The popular consultation of Mexico to investigate former presidents achieves less than 8% of the participation

The popular consultation in Mexico to investigate five former presidents will not go ahead after reaching less than 8% of the turnout at the polls.

Despite the fact that almost 90% of voters voted yes, the initiative, promoted by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, needed at least 40% of citizen participation to be binding.

According to a first bulletin from the National Electoral Institute, based on a quick count,

participation in the popular consultation was between 7.07% and 7.7%

, announced on Sunday night Lorenzo Córdova, president of the organization.

Between 89.36% and 96.28% voted in favor of “yes”, from 1.38% to 1.58% voted for “no”, and between 2.19% and 9.21% of the votes were annulled, Córdova said in a speech that was broadcast online.

The quick count was carried out at 1,830 polling stations.

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More than 93 million Mexicans were called to the polls to vote in the popular consultation called by the president, the first to be held at the federal level in the history of Mexico, and it was necessary that some 37.5 million participated for it to be binding.

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The president of the INE pointed out that the final results will be ready in the course of Monday, when the calculation of the 57,070 minutes is concluded.

The arrival of people to the polling stations passed by dropper, unlike the long lines that were registered in the midterm elections on June 6, which had a historical participation of 53%.

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During the day, the official National Regeneration Movement (Morena), promoter of the process, and the INE, in charge of organizing and disseminating the consultation, exchanged reproaches.

A man participates in the popular consultation on the trials of former Mexican presidents in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Sunday, August 1, 2021. EFE / Francisco Guasco

The Morena leader said that the electoral authority "is not up to par" and criticized that there were only 57,000 tables, a third of those in the last elections.

Mario Delgado, president of the Morena party, dismissed the results, and stated on Twitter that with the triumph of "yes" begins "a new stage against impunity in our country where the victims will be at the center." people's justice greatly exceeded the NO ”, he added.

The president of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova, denounced the "lies" of the ruling party, and recalled that if there were no more tables it is because Congress, with a majority of Morena, did not give him more resources.

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The leader of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, Alejandro Moreno, considered that the consultation was a "failure" and said, in his account of the same social network, that the results showed that "Mexicans are fed up with a government that hides in the past so as not to face the present ”.

"It is time for the Morena government to take its role seriously," Moreno said.

López Obrador has spent the first three years of his government "playing campaigning," he said.

Mexico has six living former presidents, the oldest of them Luis Echeverría, 99.

The statute of limitations has expired for many of the abuses they are accused of having committed, most of which involve massive corruption, bribery, waste of government money and criminal economic mismanagement.

Initially, the consultation proposed to prosecute former presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (governor with the PRI between 1988 and 1994), Ernesto Zedillo (PRI; 1994-2000), Vicente Fox (2000-2006), Felipe Calderón (PAN; 2006 -2012) and Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI; 2012-2018) for corruption, electoral fraud and the war against drug trafficking, among other issues.

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But the Supreme Court modified the question to preserve the presumption of innocence and left a very open statement asking Mexicans the following: “Do you agree or not that the pertinent actions be carried out in accordance with the constitutional and legal framework, to undertake a process of clarification of the political decisions taken in the past years by political actors, aimed at guaranteeing justice and the rights of possible victims? ”.

López Obrador, who is on tour outside the capital, called and promoted the consultation, but did not vote because he has assured that his "strength is not revenge."

With information from EFE and AP.