a crime was committed by three votes to one. Media coverage of the preliminary vote was small, because of the impending demise of Pope John Paul II (he died the next day). This prompted López Obrador to express (hours before the Pope died) his concerns about what he saw as minimal coverage of his desafuero process, but "hours and hours" of special coverage on the Pope's health condition. "(The media only said that) López Obrador lost three to one, as if it were a soccer match", he said, expressing his fears of a return to a time when the media, especially television, were subordinated to the government. On April 7, 2005, López Obrador went to the Chamber of Deputies to present his case. Attendance, when the session began, was reported to be 488 out of 500 deputies, but apparently one of the deputies arrived too late to vote. After a long session where AMLO accused President Fox of being behind the process, the Chamber of Deputies voted by 360 to 127 (with two abstentions) to lift AMLO's constitutional immunity against prosecution. A secondary law states that in cases like this, he is immediately dismissed from his office. The local assembly of representatives (the Federal District has no Congress as its status is somewhere between a state and a county), with a majority of PRD members (AMLO's party) refused to acknowledge the validity of this process. This was relevant to the city's future, as they were the ones legally entitled to name AMLO's successor. Political context The desafuero is both a legal and a political process (it is the Chamber of Deputies, an eminently political body, that decides the outcome) and as such, political considerations played at least as great a role as legal considerations in deciding López Obrador's fate. There were political reactions both against and in favour of the process from early 2004, climaxing in April 2005 when López Obrador saw his constitutional immunity lifted. General political context The desafuero process started and gathered momentum during the second half of the Vicente Fox presidency, characterised by a growing sense of power vacuum as Fox was increasingly perceived by Mexican society and political actors as a "lame duck" incapable of pushing the ambitious reform agenda that swept him into power in 2000. The Fox presidency was also besieged by cabinet defections and the growing popularity of López Obrador, who was