Three Mexico City buildings bombed

At least four homemade bombs exploded shortly after midnight Monday at the nation’s electoral tribunal building, a political party headquarters and a bank. A fifth bomb at another bank was disabled by police, and a sixth failed to explode.

No one was injured, but the attacks in Mexico City appeared to signal a new tactic in the nation’s simmering civil unrest, fomented by a leftist movement angry over July’s disputed presidential election, pervasive poverty and political corruption.

The bombs link three of the main targets of the country’s mobilized left: the electoral apparatus, the former ruling party and foreign-owned banks.

An Internet message signed by five small radical groups took responsibility for the bombs. Police said little was known about the organizations, except for the Popular Revolutionary Army, a longtime guerrilla group.

“We assume full responsibility for these acts,” the message said.

The groups demanded the ouster of Oaxaca state Gov. Ulises Ruiz, the removal of federal police from Oaxaca and the release of people arrested in street demonstrations this year in San Salvador Atenco, near Mexico City.

Police said they received two calls warning of the bombs just after midnight.

The first two bombs exploded at 12:14 a.m. outside an auditorium in the sprawling downtown headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Protesters have criticized party leaders for not persuading Ruiz to step down after five months of strikes, blockades and street violence in the city of Oaxaca, the state capital.

Minutes later, an explosion struck the rear of the Federal Electoral Tribunal building, in the city’s south end.

The tribunal rejected demands by presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for a national recount in the July election, and upheld the razor-slim victory of free-market candidate Felipe Calderon.

At 12:30 a.m., a bomb exploded at a branch of Canadian-owned Scotiabank, about four miles from the tribunal building blast.

Mexico’s foreign-owned banks are among the country’s most reviled businesses. They are seen as having profited through huge fees and government help during the transition to an open economy, which left many in the country languishing in poverty.

“Those responsible for the social and political violence in our country are the people with power and money who have unleashed a neo-liberal dirty war against the Mexican people,” the message from the radical groups said.

Authorities displayed an unexploded bomb, a wooden box that held about 11 pounds of ammonium nitrate and small amounts of aluminum powder and an absorbent gel. On the side, painted in white capital letters, were the words peligro, bomba. Danger, bomb.

Investigators initially had no idea who planted the bombs. But given the large number of protests this year, there were plenty of potential suspects.

In Oaxaca, a teachers strike that began in the spring grew into a takeover of the city’s central plaza until thousands of federal police officers retook the public square Oct. 29.

“We had nothing to do with those bombs,” Oaxaca protest leader Flavio Sosa said in a radio interview. “Our fight is a peaceful one.”

Lopez Obrador is planning a protest Nov. 20 in which he will be named Mexico’s “legitimate president,” a made-up title for an ersatz inauguration that he hopes will energize his opposition movement.

After losing the election by less than a percentage point, Lopez Obrador directed thousands of protesters in a two-month takeover of Mexico City’s main boulevard before sending everyone home in September.

His followers are angry at the tribunal, whose judges dismissed Lopez Obrador’s claim that the election was fixed in favor of Calderon.

“We had nothing to do with the acts that occurred last night,” said Cesar Yanez, a spokesman for Lopez Obrador’s so-called parallel government.

The president of Lopez Obrador’s Democratic Revolution Party also denied any connection to the bombings, pointing instead to conservatives.

“We demand a full investigation because we suspect this attack was planned by the Mexican right,” Leonel Cota said.

Although investors have largely shrugged off the political unrest in Mexico, analysts said that Monday’s explosions illustrated the difficulties Calderon could face in building a consensus to pass economic policies favored by businesses and Wall Street.

Although he prefers to be remembered as the leader who ushered in democracy, Mexican President Vicente Fox will leave behind a polarized country when he steps down Dec. 1, said Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez, a political analyst at Mexico’s Autonomous Institute of Technology.

“There are serious challenges to democracy from the left and from the right,” Silva-Herzog said. “Calderon is inheriting a complicated scenario.”

Fox said Monday that he would guarantee the public’s safety.

Extra security was ordered for some government offices, foreign embassies and Calderon’s offices.

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sam.enriquez@latimes.com

Times staff writer Marla Dickerson and Carlos Martinez and Cecilia Sanchez of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.