In Power Since 1910 : PRI: Mexico Party Frayed at the Edges

Posters in the campaign for governor look quite normal--a candidate’s smiling face, his name in bold letters.

But missing are the initials of Latin America’s most durable political force, the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico. These days, even candidates of the PRI, as it is known, are playing down their party affiliation.

After almost 57 years in power, while it has monopolized the presidency, the governorships and all but a handful of mayors’ offices, the PRI is on the defensive. Beset by national economic problems and insistent charges of fraud and corruption, the PRI is fighting to keep its hold.

To be sure, the party is not headed for a quick fall. It still seems capable of exercising its formidable talents for gathering support: glad-handing, back-slapping and, when confronted, head-knocking. Also, organized opposition in most of the country is weak.

But the PRI has acquired a noticeable paunch. Its once-fresh revolutionary rhetoric and its ability to mobilize great numbers of people now seem to be aimed at defending the party’s power and privilege, rather than at attacking the nation’s many problems.

For six decades, the PRI stood out in Latin America as a fortress of stability among a collection of revolving-door dictatorships. Now, in the face of the region’s shiny new democracies, the party looks a bit antiquated.

Adolfo Aguilar, an economist at Mexico City’s Center for Economic Research and Studies, said not long ago: “The PRI was once seen as the solution. Now it’s seen as the problem.”

On July 6, state and municipal elections in Chihuahua, a northern border state, will test the PRI’s vitality.

Ballot Boxes Disappear

Last year, hotly contested elections in the neighboring state of Sonora were marred by fraud. Disappearing ballot boxes, the expulsion of opposition poll watchers and unusual results--one popular opponent of the PRI was beaten in his home village by a 10-to-1 margin--threw the whole vote into question.

A significant weakening of the PRI would affect not only Mexico but also the United States, which is ever wary of change and uncertainty on its southern frontier. One of the few notions held jointly by the PRI and Washington is that Mexico must be kept politically stable.

The PRI has been the key to maintaining modern Mexico’s system of rotating power, which is based on the rule of a strong president.

Throughout Latin American history, strong government has often depended on the presence of a single unbending figure. When he is swept away, the system more than likely goes with him.

The PRI has turned the formula on its head. Under the Mexican system, strong men come and go, but the PRI lives on--providing a massive cushion of support for this alternating autocracy.

“Mexico is the perfect dictatorship,” Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once remarked. “It is the perfect dictatorship because it doesn’t seem a dictatorship to anyone. But it is one, in the sense of that stability and permanence that only dictatorships have.”

During his six-year term, the Mexican president is considered a political deity, rarely criticized and always treated with respect. He makes major appointments and hands down decrees that are invariably ratified by a docile, PRI-dominated legislature.

Yet, at the end of his term, the president, after picking his successor, steps down and is rarely heard from again.

Variations in Style

The past three presidencies have been marked by wide variations in style and substance. It seemed almost as if the candidates came from different parties: the populist Luis Echeverria, the flamboyant, heavy-spending Jose Lopez Portillo and now the cautious Miguel de la Madrid.

The PRI adulated them all, transferring its loyalty with the grace of a dancer changing partners.

The switches are eased by the fact that the PRI lacks any consistent ideology. Instead, party propagandists try to identify everything Mexican with the PRI and the PRI with everything truly Mexican.

The red, white and green party colors are also the color of the national flag. The PRI claims for itself the legacy of the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution. According to the party’s “Basic Documents,” the PRI stands for “revolutionary nationalism,” which is defined as “the path chosen by Mexico.” The syllogism is obvious; Mexico has chosen the PRI.

“We can absorb anyone, across the political spectrum. That is what makes us strong,” declared Manuel Alonso, the presidential spokesman.

History of the Party

The role of party as political sponge was a product of the chaos that lingered in Mexico after the revolution of 1910. The country was riddled with factionalism. Anyone with 100 constituents could form a party. When Gen. Alvaro Obregon ran for president in 1920, he was supported by 3,000 different parties and movements.

His successor, Plutarco Elias Calles, absorbed about 1,000 of the units into the National Revolutionary Party, forerunner of the PRI. In the 1930s, President Lazaro Cardenas reorganized the party into four interest groups--workers, peasants, bureaucrats and the military, which was later dropped to keep the generals out of politics. The new organization was called the Party of the Mexican Revolution.

