operate in corrupt Banrural (Rural Bank) business deals. President Colom has claimed he is “incapable” of ordering the murder and has asked overseas agencies to aid the investigation. Colom has invited the UN and the FBI to investigate the affair.

The US has confirmed the FBI have been asked to assist and authorities have also spoken to the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN panel set up in 2007 to clean up corruption in the country. "I don't know the motives Rodigro Rosenberg had to film that tape but if you see those who were involved in filming the tape you understand who they are...they are destabilisers,” said Colom.

Hundreds of people have taken to streets of the capital this week protesting Rosenberg's death and demanding Colom's resignation. So far the president is unmoved. He told Al Jazeera he had no intention of stepping down over the matter. “The people of Guatemala have the right to protest and ask for justice ... but be careful of crossing the line," he said. He also won support from the Washington-based Organisation of American States (OAS) which passed a resolution on Wednesday approving support for Colom’s administration "in its obligation to preserve the institutions of democracy and the rule of law".

Álvaro Colom is a centre-leftist who won the election in 2007, taking office in January 2008. His main priority has been to address the tragic legacy left by the country’s 36 year civil war internal conflict, which killed close to a quarter of a million Guatemalans and ended only with the 1996 UN-brokered peace accords. In March he opened military archives to aid lawyers in a case against a former Guatemalan dictator for genocide and the government is collecting statements from war victims for future criminal cases against army and police officials accused of abuses during the war.

But the Rosenberg allegations represent Colom’s biggest test in office. The lawyer claimed Colom and his associates dragged his client Khalil Musa into a corruption scam involving Banrural, a rural development bank. The head of the banking system, Genaro Pacheco, said Fernandez admitted sending the tweet about Banrural. Inciting financial panic is an offence in Guatemala. He will be held under house arrest pending trial.

Fernandez's arrest has angered many bloggers and has spawned several campaigns of solidarity, including the collection of donations to pay for the fine. Many people are unconvinced his tweet could have produced the panic claimed by the government. Blogger Jorge Mota asks why the authorities could move so quickly on a case like this, but the more serious accusation from the Rosenberg video has yet to receive the same treatment. "One gets incriminated for murder by a video and one can deny everything, and of course the country's impunity protects," said Moto. "But one makes a comment on Twitter, and is arrested."

Violence blights election in Guatemala

The death toll in Guatemala has risen to over 50 due to violence ahead of this weekend’s election. The violence is the worst in the country since the end of the civil war in 1996. Much of the bloodshed has been blamed on drug barons trying to force their candidates into office. Guatemala goes to the polls to elect a new president and Congress on Sunday. Former general Otto Perez Molina hopes to capitalise on the violence with his ‘tough on crime’ campaign.

Perez has risen in the polls as he promises a strong hand to tackle the violence. He has promised to implement the death penalty and expand the military's role in battling organized crime. But his rhetoric has revived fears among those who recall the murderous role of the army in Guatemala’s history. Perez’s biggest rival for the presidency, Alvaro Colom, said the violence has gotten so out of hand that he considers Guatemala a "narco-state" because of the influence drug lords wield with government and law enforcement. Real power is held by the criminal syndicates on the one hand and a small coterie of businessmen on the other.

Nevertheless Guatemalan citizens will cast their votes this Sunday to elect a new president of the Republic, as well as a vice-president, 158 congressmen, and 332 local rulers. Recent polls suggest that the result with be close. The two favourites are General Perez, the right-wing candidate of the Patriot Party, and Alvaro Colom, the left-leaning candidate. The most likely scenario is a run-off between the two on 4 November.

Guatemala, with a population of 13 million, has one of the highest murder rates in the world. 6,000 people were murdered in 2006. Only 3 per cent of these crimes were solved. The country’s low per capita GDP ($1,512 in 2001) is exacerbated by extremely unequal land holding and income distribution. 80 per cent of the population live in poverty with Mayan Indians making up the overwhelming majority of the poor. The situation is exacerbated as most Mayan parents refuse to send their children to public schools or to learn Spanish, because their children become assimilated into Guatemalan culture and leave the community.

