Mexico’s PRI Whips Up Passions for Victory, Whoever the Candidate

Micaela Padilla was shouting to be heard over the mariachi singer during a boisterous campaign rally Thursday night for Roberto Madrazo, presidential candidate of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party.

“I support Madrazo first because it’s my party,” she said, “and second because he’s a sincere man, a man of his word.”

The 49-year-old housekeeper neatly captured Madrazo’s problem: His party is more popular than he is.

Organizers made sure they filled all 2,000 folding chairs in Salon Mezzanine, one of the city’s biggest banquet halls. Dozens of buses ferried local supporters and party stalwarts from as far away as Ensenada and Tecate.

During the wait for the candidate’s arrival, lulls were quickly filled by the chant: “Ma-dra-zo! Ma-dra-zo!”

Singers followed, one after another. The music was loud, the cheers syncopated and by 7 p.m. the hall manager had to lock the doors because the building was full.

Half the chairs were assigned, some to party affiliates by neighborhood. There were also sections for women’s groups, youth groups, ranchers and farmers, and the sector popular, the party rank and file.

The PRI ruled Mexico for seven decades, and its members know how to stage a rally. But can they win back the presidency in 2006?

For all their work and all the campaign money spent so far -- his posters and billboards are just about everywhere -- Madrazo still places second or third in polls.

Lots of people tell pollsters they don’t trust him. Nearly 40% of Mexicans surveyed by Consulta Mitofsky say they have a negative view of Madrazo, more than twice the number who say that about either of his two competitors.

In the last few weeks, small red-and-white posters have gone up around Mexico City with the message: “Do you believe Madrazo? I don’t either.”

When Madrazo arrived at the banquet hall Thursday, he was trapped in a slow-moving scrum of TV and radio reporters and peppered with questions.

What about the polls? How did you pay for all your condominiums? Isn’t the party split over your candidacy?

It is an especially unfortunate circumstance for the 53-year-old marathoner who has spent three years rebuilding what is still the nation’s largest political party. Although trained as a lawyer and urban planner, Madrazo, the son of a famous PRI politician, has spent his life in politics.

As party president until September, Madrazo was credited with helping the PRI shrug off the loss of the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox and the National Action Party, or PAN. Under Madrazo, the PRI has won back a governorship, 13 congressional seats and a host of local offices around Mexico, including Tijuana’s mayoralty.

With Madrazo’s support, Jorge Hank Rhon now runs this city, elected last year partly on the premise that someone so rich wouldn’t bother looting the municipal treasury.

Besides his work at City Hall, Rhon operates a multimillion-dollar enterprise comprising off-track betting parlors, hotels and shopping centers. He is said to be worth half a billion dollars, and Washington suspected his family of laundering drug money.

The mayor’s late father, Carlos Hank Gonzalez, had been Madrazo’s political mentor.

Madrazo and Rhon took center stage at the rally. Their victory retrieving Tijuana from its 15-year rule by the PAN symbolized the PRI’s resurgence, Madrazo said in his speech.

Today, Tijuana, he said. Tomorrow, the country.

Madrazo cast himself to the left of National Action Party candidate Felipe Calderon and to the right of the current front-runner, Democratic Revolution Party candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City.

“The PRI is neither for populism nor neoliberalism,” he said, prowling the stage with a wireless microphone like a motivational speaker. Madrazo holds a black belt in karate and moves with an athlete’s grace.

The neoliberalism of Calderon and his party has made Mexicans poorer, he said, and the populism of Lopez Obrador is an empty promise.

What exactly he is for, other than a more prosperous Mexico, is less clear.

Madrazo is campaigning, essentially, on his party’s ability to get things done -- a dig at the Fox administration, whose reform agenda was largely blocked by the PRI majority in Congress.

The PRI leans to the practical rather than the ideological. Your neighborhood needs a paved road or a school or a drainage ditch? OK, but remember us come election time.

The PRI prospered through the years with its carrot-and-stick patronage system, and some Mexicans hope it returns. The broad prosperity for the border region promised by the North American Free Trade Agreement and Fox’s free-market exhortations never came.

In her section in the back, PRI organizer Edith Marin corralled about 300 people from half a dozen neighborhoods in the southeastern part of the city. Some of her charges weren’t quite sure what to say about Madrazo and asked that she speak for them.

Marin culled Micaela Padilla from the group. “We need hope and security for our families,” said Padilla, who crosses the border to clean houses. Then she seemed stuck for a moment.

Sergio Lopez, another PRI organizer, chimed in, and everyone nodded in agreement. “He’s our candidate,” Lopez said. “So we came here to support him.”

Researchers Cecilia Sanchez and Carlos Martinez in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.