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In July 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City and a well-respected figure in the Mexican Popular Left party, ran for president against Felipe Calderón, a candidate fielded by the nation's Conservative party, and after the initial vote count was announced, Calderón scored an upset victory by a margin of less than one percent of all votes cast. Much of the Mexican media made no secret of their favoritism towards Calderón and treated his victory as a fait accompli, but Leftists demanded a recount, and organized a series of massive, peaceful protests in Mexico City for forty-five days in a row. When Mexico's press and broadcast news services declined to cover the protests or the drive for a recount, filmmakers Benjamín López Alcántara and Ernesto Lehn created XHPG, an underground television outlet that gave the Left an opportunity to speak for themselves and express their dissatisfaction with the failure of the Mexican government to address their concerns. XHPG is a documentary drawn from the material Alcántara and Lehn shot for their rebel broadcasts; the film was screened in competition at the 2007 Hot Docs International Film Festival.