By Paige Bierma

CHILPANCINGO, MEXICO -- The new governor of strife-torn Guerrero state was forced to take his oath in a rented movie theater Thursday after leftist opponents surrounded the state house.

Riot police armed with tear gas, shields and clubs were able to avoid clashes and keep thousands of opposition supporters -- who say the Feb. 7 gubernatorial elections here were wracked by fraud -- outside of the theater grounds. Chilpancingo, the state capital, is about 130 miles southwest of Mexico City.

"Democracy has triumphed," said René Juárez Cisneros, Guerrero's new governor and a member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. "And with it the people, legality and peace [also triumph]," he told a theater full of ruling party politicians.

But some 5,000 supporters of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, gathered outside the theater said just the opposite: that Juárez Cisneros had beat their candidate, Senator Félix Salgado Macedonio, through outright fraud and vote buying.

"This governor has been imposed on the people by fraud, and now by force," Salgado said Thursday morning when he and his supporters arrived at police barricades.

Salgado had earlier vowed to prevent Juárez from taking office Thursday, but once at the barricades told his supporters to avoid clashing with the police. "We're not going to fight against you. Our struggle is against the corrupt government and, above all, against the usurper René Juárez Cisneros."

The PRD lost an appeal to annul the controversial elections to the Federal Electoral Tribunal. The court ruled Tuesday that while there had been fraud during the elections, it was not sufficient to change the result.

The U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for Guerrero last Wednesday, urging U.S. tourists not to visit Guerrero (home to Acapulco) because of expected violence in Chilpancingo and possible backlash to the inauguration from leftist guerrilla groups in Guerrero's rural areas.

But by Thursday afternoon, both PRD demonstrators and PRI supporters were on their way back home, riot police had set down their shields to take naps in the shade, and there had been no word of guerrilla activity in the mountains.

Guerrilla activity has been sporadic in Guerrero, one of Mexico's poorest states, over the past few years. The Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, first surfaced in June 1995 when the masked rebels appeared at a ceremony marking the one-year anniversary of the massacre of 17 unarmed peasants who were protesting against political repression in Aguas Blancas.

That massacre by state police forced the resignation of then-governor Rubén Figueroa, who sat in the audience at Juárez' inauguration Thursday.

Guerrero has been governed by the PRI for the last 70 years. Electoral reforms enacted over the last decade have made elections cleaner and allowed opposition parties to win the governorships of 10 of Mexico's 32 states.

Federal Electoral Tribunal officials said Tuesday that the PRD did not present enough evidence to prove all of its allegations of fraud, and added that many of the kinds of "vote buying" techniques the PRD had denounced -- such as PRI government officials handing out free food and fertilizer prior to the elections -- were in fact legal.

Nevertheless, the tribunal did annul thousands of Guerrero votes suspected to have been fraudulent, which narrowed Juárez's victory margin considerably in what was already a close election. At final count, Juárez received 415,863 votes compared to Salgado's 401,636.

Salgado and his supporters marched back to the state house Thursday afternoon, after Juárez had been sworn in, where they decided they would refuse to pay their taxes, water or electric bills until Juárez would step down.

"I know that Felix won," said Aurelio Toba, a 24-year-old campesino from Rancho Nuevo, a remote town in the mountains of Guerrero. The Mixtec Indian, one of the few from his town who spoke Spanish, had been camped out in front of the Chilpancingo state house for five days. "We came to see that he's put in there," he said, pointing to the state offices.

Hundreds of PRI supporters also camped out in Chilpancingo on Wednesday night, inside the movie theater grounds. They waved white flags and chanted PRI slogans when Juárez emerged after being sworn in Thursday.

"We came to support our new governor," said 68-year-old corn farmer Ranulfo Beltrán Palacios, from the town of San Miguel Totolapán. "I have always voted for the PRI because it is the party that does the best by the campesinos."

Beltrán and his neighbor, Bolívar Mendoza Campusano, went on to say how the PRI had given them free fertilizers, insecticides and how they had brought electricity and phone lines to their town in the Tierra Caliente region of Guerrero state.

"The PRD is telling pure lies," Mendoza said. "The PRI won fair and square.