Crucial Election Today Will Test the Strength of Mexico’s Ruling Party, Opposition

A ripple of unrest swept across the northwestern state of Sonora on Saturday, the eve of nationwide elections that could signify important changes in the political direction of Mexico.

More than 30 million voters are eligible to elect a new Congress, 10 state legislatures, local officials in 14 states and governors in seven in the most important round of balloting since President Miguel de la Madrid won a six-year term in July, 1982.

In most years, such elections would rouse little interest and even less partisan enthusiasm because the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, has routinely come out on top in every balloting since its founding in 1929.

The overpowering political dominance of the PRI is such that it has never lost a gubernatorial election in half a century and, at the moment, controls 96% of municipal governments--2,282 out of 2,378.

This year, however, the right-of-center National Action Party is posing a strong challenge in at least three states that its members claim will test the willingness of the ruling party--and of President De la Madrid--to provide a political opening to a resurgent opposition.

A failure to recognize opposition victories, they insist, will undermine whatever claims Mexico has to being a democracy.

The focal point of the race is Sonora, where 43-year-old Adalberto Rosas Lopez, a former mayor of Ciudad Obregon, has waged a powerful campaign for governor under the National Action banner against Rodolfo Felix Valdes, a former member of De la Madrid’s Cabinet.

The other states where opposition gubernatorial candidates are rated as possible, albeit unlikely, winners are Nuevo Leon (Monterrey), a longtime National Action stronghold in the north, and the central state of Guanajuato.

In large measure, the opposition party has already won a major battle here by convincing its followers--as well as important sectors of the news media in Mexico and the United States--that it has a real chance to win.

Part of the suspense can be attributed to the National Action Party’s thinly veiled threats to resort to violence if the ruling party resorts to vote fraud.

“The PAN has spent 46 years avoiding violence,” said Eugenio Elorduy, an opposition leader in the border city of Mexicali. “Maybe that’s why we’ve been considered patsies for so long.”

On Saturday, Catholic Archbishop Carlos Quintero Arce of Hermosillo issued a public statement pleading “that neither passion nor violence prevail.”

The army, which has maintained an unusually high profile in recent days, trucking soldiers through the streets in several towns, was called in Saturday to remove National Action protesters at municipal election headquarters in Hermosillo and Caborca. No violence was reported at either location.

In Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas, Ariz., National Action protesters were reported blocking the international border in a similar protest. Other protests were reported Friday in Guaymas and Ciudad Obregon, the second-largest city in Sonora.

According to National Action spokesman Norberto Corella, the protests are directed at “electoral irregularities” imposed by the ruling party. In precincts where the opposition is strong, he said, the number of voting booths has been reduced to create long waiting lines on election day. Some National Action election observers have been disqualified and the electoral registry has been tampered with to create thousands of “phantom voters,” he charged.

PRI officials, led by Carlos Gamez Fimbres, the head of the state electoral commission, denied the charges and said they were part of a deliberate opposition campaign designed to embarrass the government in an election that has attracted international attention.

“Our fight is not against a party,” said Elorduy, who claims he was cheated by the PRI when he lost a race for mayor of Mexicali, ‘because the PRI is not a party as such--it is just a sort of national political employment agency. Our fight is against the whole crooked system.”