The mighty Mayan empire was routed in the 1520s by murderous conquistador Don Pedro de Alvarado. He established the city of Santiago de Guatemala as the seat of Spanish power in the region for the next three hundred years. The conquered Mayans became slave labourers on the city’s monumental works. Catholic missionaries outlawed the Maya religion and burned all but four of their sacred bark-paper books.

Mayans have remained at the bottom rung of Guatemalan society. The country itself became nominally independent from Spain since 1821. But since then it has been under the considerable shadow of American influence. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated and helped carry out the violent overthrown of Jacobo Arbenz’s democratic Guatemalan government. The all powerful United Fruit Company had opposed Arbenz’s agrarian reform policies and successfully lobbied President Eisenhower to portray Arbenz as a communist threat. Since that time, through to the late 90s, Guatemala was ruled by an oligarchic military regime supported by American training, weapons, and money. A low-level Mayan insurgency has been in place since Arbenz was overthrown.

In the early 1980s the civil war became fiercer and the Guatemalan government launched a brutal war against its own people. Military dictator Efrain Rios Montt, backed by the US Reagan administration, began an all-out military campaign to annihilate the mostly Mayan Indian peasantry. Some of the worst massacres occurred at Rio Negro where the locals were forcibly evacuated to make way for the World Bank funded construction of the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam. Military leaders owned vast tracts of land in the area that the dam would service but the locals were reluctant to leave. In four separate massacres, almost 500 men, women and children were strangled, shot or hacked to death. Filling of the reservoir began after the last of the natives were removed or killed. To date neither the World Bank nor the Guatemalan government acknowledge responsibility for Rio Negro.

Rios Montt continued his scorched earth policy throughout the 1980s. But international opinion was beginning to turn against his government. In 1992, Mayan Rigoberta Menchú (who is an outsider for the upcoming election) won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bring international attention to the government-sponsored genocide against the indigenous population.

In 1996 the UN brokered a peace accord between the government and the rebels. The accord ended the longest and bloodiest of Latin America's Cold War civil wars, leaving between 150,000 and 200,000 civilians dead, mostly Mayans. A UN-sponsored truth commission said that government forces and state-sponsored paramilitaries were responsible for over 93 percent of the human rights violations during the war.

But the dividend of peace remains elusive for most Guatemalans. Organised crime and drug trafficking are thriving in a country where the police, courts and jails are barely functioning. The justice system is so ineffective that the US and other Western nations successfully pushed for a UN commission last month that would tackle criminal cases that authorities are unable to pursue. "If they catch you, you must be an idiot. Because it's almost impossible that they catch you," said Ana Maria Mendez, director of the UN's justice, security and conflict program in Guatemala. "In some of those places, justice is in the hands of God."

Sandinista resurrection

Daniel Ortega appears set to complete a remarkable political comeback and be installed as president of Nicaragua. The 1980s Sandinistan leader of the country polled 40% of the vote after this weekends elections. Although officials have yet to release the formal result, he appears likely to have beaten his four opponents and avoid a run-off against Harvard-educated banker Eduardo Montealegre, who trailed by at least seven percentage points. Ortega needs 35% of the vote and an advantage of 5 percentage points over his closest rival to avoid a second poll in December. The US has threatened to pull aid from an Ortega government and has also said it was too soon to declare him the winner.

Ortega has claimed he is a changed man from the bogey figure that the US attempted to overthrow in the 80s. He spent much of this campaign preaching harmony, love and reconciliation, often campaigning with John Lennon's Give Peace A Chance playing in the background. Now 60 years old, he has toned down his revolutionary rhetoric, promising to favour free trade policies as well as improve health care and education.

Jose Daniel Ortega Saavedra was born in November 1945 to a middle class family in the southern city of La Libertad. Both his parents were political activists opposed to the regime of the Somoza family who ruled the country between 1937 and 1979. Daniel Ortega learned early and was arrested aged 15 for political involvement. He joined the underground opposition movement the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional). By 1967 he had was a leader of the movement. The Sandinistas took their name from Augusto Sandino, a Nicaraguan revolutionary and charismatic leader of a guerrilla war against a US military presence until his murder by the Government in 1934. The FSLN was founded in 1961 but did not emerge as a serious opposition force until the following decade.