The popular Cardenas picked a successor and retired quietly, setting an important precedent.

In 1946, Miguel Aleman, the official presidential candidate, renamed the party the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The oxymoronic name was symbolic: the revolution had been tamed, institutionalized and kept within a political and bureaucratic family.

Over 10 Million Members

Today, estimates of PRI membership range from 10 million to 15 million. Sometimes, party membership is conferred on the basis of membership in a union or professional group tied to the party. A member may not be aware that he belongs, at least until election day, when his vote will invariably be solicited for the PRI.

“Not even the PRI really knows how many members it has,” said Lorenzo Meyer, director of the Colegio de Mexico, a graduate think tank on the outskirts of Mexico City.

On the surface, the party appears to be nothing more than an enthusiastic practitioner of coalition politics, a south-of-the-border Democratic Party. But the PRI’s factions are bound exclusively to the party in official organizations that represent labor, farmers and “popular organizations” of bureaucrats and professionals.

The PRI’s largest faction--some say its key ally--is the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). Said to number 4 million, the confederation is headed by Fidel Velasquez, a former milkman who has dominated Mexican labor for 40 years as a strongman behind strong men.

Jealous Relationship

The confederation is jealous of its relationships with the party and the government. On May Day this year, non-CTM unions were excluded from the Mexico City’s official labor parade. When a few demonstrators tried to join the parade as it passed in front of President De la Madrid, a rock-throwing melee broke out. Police sprayed the protesters with tear gas and clubbed a few.

With the connivance of the government, the CTM and other PRI unions serve as a giant closed shop. Construction transport workers in Chihuahua have complained that before they joined the confederation and obtained union stickers for their trucks, policemen would stop them from going to work. Freelance bootblacks in Mexico City are sometimes set upon by PRI-affiliated bootblacks who resent the competition. Policemen look on impassively.

On Election Day, taxi drivers are often recruited to carry voters to polling places. Refusal to cooperate can mean the loss of one’s place at a taxi stand or one’s union-issued license to work.

Tested by Economy

Recently, the PRI’s traditional alliances have been sorely tested by the country’s economic problems. Buying power for workers has declined by at least a third in the last five years, calling into question the value of the union-government tie.

Agriculture, for several years underfinanced, is in decline, and many rural people are moving into the cities--or to the United States--in the hope of bettering their lot.

Calls for budget cutbacks designed to curb inflation and to help meet interest payments on a massive foreign debt undermine the party’s hold on the bureaucracy.

In addition, there is increasing resentment of the corruption that seems to be a byproduct of the patronage and relationships that hold the system together at all levels of the bureaucracy. Police accept bribes in lieu of traffic fines. At airports, customs officials make a gesture at confiscating illegal gifts of food being brought into Mexico but relent when offered a tip of a few dollars.

Ex-Police Chief on Trial

The former police chief of Mexico City is on trial for extorting money from his officers who, in turn, allegedly accepted bribes from motorists and other citizens. A former head of the huge government-owned oil company is in jail on charges of embezzling $34 million.

PRI candidates in Chihuahua have taken an anti-corruption stand, a backhanded slap at their own party.

“We’re going to shake out inefficiency and any form of corruption,” said Fernando Baeza, the PRI candidate for governor.

Chihuahua is a frontier state famed for tender steaks and unfriendly snakes. Adverse economic conditions there have strengthened the conservative National Action Party (PAN), the PRI’s principal opposition in the north. In 1983, PAN wrestled control of seven of the state’s 67 city halls away from PRI, including those in Chihuahua, the capital, and the border city of Juarez.

The PRI is trying to recover the city halls it lost and is battling to hold on to the governorship, although the party has never lost a statehouse. The stakes in Chihuahua may seem to be minor, but in Mexico any crack in “the system” is considered significant.

Party Is the Issue

“Beyond economics and regional interests, the party itself is the issue (in elections),” said the Colegio de Mexico’s Meyer.

To counter the opposition threat, the PRI has been careful in its choice of candidates. Baeza, the candidate for governor, is a member of an old Chihuahua cattle family. Critics in the PRI chided the conservative choice as an attempt to out-PAN the PAN, the party of business interests and traditional Catholic values.

