Dispirited Voters Waver : Expectations Are Sinking, but Mexicans Loyal to PRI

They call it the Mansion, although there is nothing glamorous about the rambling, four-story tenement that houses more than 60 families, each in a dank cement room. The inhabitants are restaurant workers, market vendors and day laborers who moved from the countryside a decade ago in search of a better life.

But life is not getting easier, say the women who take turns washing their clothes and breakfast dishes at communal sinks. Rents at the fly-infested Mansion have doubled in the last two years. The price of a chicken, including head and feet, equals the monthly rent. Mothers serve soups and rice to their children to replace ever more expensive meat.

“We’re worse off every day,” said Flor, 29, the mother of three. “The price of meat is in the clouds. We eat chicken once a week. I haven’t bought any new clothes for myself in three years.”

Echoed by workers and farmers throughout the country, Flor’s lament is the central theme of this presidential campaign season in Mexico. During the administrationof President Miguel de la Madrid, whose six-year term ends in December, the buying power of most Mexican workers has dropped by 50%. Half the work force is without a full-time job, and Mexico, which once boasted one of the steadiest growth rates in Latin America, has stagnated. The value of the Mexican peso has declined sharply.

On Wednesday, Mexicans will go to the polls to choose a new president. The winner will almost surely be Carlos Salinas de Gortari, candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, a formidable electoral machine that has ruled the country for 60 years. Even as Mexicans complain of their economic straits, most of those interviewed recently by The Times say they will vote for the PRI, as the party is universally called, for reasons that range from habit to gratitude for favors large and small.

In Mexico, a Cliff-Hanger

The official vote count will probably give Salinas somewhere between 55% and 60% of the ballots cast. In most parts of the world, such a margin would amount to a landslide; but in Mexico, with its history of one-sided elections, this is a real cliff-hanger.

Voters in record numbers are expected to look for alternatives to the PRI, either in the left-wing candidacy of renegade PRI politician Cuauhtemoc Cardenas or the conservative candidacy of businessman Manuel J. Clouthier.

The reason for the defections, most analysts here agree, is that Mexicans are simply worse off today than six years ago when they last voted for a president. The country is in a revolution of sinking expectations.

Such despair has elicited promises by Salinas to restore economic expansion. His aides talk of 4% annual growth and steady prices.

Voters Are Not Impressed

But scores of voters interviewed at the Mansion and elsewhere were not impressed. Many say the government makes promises every six years that are conveniently forgotten after the election. They expect their lives to get worse before they get better.

“From here on, things are going to be very tough,” complained Nicolas Valdez, a factory worker in Valle de Chalco.

Despite this skepticism, the PRI can expect support. In some cases, voters said the party is the only one they know anything about. Others said they would vote PRI because the PRI would win. Fear is another factor; according to a recent Gallup Poll, more than half of Mexicans surveyed said they expect social unrest if a party other than the PRI takes power.

Some simply see their vote as a way of saying thanks for some favor or service provided by the PRI. Flor, for instance, noted that the PRI local government had earned loyalty at the Mansion by lending a helping hand there. Not long ago, PRI representatives provided paint and a chimney to funnel smoke from a wood-burning boiler that heats the building’s eight showers. Occasionally, the PRI sends a bus to take the women and children to a museum and lunch--luxuries they could never afford on their own.

“The PRI brings us toys on Children’s Day,” said Flor, who declined to give her last name. “And on Mother’s Day they give us tickets to go to the movies.”

In the Valle de Chalco, a squatter community on Mexico City’s eastern outskirts, one of Salinas’ campaign sign promotes “a more rational use of water.” The crisp slogan overlooks one detail: There is no water in the Valle de Chalco, except for wide rain puddles that have turned unpaved streets to mud.

When they can make their way through the mud, giant tankers haul water to the residents of Valle de Chalco. Water is rationed by its high cost.

“We pay 1,000 pesos (about 45 cents) per drum,” said 30-year-old Nicolas Valdez. “A drum lasts about two days.” Those who can’t afford to buy, collect polluted rainwater in buckets and boil it.

Six years ago, Chalco Valley, as it is called in English, was but a few houses scattered along the southern highway running from the capital to Puebla. Today, it is 22 neighborhoods, tens of thousands of clapboard and cinder-block houses and hundreds of thousands of the migrant farmers who have transformed Mexico into an urban country.

Left Farm for Capital

Unable to make a living off his land in Veracruz, Valdez moved to the capital eight years ago and built his two-room house in Chalco in 1983. Soon after, his younger brother and cousin followed him to the city.

Valdez works the overnight shift at a cracker factory, earning the minimum wage of 56,000 pesos a week--about $25.50--for six shifts. Out of that, he supports his wife and three children, including buying the family’s water, and pays 7,000 pesos a week in bus fare for the two-hour trip to and from the factory.

Valdez belongs to the PRI’s Confederation of Mexican Workers, a 4-million-member union. As a union member, Valdez gets annual paid vacations, state-provided health care for his family and access to low-priced furniture in union stores.

