Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican leftist leader and two-time presidential candidate, checked into a Mexico City hospital on Tuesday morning with heart problems. Aides told ADNPolitico.com that the 60-year-old known as "El Peje" had been hospitalized for high blood pressure but that he is in good health. "With regard to the speculations as to the health of AMLO," wrote Ricardo Monreal, a former coordinator of López Obrador's presidential campaign, on Twitter. "We can confirm that he is fine. More information will be given later."
After rising to fame in 1996 as one of the leaders of an indigenous group who blocked access to a petroleum well in the state of Tabasco - a protest which was broken up by the military - López Obrador twice ran for the presidency of Mexico. In 2006, he lost to Felipe Calderón by just 0.56 percent of the votes, and never conceded the election during the six years in which Calderón was in office. He also ran in the 2012 elections, which he lost by 6.62 percent of the vote to Enrique Peña Nieto, the current president of Mexico. He denounced those results as fraudulent as well, calling them "dirty, unfair and plagued by irregularities".
"El Peje" - a nickname derived from pejelagarto or freshwater gar, a fish common in his native state of Tabasco - has since left the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Mexico's biggest leftist party, to head the coalition known as the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), which is in the process of becoming a political party. The national president of the PRD, Jesús Zambrano, said during the handing-in of signatures gathered to carry out a referendum on a planned reform of Mexico's energy industry - including a constitutional amendment to allow foreign oil firms to exploit Mexican petroleum in shared-risk contracts - that he hoped López Obrador was in good health.
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