The trigger was the 1972 earthquake that levelled the capital city Managua. It killed 10,000 people, destroyed 80% of the buildings and left over half of its population homeless. Much of the subsequent international aid to the country was embezzled by Somoza’s National Guard. The president’s personal wealth soared to US$400 million in 1974. The Sandinistas gained much support as many middle-class Nicaraguans reacted against blatant corruption. In December that year, guerrillas seized government hostages at a private party. They received $1 million in ransom and had 14 prisoners released from jail. One of the prisoners was Daniel Ortega. He had been in jail since his arrest after a botched bank robbery in 1967. Ortega fled to Cuba while the Somoza government responded with further censorship, intimidation, torture, and murder.

Guerrilla warfare intensified in the capital and elsewhere for the remainder of the decade. In 1979 the Sandinistas called a general strike and launched a full-scale uprising. Somoza resigned and fled to Florida. On 19 July the FSLN army entered Managua in triumph. The insurrection left approximately 50,000 dead with another 150,000 Nicaraguans exiled. Ortega was installed on a five-person junta to lead the country. Ortega was the chief FSLN leader on the junta. They inherited a country in ruins with debts of $1.6 billion and a devastated economy. Their first major success was literacy. Within six months they brought the national illiteracy rate down from over 50% to just under 12%. But despite early advances, disputes emerged between pro and anti Sandinista forces in the junta. Two members resigned including Violetta Chamorro who would eventually succeed Ortega and lead the country.

The military opposition to the government became known as "Contras" (short for "contrarrevolucionarios"). When Ronald Reagan assumed power in 1981 he condemned Nicaragua for its links with Cuba authorised the CIA to begin financing, arming and training rebels. The Contras operated out of camps in the neighbouring countries of Honduras and Costa Rica. Although the US Congress prohibited federal funding of the Contras in 1983, the Reagan administration began to covertly sell arms to Iran and channel the proceeds to the Contras.

In November 1984, Nicaragua called national elections; Ortega won the presidency with 63% of the vote and took formal office in January 1985. While international observers declared the election to be free and fair, opposition parties boycotted it, and it was denounced as unfair by the Reagan administration. The US continued their economic embargo crippling the country’s growth prospects. By 1987 the war with the well-armed Contras was at a stalemate. Costa Rica brokered the Esquipulas II treaty between the sides. The treaty called for a ceasefire, freedom of expression, and national elections. The elections were called for 1990.

Ortega crashed to a stunning defeat in this election. His ex-junta partner Violetta Chamorro led a centre-right coalition to win the election as impoverished voters took out their frustrations of a long and costly war on their government. To many people’s surprise, the transition of power was smooth and without violence. The Sandinistas accepted the people’s vote and gave up power peacefully. Their price of power was “the Piñata”. These were estates valued in the millions seized by Sandinista officials including Ortega himself. Ortega remained leader of the FSLN and stood again for unsuccessfully for Nicaraguan president in 1996 and 2001. In both elections, allegations of corruption related to the Piñata during his final days as president came back to haunt him.

The FSLN remains the second largest political party in the country. Current president Enrique Bolaños is stepping down after almost five years in the job. In September last year, Bolaños was threatened with impeachment by the opposition but the US threatened to cut off aid and the move was defeated. The US still has not forgiven its old enemy and has threatened to cut off aid to the country if he wins again in 2006. Adolfo Franco, USAID's adjunct director for Latin America and the Caribbean, told La Prensa (the newpaper owned by Violetta Chamorra) "we don't support any candidate in Nicaragua's electoral process, but some of Ortega's declarations worry us." Franco said Ortega might try to undermine a free trade agreement between Washington and the nations of Central America. If that happens, he added ominously, "we are going to analyse aid assigned to Nicaragua”.

