Fed Up With Ruling Party, Some in Mexico Heed Ghost of Past

The chants broke out like thunderclaps in the moonless night. “Death, death, death!” the crowd roared, its members’ faintly lit faces filling the plaza of this western Mexico market town.

Theirs was not a literal call for death but a political message aimed at the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has ruled Mexico for six decades. The throng was fed up with the PRI, as the party is known. Its tone was angry.

Oddly enough, the repository of the crowd’s support and hopes for change was himself a former staunch member of the PRI: soft-spoken Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of the late Gen. Lazaro Cardenas, a PRI patron saint and one of Mexico’s most revered presidents (1934-40).

Biggest Surprise of Season

No matter. In Mexico’s unusually hard-fought presidential campaign, with many voters casting about for some alternative to the ruling party, contradictions are the norm. Cardenas’ candidacy is the biggest surprise of the election season.

Uncharismatic, full of unoriginal and unrealistic ideas, only a recent defector from the PRI, Cardenas is nonetheless tapping a mother lode of discontent that is beyond the reach of the other major candidates in the race, the PRI’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Manuel J. Clouthier of the conservative National Action Party. Voters say they are fed up with official corruption, the PRI’s lock on power and five years of economic decline.

No one expects Cardenas to win; victory in presidential elections has been the special preserve of the dominant PRI since 1929. But Cardenas’ strength in some parts of the country is making the PRI nervous, and his candidacy is given an outside chance of knocking National Action out of its long-held No. 2 spot in Mexico’s political spectrum.

Another Candidate Drops Out

Those chances improved considerably June 3 when another candidate of the left, Heberto Castillo of the Mexican Socialist Party, dropped out of the race and threw his support behind Cardenas.

Cardenas now counts on the support of seven minor leftist parties: five that were grouped under Castillo in the Socialist Party and that include remnants of the old Mexican Communist Party, and two others that have supported Cardenas since he announced his renegade candidacy last fall.

Cardenas is also representing the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution, a group that in the past traditionally supported the PRI’s presidential candidate. On the left, only the radical Mexican Workers Party is putting up its own candidate.

The main advantage in this new-found unity for Cardenas is considered to be not so much the actual votes it will win him, but the capacity of the small, well-organized leftist parties to mobilize and watch for voting fraud on election day.

Strongest Leftist in Years

Cardenas, 54, is the strongest left-wing candidate to run for president in many years. His candidacy is a challenge to the prevalent opinion that Mexico’s voters are basically conservative and that the left is no electoral threat.

In March, during a celebration of the anniversary of the nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry by Cardenas’ father in 1938, a Cardenas rally in downtown Mexico City attracted as many backers to the capital’s main square, the Zocalo, as did a well-organized government demonstration. In May, tens of thousands of peasants turned out to see Cardenas in town after town during a campaign swing through Michoacan, his home state. He has outdrawn Salinas in several rural PRI strongholds.

Campus Visit Noteworthy

At the end of May, Cardenas spoke to 50,000 cheering students and faculty at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the capital. This visit was especially embarrassing to the PRI. Since 1974, when then-president Luis Echeverria fled the university under a hail of stones thrown by students, no Mexican president or PRI candidate has dared set foot on campus.

“Cardenas’ campaign is advancing in the preference of voters more rapidly than what had been foreseen,” said Lorenzo Meyer, a leading political analyst at the prestigious Colegio de Mexico, a postgraduate think tank in Mexico City.

“His followers are poor workers. They want revenge. Wages are dropping. They are humiliated. They feel they have been betrayed by the PRI,” said Rogelio Ramirez de la O, a prominent Mexico City economist.

The election is scheduled July 6. In all, five candidates are running, although Salinas, Clouthier and Cardenas are expected to win the lion’s share of ballots.

A Magical Name in Mexico

Cardenas’ appeal is in part mythical. For one, he has a magical name in Mexico that no other candidate can match. His father’s accomplishments as president are seen here as perhaps comparable to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States. Best known for expropriating foreign oil holdings, the elder Cardenas also carried out what was by all accounts Mexico’s most effective land distribution program.

