Miamil Herald: 08.38.06 MEXICO
Mexico: Leftist wins Chiapas race
Official results gave the governor's race to a leftist candidate in Mexico's Chiapas state. However, the results will be challenged.
By MANUEL DE LA CRUZ
Associated Press
TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, Mexico - A leftist candidate won the governor's race in Mexico's volatile Chiapas state, edging out a hopeful backed by President Vicente Fox's party by about 6,300 votes, electoral officials said Sunday.
Following a tense, two-hour session, Chiapas' electoral council announced the official results from the Aug. 20 election, giving Juan Sabines of the Democratic Revolution Party 553,270 votes, compared to 546,988 for Jose Antonio Aguilar of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which controlled Mexico's presidency from 1929 until 2000.
''I call for unity in Chiapas and forgetting old conflicts,'' Sabines said.
PRI officials said they would challenge the results first in state electoral courts and then before the Federal Electoral Tribunal, the country's highest legal authority in electoral matters.
''We are completely certain we can overturn the announcement of Juan Sabines as governor-elect,'' said Roberto Dominquez, the party's representative to the state electoral council. ``We are confident that the courts will annul this election given all the challenges and documentation of irregularities.''
Locatoin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiapas#Some_Landmarks In 1868 there was an armed native rebellion, led by the Tzotzil Maya as well as Tzeltal, Tojolabal, and Ch'ol; it almost succeeded in taking San Cristóbal, then the state capital, before it was suppressed by the Mexican army.
“After the initial seizure of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, the Mexican army kept the Zapatistas bottled up in their rural strongholds. Sporadic armed repression by paramilitaries that appears to have been funded by local landowners, and with which elements in the federal government may have sympathized, followed. There was a series of massacres,most notably in 1997 in Acteal, where refugees from indigenous communities, mainly women and children, were killed, after a National Peace Accord had been signed.”