Panama votes to widen canal

Voters in Panama have approved a massive expansion to the Panama Canal. The $5.25 billion dollar project will open up the canal to post-panamax shipping. The government run Panama Canal Authority expects the modernisation to complete by 2014 - the 100th anniversary of its initial opening. It will be a massive engineering project which will create 40,000 jobs in the area. The project will be financed by increasing tolls to raise more than $6bn by 2025. The canal is Panama’s primary economic earner. About 80 per cent of Panama's gross domestic product, $16 billion in 2005, is linked to canal activity.

The dream of a short cut from the Atlantic to the Pacific has inspired sailors ever since Magellan first had round the dangerous Cape Horn at the tip of South America on the maiden circumnavigation of the globe. In 1534 Charles V King of Spain suggested a canal would ease transport to from Spanish possessions in Peru. Scotland launched the farsighted but madcap Darien scheme in 1698 to colonise Panama in the hope of establishing trade with Asia. They sent a thousand settlers to settle a fort and build a canal. But the colony was short-lived due to poor agriculture and the threat of tropical disease. It wasn’t helped by an English decision to refuse help from their colony in Virginia. Darien was abandoned a year later after 700 colonists had succumbed to the inhospitable conditions. The Scottish debt incurred as a result of the scheme was a major factor in the 1707 Act of Union with England.

It took the California Gold Rush of 1849 to inspire the next Panamanian infrastructure project. A consortium of US businessmen led by William Aspinall sponsored a railway line through mountains and swamps across the isthmus. It was a massive engineering project and hugely expensive but the Panamanian Railway Company quickly made vast profits. Panama enjoyed a period of affluence and importance. Its creation also re-awoke the long held desire to build a canal from ocean to ocean. The canal-to-be would closely follow the railway line in its short but perilous journey across the continental divide. The railway was important but the canal was still the preferred long-term option so that two ships weren’t needed to complete the voyage.

The Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps (a diplomat not an engineer) imitated the pyramid builders when used forced Egyptian labour for a decade to open up the Suez Canal in 1869. Enthused by the success of Suez, he turned his attention to Panama. Because Suez is a lockless sea level canal, de Lesseps thought he could build it the same way in Panama. The plan required an 8km tunnel through the Continental Divide. But unlike Egypt, there was no ready supply of cheap labour. Disease, bankruptcy and the sheer engineering folly of building a sea-level waterway in a mountainous country caused the French operation to go bust after 13 fruitless years.

US President Theodore Roosevelt bought out the French operation and the Canal Zone in 1904 in return for helping Panama gain independence from Colombia. They first launched a program to eradicate mosquitos from the area. They painstakingly fumigated houses, drained the swamps and removed stagnant water pools to stop mosquitos from breeding. As a result, both malaria and yellow fever were eliminated. The work of doctors in Panama proved the mosquito theory as the cause of both diseases and also introduced a vaccine for yellow fever.

Finally the canal opened in August 1914 just prior to the start of World War I in Europe. The Americans built Madden Dam to assure water supply. Completed in 1935, the dam created Alajuela Lake. The US started to widen the canal to aid its World War II efforts but the project was abandoned in 1946. The issue of sovereignty became contentious in the post-war years as Panama asserted its nationalism. Panamanian student protests caused the Americans to fence in the canal zone and increase its military presence. Finally in 1977, the US and Panama signed the Torrijos-Carter Treaty (named for the countries’ presidents) to formalise the handover of the canal back to Panama. Panama finally regained control of the canal in 1999.

The canal is so successful it is now greatly overloaded. Designed to carry 80 million tons a year it carried four times that much in 2005. The canal consists of two artificial lakes, several improved and artificial channels, and three sets of locks. Only Panamax sized ships can negotiate the locks. These have a maximum length of 294m, a width of 32m and a height of 58m. Post-Panamax ships are often far larger than these restrictions. These ships must travel the costly and treacherous 36 day route around Cape Horn. As a result, the canal is missing out on the lucrative revenues from oil tankers, LNG (liquefied natural gas) carriers and bulk carriers. Driven by China’s resource boom, these ships are becoming more common on the high seas. By 2010 almost 40% of the world's fleet will be post-panamx. But Panama is not alone in its desperation to grab a bigger slice of that action.

