Mexico’s Ruling PRI Can’t Win for Losing

The 1985 elections in Mexico are going to be remembered, but not for the reason many people expected before the voting began.

During the campaign leading up to Sunday’s voting for 400 congressional seats, seven governorships and numerous local offices, some observers were predicting that the powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) would suffer its first major losses ever. Opinion polls indicated that gubernatorial candidates of the rival National Action Party (PAN) had a chance to win in three states, including this rugged desert on the Arizona border.

The colorful PAN campaign here in Sonora fed those expectations. Adalberto Rosas Lopez, a popular former mayor of Ciudad Obregon, the state’s second-largest city, drew large, enthusiastic crowds and got loud cheers whenever he reminded Sonorans of their reputation for being the toughest, most independent people in Mexico. His PRI opponent, Rodolfo Felix Valdes, a colorless career bureaucrat, could not have been more different. And while the crowds for PRI rallies were much larger, they were lifeless by comparison. It looked and sounded like a real contest.

But the PRI didn’t lose in Sonora, or anywhere else it had seemed vulnerable. Felix Valdes won in a 3-1 landslide, according to early claims by PRI officials. The final results will not be announced until Sunday, but no one, even in the PAN, doubts that the PRI can make its victory claims hold up. Such an outcome is no surprise to anyone familiar with Mexico’s tightly controlled political system, under which the PRI has not lost a major election since it was founded 56 years ago.

For an off-year election, the amount of outside attention was remarkable. In part, this was because of the vigor of the PAN’s challenge to the political Establishment, and how that might affect the issues that have put Mexico in the world spotlight in recent years.

Mexico is still struggling with one of the largest debts in the underdeveloped world ($90 billion), a 40% rate of unemployment and underemployment, and a peso that has fallen in value from 40 per dollar in 1982 to 300 per dollar today.

The continuing crisis in Central America also contributes to U.S. concern about Mexico. Our southern neighbor is, after all, the last domino in President Reagan’s scare scenario that envisions communism creeping from Nicaragua and El Salvador toward San Diego and El Paso. Worried that Reagan’s heavy-handed policies in the region are prolonging the civil wars there, Mexican diplomats have led efforts to negotiate a peace treaty for the five Central American countries.

All these issues were skillfully seized on by PAN spokesmen during the campaign. They stirred the interest of visiting reporters by stressing voter discontent caused by the slumping economy, hinting of possible violence if there were any electoral fraud, and asking rhetorically how Mexico could promote democracy in Central America when it could not guarantee fair elections to its own people.

That question is a hard one for Mexican government leaders to answer, and Sunday’s outcome will not make it any easier for them.

The PRI political machine went into high gear Sunday and found various ways to win. Some were legitimate efforts to mobilize the many voters who benefit from government programs or hold government or party jobs. But other tactics were highly irregular. Some of the incidents mentioned in non-Mexican news reports:

--In Hermosillo, PAN officials displayed a list of several hundred voters newly registered by the PRI. Their computerized voter-identification numbers coincided in perfect numerical order with the alphabetical order of their last names, normally a mathematical impossibility. “We suspect many of these voters don’t even exist,” a PAN official said.

--Elsewhere in Sonora on election day, according to a New York Times account, a group of foreign journalists stopped a cab and found three ballot boxes full of uncounted votes sitting in the back seat, their destination unknown.

--In Pueblo Yaqui, Sonora, the hometown of PAN candidate Rosas, the PRI won precincts by counts of 400 to 0 and 320 to 0. The only precinct that Rosas won was by 800 to 100. Similarly uncanny, even vote counts were reported elsewhere in the state, leading one PRI official to comment privately, “They cannot be this way.”

--In Guaymas, Sonora, 50% of the poll-watchers designated by the PAN were disqualified at the last minute on technicalities that included their having received traffic citations, the Associated Press reported.

--In Nuevo Leon, another border state where PRI won the gubernatorial race with surprising ease, the Associated Press reported that supporters of PAN scuffled with election officials at one polling place when they demanded that the ballot box be inspected before voting began. The box fell open during the struggle, and it was found to be full of ballots marked for the PRI.

The significance of these incidents is not just that they happened, but that they happened in full view of the foreign press. Not since 1968, when the army killed hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City, has there been so much outside documentation of political backwardness--not to say repression--in Mexico. The 1968 massacre badly hurt Mexico’s image as a “democracy” for a time, but the country’s international reputation eventually recovered. It is likely that President Miguel de la Madrid and his government are now hoping for the same forgetfulness.

The PRI people won all the important offices at stake in the elections of 1985, but the only thing that they really gained was experience with a phenomenon that often frustrates political leaders in the United States: They won an election at the polls, but lost face in the news media.