Desafuero of Andrés Manuel López Obrador

The desafuero was supported by the then-ruling PAN, the federal government headed by then-President Vicente Fox, and the PRI; it was opposed by the PRD (the party in which López Obrador was affiliated) and left-wing politicians.

After a massive rally in support of López Obrador took place in Mexico City on April 24, 2005, with an attendance exceeding one million people (at the time, the biggest political demonstration in recent Mexican history),[1] and near unanimous condemnation from the foreign media towards the process,[2][3] President Fox decided to stop the judicial process against López Obrador.

This privilege is usually confused with the freedom of speech protection granted to members of congress by the 61st article, known as fuero (from Latin forum), the process to strip it is known as desafuero.

On November 9, 2000, Rosario Robles, his predecessor, expropriated a patch of land from a larger property called "El Encino", in Santa Fe, Cuajimalpa, to build an access road for a private hospital.

By August, the judge found the works continued, so he requested the federal attorney general to make an inquiry and take the necessary steps to bring him into compliance.

He would be formally prosecuted in a matter of days after losing his immunity; in that case he would have had to be cleared of all charges before January 15, 2006, if he wished to run for the presidency (although the law allows candidate changes until May).

López Obrador stated several times he would forgo all legal means available to him to remain free until a verdict is given, going to prison when the prosecution starts and campaigning from there.

As part of his campaign before the Chamber of Deputies' vote, he organized mass rallies in public places to pressure the vote in his favor and doing media interviews comparing his process with those held against Mexican revolutionary Francisco I. Madero or U.S. civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., insisting it was a conspiracy masterminded by former President Salinas and President Fox.

Media coverage of the preliminary vote was small, because of the impending demise of Pope John Paul II (he died the next day).

The local assembly of representatives (the Federal District had no Congress as its status was somewhere between a state and a county), with a majority of PRD members (AMLO's party) refused to acknowledge the validity of this process.

The Fox presidency was also besieged by cabinet defections and the growing popularity of López Obrador, who was running significantly ahead of all other likely candidates in all presidential election polls and seemed to be immune to political scandals involving his inner circle.

To others, however, this argument rang hollow in view of the lack of prosecution of several multimillion-dollar financial scandals involving prominent members of the PRI and, to a lesser extent, the PAN.

Predictably, arguments against the desafuero came, at least at the start, from López Obrador's Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and other members and militants of the Mexican political left.

López Obrador's media strategy was to contrast his prosecution with that of killings attributed to previous governments (1968, 1971) and financial scandals (1994-1995) where almost no convictions were made (but heavy fines applied in some of the latter), and emphasizing his status as the leader in the polls.

He also compared himself with Francisco I. Madero, a political candidate in 1910 who was imprisoned by dictator Porfirio Díaz and eventually became leader of the Mexican Revolution and the next president.

In his eight-minute speech to the nation, he called AMLO "Head of Government", forgetting controversies about whether he was sacked from office or not, and placed great emphasis on the importance of having suspicion-free elections in 2006.

On May 4, the Attorney General's office announced they would drop contempt charges against AMLO on a technicality: they declared he was guilty, but his unique post as Head of Government (neither governor nor mayor) made it unclear a penalty for his crime existed due to the wording of the relevant article.