Nicaragua has even bigger plans to cater for the super sized structures of the future. It plans to build its own $20 billion grand canal that will dwarf Panama’s project in size and scope. Like Panama, they will put the proposal to a vote and if successful it will be ready by 2019. There are massive obstacles to overcome to make this happen. Not least are serious environmental concerns on Nicaragua's tropical forests, coral reefs and indigenous villages living near the Caribbean coast. Panama too has environmental concerns over their expansion. But with 5% of the world’s trade going through the narrow isthmus, pressure to conform was always going to be too great for the nation of 2.1 million whose livelihood depends on the canal.

Mexican election result still in doubt

Mexico’s federal political system remains in chaos waiting for the partial recount of the Presidential election. The official result of the July 2 election gave a narrow victory to the conservative Felipe Calderón (pictured left) over his left-wing rival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. On 6 July 2006 the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) announced the final vote count resulting in the victory for Calderón over the PRD candidate Obrador. Calderón had won by a difference of 243,934 votes (or 0.58%)

However, under Mexican electoral law, only the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) can declare who will serve as Mexico's next president. Lopez Obrador alleged electoral fraud and has led a mass civil disobedience campaign to demand a full recount. However independent and international observers said the election was fair. The TEPJF has declared a full recount as impossible by law, and has ordered a recount of about 9% of the total votes. Meanwhile thousands of Obrador’s supporters have been demonstrating for more than a week on the streets of Mexico City. Incumbent President Vicente Fox said Thursday that he is confident the country's disputed presidential election will be resolved peacefully and Mexican democracy will emerge stronger after its greatest test yet. The new president will serve a six-year term replacing Fox who could not constitutionally stand for re-election. Vincente Fox (whose father is of Irish descent) was the first president since Francisco Madero in 1910 to be elected from an opposition party. Fox and Calderon are both from the same party the National Action Party (PAN).

Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa will be 44 years old on August 18. He has three children under ten years old. He has a law degree and a masters in economics from Mexican universities and a master of Public Administration from Kennedy Business School at Harvard. He ran for governor of the Pacific state of Michoacán de Ocampo in 1995 and was PAN party president between 1996-1999. When Fox became president, Calderón was appointed director of a national development bank and later joined the Cabinet as Energy Secretary. He left the post in 2004 after Fox indicated his preference for a different candidate to replace him. However Calderón won the battle to become the PAN presidential candidate by a comfortable margin. He was forced to deny charges of corruption from his days as bank director. Although this hurt him in the polls, he recovered sufficiently to record a narrow lead on election day.

Soon after it was clear that the "Official Count" would result with Felipe Calderón ahead, Andrés Manuel López Obrador stated that he and his party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), would fight for a "vote-by-vote" general recount. His party organised mass protests, marches, and civil disobedience which culminated in a massive rally in Mexico City's historic Plaza de la Constitución on 30 July. Estimates of the crowd at the rally range from 500,000 to 3 million. Obrador is 52 years old and comes from the southern state of Tabasco. He graduated from the most important university in Mexico, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, with a major in political and social sciences. In 1994, he ran for the governorship of his oil-rich home state, but lost to the PRI's Roberto Madrazo in a highly controversial election. The election was plagued by allegations of fraud. Then-President Ernesto Zedillo sent a committee led by lawyer Santiago Creel to investigate and investigators found irregularities at 78 percent of polling stations. Obrador recovered from this setback and he was mayor of Mexico City between 2000 and 2005. During this period he built up a major public profile which became the platform for his election campaign.

The election was also important because for the first time, Mexicans living abroad were allowed to vote by mail. However it is estimated that of the more than 11 million Mexicans living abroad, only four million have a voter identification card, a requirement that leaves out millions of potential Mexican voters, who reside in the United States illegally. Dr. Todd Eisenstadt, a visiting fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at the University of California-San Diego has claimed that only about 400,000 US votes will be cast in the 2006 election. If the recount does not change the result, Calderón will be formally proclaimed as president elect before serving for the period 1 December 2006 to 1 December 2012.