Leftist warns of instability in Mexico vote wrangle

Mexican leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador warned on Wednesday the country's stability was at stake as a political crisis brewed over the bitterly contested presidential election.
Preliminary results from Sunday's vote showed Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, less than a percentage point behind conservative rival Felipe Calderon. The leftist, who has a long history of launching street protests, called on electoral authorities to be thorough in a recount of votes that began on Wednesday.
"The stability of the country is at stake," he told a news conference. "This deserves taking time over, it will require a detailed revision polling station by polling station." The stock index plunged 3.53 percent and the peso also fell in early trade because of the political tension.
Mexico faces two months of legal wrangling over the results, and the threat of street protests has raised fears of unrest in a young democracy that is key to US interests over immigration, drug smuggling and security.
Lopez Obrador says the election count was riddled with irregularities. He may brings hundreds of thousands of supporters onto the streets to support his cause, aides said on Tuesday.
Left-wing militants remember a 1988 election when fraud almost certainly robbed their candidate of victory. Lopez Obrador says 3 million votes were not accounted for and he refused to accept the preliminary numbers.
Mexico's top election official, Luis Carlos Ugalde, said those votes totalled 2.58 million and were discounted at first because of errors made filling in ballots.
But his Federal Electoral Institute then said the votes would be included in the final count, due later this week, and they cut Calderon's advantage from about 400,000 votes to less than 260,000, a lead of just 0.6 percentage points.
Calderon, a hard-nosed former energy minister, insists the preliminary returns are clear enough and his National Action Party is pushing electoral authorities to declare him winner.
Educated at Harvard, Calderon would be an ally of the United States in Latin America, where left-wing leaders critical of Washington have taken power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela in recent years.
Mexico won full democracy just six years ago, when voters threw out the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, after 71 years of single-party rule.
Lopez Obrador, 52, promises to renegotiate part of the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada to stop imports of cheap US corn and beans as of 2008.