Campaign Tactics Under Fire in Mexico : Ruling Party Uses Government Resources, Cut-Rate Tortillas

While Mexico’s ruling party has yet to name its presidential candidate and the election itself is still 10 months away, the party has already launched a get-out-the-vote campaign that relies heavily on government resources and uses bargain tortillas as a lure for new members.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, to use its Spanish initials, is expected to name a candidate in a matter of days, when the outgoing president, Miguel de la Madrid, like his predecessors, hand-picks a nominee. From all indications, the chosen candidate will enjoy the same combination of party and government support that has helped keep the PRI in power for 58 years. By comparison, opposition parties run their campaigns on a shoestring.

As the campaign season begins, it is difficult to tell where the government ends and the PRI begins. Food programs meant to ensure the availability of staple goods to the poor are put into effect under the PRI’s red, white and green emblem. Cards that make it possible for families to obtain free milk for their children are dispensed by party officials who, in turn, ask that users register for PRI membership.

Housing officials have distributed twin cooking-gas canisters to residents of government-built housing. The next day, party functionaries came by to ask the recipients to sign up with the PRI.

But the practice of using government programs to promote the dominant party is coming increasingly under fire in Mexico. Many Mexicans believe it is unfair to make the delivery of government services dependent on a citizen’s devotion, however fleeting, to a political group.

Big Advantage

The identification of government handouts with the PRI gives the ruling group an insurmountable advantage in Mexican elections, not only for the presidency, but for legislative, state and local posts, political observers say.

Said one political scientist here: “The link--I would say confusion--of the government and the PRI is a major hindrance to democratic development in Mexico.”

If the past is any guide, the upcoming PRI campaign will be very costly. Typically, as the PRI candidate crisscrosses the country, party functionaries produce instant solutions to local public works problems. The Mexican army provides both transportation and security for the PRI candidate but nothing for his opponents.

It is estimated that De la Madrid’s 1982 campaign cost $100 million. Such spending, coupled with stepped-up pork barrel giveaways, raises fears that Mexico’s already explosive rate of inflation will climb even higher as the government prints money to cover the PRI’s political needs.

“No one really knows how much is spent,” said economist Jorge Castaneda. “It comes out of all parts of the budget and is unaccounted for.”

Fears of inflation have yet to alter the campaign habits of what opposition critics call “the PRI-government.” Even this year, when greater democracy is the rallying cry of virtually all opposition parties, the PRI seems unembarrassed by its monopoly on government resources.

In some Mexico City neighborhoods, PRI officials have instructed party representatives to promote party membership among families in exchange for tortibonos, coupons that permit consumers to buy two pounds of tortillas at one-seventh their regular price.

A letter to the recruiters reads: “We are enclosing four certificates for the acquisition of tortibonos ... so that each family you get to join can fill out this form with the object that . . . these families (can) obtain the corresponding benefits” for joining the party.

On the reverse side of the certificate there is a quotation: “Family membership in the Institutional Revolutionary Party--a decisive factor in the strengthening of the Mexican Revolution.”

The government is giving out 8 million tortibonos this year, reflecting expenditures of about $40 million on tortilla purchases. The PRI is responsible for distributing almost 40% of the coupons, according to Proceso magazine. The rest are handed out by party-affiliated unions, other political parties and independent neighborhood groups.

Recently, Guadalupe Salas de Alcantara, a housewife in the Mexico City neighborhood of Santo Domingo, went to a local PRI office to apply for cards that entitle her to free milk for her children. She said she was advised by neighbors to go to the PRI office instead of the normal government outlet in order to avoid bureaucratic delays.

At the PRI office, she got the milk credential just by signing a form that made her a member of the party.

One day a few weeks ago, Concepcion Villela, a housewife in the the downtown neighborhood of Tepito, was surprised to receive a gift of two natural-gas canisters from the government oil company to replace old ones that residents had complained were fire hazards. The next day, there was another surprise: a request from a PRI representative that she join the party.

“For a moment, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t connect the gas tanks with the PRI,” Villela recalled. “But then I turned him down. We are due normal government service. I saw no reason to have to pay for safe gas tanks with a political promise.”

In Mexico City, posters that advertise the location of government markets, where beans, tortillas and other goods are sold at cut-rate prices, also bear the PRI emblem. The government spends millions of dollars to purchase such goods and sell them at low cost.