Even the candidate’s first name is heavy with legend; Cuauhtemoc (pronounced cwow-TAY-mock) was the last Aztec prince to resist the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Sometimes it seems that many Mexicans who attend Cardenas’ rallies are coming to see his father. At one such gathering in Cheran, a mountain pueblo in Michoacan state, 88-year-old Leopoldo Ortega pulled a faded handkerchief from its hiding place inside his shirt, unwrapped a worn leather wallet and pointed to a picture of Gen. Cardenas.

“I was very loyal to this man,” the old farmer said, staring at the drawing. “He was for us. He is the reason I support his son, Cuauhtemoc.”

Portraits of Father, Son

In the plaza at Uruapan, banners bore not only the portrait of Cuauhtemoc but also that of his father, and shouts of “Viva Lazaro Cardenas!” preceded shouts of “Viva Cuauhtemoc!” Uruapan is in Michoacan, Cardenas’ home state, where he served as governor for six years.

The candidate makes no effort to play down the connection to his father either by blood or program. Cardenas often emphasizes that his is the true message of the Mexican Revolution in which his father was an important figure. At one campaign stop, Cardenas vowed to “retake the banner of Lazaro Cardenas and fight on the side of the majority.”

Cardenas campaigns on a platform that differs little from the traditional positions of the PRI. He promises jobs and more schools and says that money for such programs will come from canceling payments on Mexico’s foreign debt. He adds that he would stop exporting oil, one of the nation’s principal foreign exchange earners, to save the fuel for future generations of Mexicans.

He avoids answering questions about the experience of failure of debt moratoriums declared elsewhere in Latin America. Just how he would replace income lost by ending oil exports is left unspecified. “The economy will revive, and that will create income,” he said in an interview.

Racial Resentment

Cardenas also inadvertently plays on feelings of racial resentment among the darker-skinned mestizo and Indian population against the lighter-skinned Mexican establishment. The lanky Cardenas has a somber look and coppery skin tone. By contrast, PRI candidate Salinas de Gortari is seen as “a foreigner” with light skin, an Italianate last name and North American pretensions.

“Cuauhtemoc is Mexican. He represents the interests of the nation,” said Antonio Hernandez, 40, who attended the Cheran rally.

Added Esperanza Martinez, 39: “He is in favor of us, the Indians.”

Even his lack of spark in front of crowds seems appealing to some.

“The more his lack of charisma is pointed out, the more success he has,” said novelist Carlos Monsivais. “The more insistence about the tedium of his oratory, the more the respectful silence of his listeners.”

How Far Can He Go?

Just how far this quixotic campaign can go is open to question. A few dissidents have challenged the PRI in the past and drifted into obscurity. Many who attend Cardenas’ rallies appear not so much committed to his campaign as they are opposed to the PRI.

The Cardenas campaign faces other serious problems. Despite growing disaffection, many Mexicans say they will cast their ballots for the official party “because the PRI always wins,” or they say they will not vote because they believe the PRI will steal the election. Some feel that Cardenas, as a former PRI militant, will eventually return to the official fold.

“We are fighting against Mexican fatalism,” said Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a former PRI chieftain and the brains behind the Cardenas candidacy.

Munoz Ledo indicated that Cardenas would formalize his movement into a political party after the election. For the moment, he is running as the candidate of several minor parties.

Still a Long Shot

Like Jesse Jackson, the long-shot populist presidential hopeful in the United States, Cardenas refuses to discuss the possibility that he will lose. “We plan on taking the presidency,” he said.

Before Cardenas split with the PRI, he tried to “democratize” the party from within. Together with Munoz Ledo, Cardenas formed the Democratic Current last year to try to put an end to the practice of el dedazo, or the president’s pointing a finger to select his successor. Cardenas made it clear that he wanted to be president and suggested the party open the nominating process for internal campaigns.

When the PRI ignored him, the Democratic Current split from the party, and last October, Cardenas announced his candidacy.

Now, after months of trying to play down his effort, the PRI is issuing critical commentary on his compaign. Columnists sympathetic with the PRI have begun accusing him of everything from corruption to bad management of the Michoacan statehouse. In Mexican politics, such accusations are considered a sign that a candidacy is catching fire.