Despite these benefits, Valdez said, he is losing economic ground, sinking like a water truck in the mud.

“We used to eat a lot better before. But if you protest your salary, you could lose your job. You are very careful not to lose your job because there aren’t any more out there,” Valdez said.

‘I Feel Pressure, Get Angry’

“I argue with my wife when she tells me we need shoes for the children. I feel pressured and get angry. Look at what I earn.”

Valdez’s union mobilizes its members for Salinas rallies. When Salinas visited Chalco last spring, he promised residents that his government would install waterworks. Just days before the election, three chartreuse government trucks showed up on the widest dirt road in Valdez’s neighborhood with workmen to put up electrical power poles.

Despite the pledge and instant public works program, many in Valdez’s neighborhood have been drawn to the campaign of PRI dissident Cardenas, whose father, President Lazaro Cardenas, is remembered fondly for nationalizing Mexico’s oil industry and distributing land. They believe Cardenas would look after the poor.

Valdez, however, will stick with the PRI: “I know Salinas is going to be the president, and so I will vote for him. He’s the government.”

The price Marcelo Acosta receives for his corn has gone up 30% in the last year, but the price he pays for fertilizer has tripled. The farmer said he cannot support his six children on the 2 1/2 acres the government gave him in an ejido, or communal farmland . To survive, he also sharecrops five acres for one-third of the corn harvest and sells milk from his four cows each morning, and his wife takes in sewing.

Leaning against his wooden, horse-drawn plow one day last week, the 46-year-old Acosta figured maybe he was partly to blame for the high cost of living: After all, like everyone else, he raised his milk prices from 300 to 600 pesos a liter.

A member of El Colorin ejido in the town of Texcalac, Acosta is one of hundreds of thousands of ejidatarios , or communal farmers, who have received land in PRI agrarian reform programs. Most of the communal farmers are organized into the PRI’s National Farmers Confederation and as such have access to low-interest government loans for fertilizer and seed--loans that are insured against a bad crop.

Farming a Big Gamble

Acosta’s hands are cracked and caked with dirt kicked up from his plow. Farming is hard work and a big gamble, he said. If you win, you’re set, but a drought or a cold spell can wipe you out. His eldest son already has chosen to work in a nearby plastics factory rather than buck the odds.

Like so many of the communal farmers, Acosta said, as long as he has been able to vote, he has voted PRI.

“I am going to vote for the party, for Salinas. They have always helped us,” he said, noting the new sewer system the government began to install in January and the blacktop laid recently along the highway to town.

Acosta said he has heard on television about the country’s $108-billion foreign debt. He can’t figure out why the government borrowed so much money or what, for that matter, happened to all the revenue Mexico was to receive for its oil production.

Bitter Joke

“These folks don’t just come in to help the people, you know. Every government leaves office full of millionaires. And it’s always been that way. The joke is, if they were any good, they’d probably get killed, just like that American president who was so good, Kennedy; they killed him,” Acosta said.

“I don’t know. A president can look great before he’s elected, and then turn out to be terrible,” he said. “We’ve made some pretty bad mistakes in the past.”

Survival in Mexico is sometimes a test of endurance. For hours on end at the intersections of Mexico City, teen-agers with greasepainted faces juggle for coins from motorists stopped for red lights. On the northern Highway 57 leading from San Luis Potosi to Monterrey, children sell lizards and snakes under the hot desert sun. On the streets of provincial cities, men stake their hopes for their children’s dinner on selling a giant plastic watch or a multicolored umbrella.

For those who can muster cash and master fear, there is the trek across the U.S.-Mexican border. Despite a new American immigration law to discourage them, hundreds of men and women gather in Tijuana’s soccer field at dusk each evening to try their luck at a sprint into the United States and a dollar-wage job.

Dressed in Levi’s and tennis shoes, or brown work pants and a straw hat, they pace nervously before dark, observed by the U.S. Border Patrol across the way. If they are lucky, they say, they will not be in Mexico on election day.

No Work at Home

Among those waiting one night last week was Arturo Milanez, 19, from Guadalajara. Single, broke and ambitious, Milanez said there is no work for him at home.

“I want to make some money so I can open my own business in Mexico,” Milanez said. Too young to have voted in previous presidential elections, Milanez sounds cynical beyond his years. “The election is all a big lie, a joke on the people,” he said.

Nearby, Paulo and Ramarino Tapia, two brothers from the state of Veracruz, said they own no land and could not earn enough to live on as day laborers in the countryside. When Paulo’s wife had their first son two months ago, he decided to head north.

“I don’t want my son to suffer like we have,” said Paulo, 23. “I want him to have something better.”

Next to him, Noe Mendez, 20, a bricklayer from the state of Mexico, said he, too, hoped to earn money to give his three children a good education. But if he didn’t make it past the U.S. Border Patrol, he would vote for the PRI, he said.

“Whether I vote for them or not, the PRI is going to win,” said Mendez. “So what do I win voting for another party?”