Madrazo Learning a Lesson from La Maestra

Elba Esther Gordillo is threatening to upstage the presidential candidates with a campaign role of her own -- that of a woman scorned.

Her political betrayal by candidate Roberto Madrazo has thrown a wrench into his campaign and threatens to upend the calculus of next year’s presidential election as Gordillo and her powerful teachers union shop for a new champion.

The 60-year-old Gordillo lives in a penthouse, wears designer clothes and has the stretched-smooth complexion of a woman of means. But the longtime union leader also has no problem baring her knuckles: In a radio broadcast with Madrazo last month, she called him a liar, a snake and a seducer.

“In what do you believe, Elba?” Madrazo asked the former schoolteacher who three years ago helped him take control of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

“In Mexico,” she said. “Sorry, you’re not Mexico. You’re the shame of Mexico.”

No one expected the presidential campaign season to begin quite this way.

But for Gordillo, it is just the latest chapter in a rags-to-riches life that is told and retold like the story line of a Mexican soap opera -- starring the woman whom Madrazo and everyone else respectfully calls La Maestra.

As the PRI’s secretary-general, Gordillo was Madrazo’s second in command and next in line to lead the party when Madrazo stepped down this summer to begin his run for president.

She once had visions of them returning Mexico to the PRI, which had held the presidency for 71 years -- until the victory of President Vicente Fox and the National Action Party in 2000.

But Gordillo says Madrazo plotted to deny her the PRI presidency, and now she seems bent on teaching her former ally that it doesn’t pay to double-cross one of Mexico’s most powerful women.

Gordillo holds considerable influence over the 1.4 million men and women who make up the national teachers union. Even though she has not been the union’s formal leader since 1994, many teachers owe their jobs, and loyalties, to Gordillo and her handpicked union lieutenants.

In the small towns and villages where the PRI is strongest, teachers are revered and their opinions carry weight. If Madrazo wants to spend the next six years in Los Pinos, Mexico’s White House, he’ll need their support.

But there are few prospects for reconciliation.

PRI leaders suspended Gordillo’s party status after she lambasted Madrazo, and now they’re considering her expulsion.

In retaliation, Gordillo met last month behind closed doors with more than 200 union members who hold elected office, presumably to talk about whether they should bolt from the PRI. Afterward, they said they decided not to back Madrazo.

With its deep pockets and nationwide political machine, the PRI started this year with a grand strategy for winning back the presidency in 2006: sideline Mexico City’s popular leftist mayor and consolidate party loyalty.

The plan collapsed almost immediately.

Influential PRI leaders in January launched a splinter group known as “Everybody United Against Madrazo.” And a million protesters in the spring shielded former Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador from a politically driven prosecution.

Madrazo has since spent millions on TV and billboard ads to shore up a spot behind front-runner Lopez Obrador, who quit as mayor in July to campaign.

Closing in on Madrazo from third place -- or already in second place, according to one poll -- is PAN candidate Felipe Calderon, who hopes for Gordillo’s support. Transcripts of a bugged phone call between them, which was leaked to the Reforma newspaper, suggests she may back him.

It would be sweet revenge. Madrazo two years ago yanked Gordillo from her post as the PRI’s leader in the lower house because she had supported fiscal reform proposals by Fox and the PAN.

Madrazo, the son of a famous PRI governor, has been dogged at campaign stops this fall by jeering crowds often throwing eggs. He thought he could push aside La Maestra, pundits here say, which makes him a very poor student of history.

Gordillo was born poor in Chiapas and, after her father died, she began teaching peasants to read and write while she was 15. She married a sickly high school teacher and gave up one of her kidneys to save him. But he died, leaving her at 18 with a baby daughter and a tough road ahead.

The young teacher moved to Mexico City to work and her outspoken union activities caught the attention of Carlos Jonguitud Barrios, who was head of the national teachers union. He took her under his wing -- some say romantically -- and she moved up the ranks.

“That I was or was not his lover ... I neither deny or confirm,” Gordillo told the Wall Street Journal in 2003. “ ... Even if it were to be true, nobody can say that made me Elba Esther.”

No, it was the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion, which, with more than 1 million members, is the largest union in Mexico.

The teachers union holds tremendous power in Mexico because it decides where its members work, said George W. Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. The union also can dole out supplemental teaching jobs or ease the way for government assistance.

“Say you’re starting a family and would like access to affordable housing, which is available through state agencies. The union can make sure your name is on the list and is high enough on the list,” Grayson said. “But you have to play ball when they collect extra union dues, or when they have a rally, or when it’s time to vote for the official slate.”

Gordillo learned to work the union levers under Jonguitud and then seized control from her mentor in 1989, with the help of then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. She stepped down as head of the union in 1994 but still decides much of its politics.

Legend of Gordillo’s strong-arm tactics swelled three years ago when union opponents accused her of ordering the fatal shooting of a dissident teacher in 1981, while she was serving her first term as a deputy in Mexico’s lower house.

Her accusers also told government investigators that she allegedly used union money to buy properties worth millions of dollars. Gordillo, who denied any wrongdoing during her testimony, told reporters that she inherited her money from a grandfather.

Prosecutors closed their investigation in May 2003 for lack of evidence, and Gordillo was soon on top again. She returned in the fall of that year as an elected deputy and leader of the PRI delegation in the lower house. Gordillo was the PRI’s secretary-general and was to be its president when Madrazo quit to campaign.

But Gordillo’s social and political ties to Fox drove a wedge between her and Madrazo.

Fox had proposed broadening taxes on a variety of goods, including food and medicine, to shore up government revenue because income tax evasion is so common.

But the PRI saw any success by Fox as hurting its chances of recapturing the presidency. Madrazo supporters ousted Gordillo from her leadership role in December 2003, and the fiscal reform proposals died.

Gordillo resigned from the Chamber of Deputies a few months later, accusing Madrazo and the PRI of putting their political ambitions ahead of the country’s future.

Health problems sidelined Gordillo in the months that followed, but she returned to the spotlight this spring. Her split with Madrazo was made final after meetings with the PRI faction Everybody United Against Madrazo.

Gordillo was accused by PRI loyalists of cozying up to the rival group’s candidate, former Mexico state Gov. Arturo Montiel. But Montiel’s challenge to Madrazo lasted only three months. He dropped his candidacy in October, just weeks before the PRI’s first nationwide primary.

Montiel blamed Madrazo for planting bogus media reports that prosecutors were investigating the source of his family’s million-dollar bank accounts and luxury homes.

Madrazo easily won the Nov. 13 primary, and two days later he was the featured guest on Joaquin Lopez Doriga’s afternoon radio talk show.

But Madrazo was quickly upstaged by one listener, Elba Esther Gordillo, who phoned the show twice -- she hung up angry the first time -- to give Madrazo a public scolding that is still echoing here.

Times researchers Carlos Martinez and Cecilia Sanchez contributed to this report.