Baeza, in an unusual campaign, virtually hides his ties with the PRI. His campaign pictures are devoid of the familiar round PRI symbol. One of his slogans is “Baeza is different,” an apparent criticism of his party’s past.

The PRI also chose some down-home candidates to emphasize its common roots. Mario de la Torre, who is running for mayor of Chihuahua city, boasts that he was born on an ejido, a farming cooperative--the Mexican equivalent of being born in a log cabin.

Placating Activists

De la Torre’s candidacy reflects an attempt by the PRI to placate longtime party activists who feel they have been pushed aside in favor of Mexico City “technocrats,” who are steeped in bureaucratic arts but perhaps have fallen out of touch with the people.

President De la Madrid himself, a Harvard-trained economist, was never elected to an office before being chosen to run for president.

“Those who are educated at Harvard or in Washington are not the only ones who know how to rule,” De la Torre said in an interview. “We must rule with the people, not above them.”

In classic PRI style, the party’s alliance of workers, farmers and bureaucrats is being wooed and mobilized for the campaign.

De la Torre recently visited a small construction transport union in the neighborhood of Cerro de la Cruz. The workers stood impassively, fiddling with their straw cowboy hats. The candidate offered his regards for the workers’ families, reminded them of their “class conscience” and asked politely for their votes.

Ignorant of Barrio Life

A few minutes later, a black pickup truck arrived with four comely campaign workers for a PRI congressional candidate. Union leaders and the women exchanged pleasantries and one of the women commented that she would like to live in a neighborhood with such clean air. She apparently was not aware that much of the barrio had no running water.

In the countryside, PRI functionaries have compiled long lists of requests from farmers who are organized into PRI-affiliated ejidos. On campaign stops at the ejidos, the candidates, with bureaucrats in tow, promise action on whatever requests are made. Sometimes, at a moment’s notice, an electric power line is ordered strung or a well dug.

Quick to Aid Farmers

“If a drilling machine breaks down, the farmers can call me, and I send to get it fixed,” said Jose Bernardo Ruiz, an official of the PRI-affiliated National Peasants Confederation. “That’s how we link everyone to us.”

The bureaucracy, mobilized through the National Confederation of Popular Organizations, paints schools, holds sports meets and runs vaccination campaigns, all in the name of the party.

“We are in a permanent mode of negotiating the demands of our workers,” said Guerrero Chavez, the confederation’s head in Chihuahua. “In return, we ask for support for our candidates.”

Should the mobilization fail, many consider fraud to be the PRI’s trump card.

‘Not New, More Complaints’

“Fraud is nothing new to elections in Mexico,” Prof. Aguilar said. “It’s just that now there are more complaints about it.”

Chihuahua voters seem to be on guard against ballot-rigging.

“We want our vote to count,” said Fermin Fernandez, head of a PRI-linked transport union in Cerro de la Cruz. Fernandez is undecided about how he will vote.

Fernandez repeated commonly heard electoral horror stories from Chihuahua. On one occasion, the vote at a polling station was nullified because some young voters wore blue jeans and white T-shirts. Blue and white are the PAN’s colors, and vote officials asserted that the color combination broke the rule against politicking at the polls.

The PAN candidate for governor, Juarez Mayor Francisco Barrio, contends that PRI’s longevity is based on open election fraud, ballot box stuffing and misuse of government funds.

Vote Outcome Critical

“These elections without doubt will define the direction Mexico will take,” Barrio said recently. “If the PRI respects the PAN vote, the entire nation will make a great leap forward. But Mexico will lose ground if the vote is not respected.”

The Roman Catholic Church, normally quiet on political questions, recently spoke out against fraud in a pastoral letter signed by all the nation’s bishops.

“At the base of the corruption that affects the country is a greater corruption, which is electoral fraud,” the letter said in part.

The bishops defined fraud broadly: pressure on bureaucrats to support the party, attempts to lure voters with services that should be given them in the normal course of governing, dominance of the news media, unions and other organizations that “should, by nature, be independent.” In short, the bishops challenged almost every tactic employed by the PRI in the usual course of a campaign.

In Chihuahua, then, the problem for the PRI is not just to win, but to win cleanly.

If the opposition should take a governorship, or even hold on to a major city hall, dissatisfaction with the PRI would be exposed. And if the PRI wins through fraud, it will be faced with another avalanche of unfavorable publicity and a public whose increasing skepticism is again confirmed.