Voters in Mexico are casting ballots to choose their next president, in
an election that is expected to return to power a party that ruled for
decades.
Opinion polls ahead of Sunday's vote showed Enrique Pena Nieto -
candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI - heading
for a landslide victory.
The PRI ruled Mexico for 71 years until 2000, with a mix of corruption,
electoral fraud and repression that Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas
Llosa once called "the perfect dictatorship." But the party has been
bolstered recently by voter fatigue due to economic stagnation and a
wave of lawlessness that have plagued Mexico under the conservative
National Action Party, or PAN.
A large part of that lawlessness has stemmed from the country's drug
violence. Since President Felipe Calderon deployed the military against
Mexico's drug cartels in 2006, more than 50,000 people have been killed.
The
candidate in second place in opinion polls is leftist Andres Manuel
Lopez Obrador, who lost the 2006 race by half a point to President
Calderon and claimed fraud, leading massive protests in the capital for
weeks.
Trailing is PAN candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota who hopes to become the
country's first female president.
The three candidates signed an agreement Thursday, in which they pledged
to accept the results of Sunday's presidential election. The agreement
also called on Mexicans to respect the result of the election, despite
political disagreements.
