Massive protests snarl Mexico City

? Supporters of Mexico’s leftist presidential candidate brought rush-hour traffic to a crawl Monday, causing the stock market to drop and forcing office workers dressed in business suits and high heels to hike for miles to work.

The sprawling tent cities in the financial heart of the Mexican capital were another sign that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his supporters won’t accept anything less than victory from the top electoral court.

The tribunal is weighing allegations that fraud gave ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon a slight advantage in the July 2 election.

It has until Sept. 6 to declare a president-elect or annul the elections.

Lopez Obrador is demanding a vote-for-vote recount and has vowed to block the city center until the Federal Electoral Tribunal rules on his request.

Meanwhile, Mexican stocks closed 0.8 percent lower, in part because the protests made investors nervous.

“We’ll stay here for as long as it takes, but we’re not going to let them impose a president on us,” said farmer Anacleto Garcia Martinez, 53, as he warmed his coffee on a wood-burning brazier set up beneath a tarp strung from the wrought-iron gate leading to Chapultepec Park.

The normally busy Reforma avenue of Mexico City is empty of traffic as resistance

With his broad mustache and a blanket hung over his shoulders, he resembled his ancestors, farmers-turned-soldiers in Mexico’s 1910 revolution.

“We’ve got revolutionary blood,” said fellow farmer Angel Campirano, 49, of the city’s rural Milpa Alta district. “Farmers are being forced to sell off their land, and we are defending the land.”

But modern Mexico – which now depends more on commerce, services and manufacturing than on agriculture – has little patience with such sentiments.

Salesman Alejandro Lara, 33, walked two miles up Mexico City’s swank Reforma Avenue, blocked by protesters, before he began shouting.

“I’m either going to have to get up at 5 a.m. every day, or ask for vacations,” Lara said angrily. “It’s too bad, because I supported Lopez Obrador. But now, after this, I wouldn’t want to have him governing us. He scares me.”

Cesar Nava, a spokesman for Calderon, called on Mayor Alejandro Encinas to reopen the streets to traffic, contending Lopez Obrador’s leftist Democratic Revolution Party – of which Encinas is a member – had “kidnapped” the city.

“What they’re doing is kidnapping Mexico City,” Nava told reporters. “We see that as an unacceptable, partisan act and absolutely contemptuous of democracy.”

“The mayor up to now has been an accomplice to the flagrant breaking of the law. We hope he changes his behavior and starts acting like a mayor,” Nava said.