Losers Raise Fraud Charges : Mexico’s Election Over--but Campaign Continues

More than a month after national elections, Mexico’s presidential campaign continues in full swing on the eve of the official canvass, with the declared winner under siege from challengers who charge that the ruling party falsified the results of the vote.

More than 10,000 backers of the rightist National Action Party marched through the capital Sunday denouncing fraud and demanding new elections, while supporters of leftist coalition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas began a series of protests throughout the nation that they promise will last throughout the canvassing process, which will take more than two weeks.

Despite his proclaimed victory, Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party is clearly on the defensive. Salinas, 40, kicked off his postelection campaign Friday with a rally inside the fenced courtyard of party headquarters that he called a “popular action to ratify our national victory.”

Hoping to move the political debate from the issue of alleged fraud to that of the future, Salinas promised that the PRI, as his party is known, will “turn our victory into a response to the demand of workers and peasants for justice, better education, nutrition that strengthens our children, better housing, health care and a better environment.”

But the focus of the demonstrations is today’s scheduled start of a canvass by the Electoral College, which must certify the results of the July 6 elections that were proclaimed by the Federal Election Commission last month. The newly elected Chamber of Deputies meets as the Electoral College to certify the election of its own members and later that of the president.

While Salinas is virtually certain to receive certification by the PRI-dominated chamber, he faces a fierce challenge to his legitimacy that could undermine his ability to govern for the next six years.

“Cardenas’ strategy is to weaken as much as possible the legal and political basis by which Salinas takes office, to try to prove that the government has not respected the will of the people,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“Cardenas will present his movement as the representative of law and the constitutional order. He will treat Salinas as a de facto president. If he maintains that claim for six years, it could be devastating for Salinas,” Aguilar said.

The unprecedented competition in last month’s election and the relative closeness of the vote marked an end to a virtual one-party system and a turning point in Mexican politics, according to political analysts, who now commonly refer to “before and after” July 6.

Renowned author Octavio Paz wrote in an essay published last week that Mexico is taking its first steps into the uncharted territory of pluralistic politics

‘More Religion Than Politics’

“Will we be able to live together in an open democracy with all its risks and limitations?” Paz asked. “In our history, neither the victorious nor the conquered ever accepted that their triumphs or their defeats were relative or provisional. All or nothing--it was more religion than politics.”

Last month, the Federal Election Commission declared Salinas the winner with 50.36% of the vote--the lowest in history for a candidate of the party that has governed Mexico for six decades. Cardenas, a former PRI member whose father half a century ago was one of the nation’s most popular presidents, stunned the country by winning 31.1% of the official count. Manuel J. Clouthier of the National Action Party polled 17%.

The opposition parties of the left and right have joined forces to charge that the results were fixed. Cardenas, who claims that his leftist coalition won, filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office last week charging that the government has failed to turn in official tallies for nearly 25,000 of the 55,000 polling places.

Although he is the accused, the burden of proof seems to rest on Salinas and the official party. Public skepticism about the PRI is high after what is believed to be a long history of election fraud.

Several political analysts have said in recent interviews that they believe Salinas may have won the election, but not with the majority that the Election Commission proclaimed. To prove convincingly that he won, these analysts said, Salinas would have to admit fraud.

Catch-22 Situation

“It is a Catch-22,” Aguilar Zinser said. “They now have to defend something undefendable. Maybe they won, but not by 20%.”

PRI officials insist that this year’s was the cleanest and most closely observed presidential election in Mexican history and that the results demonstrate their fairness. PRI presidents of the past have often won with 90% to 100% of the official vote count, and none had ever before received less than 70%.

PRI strategy is to make as credible a defense as possible, which it began doing last week in newspaper advertisements with splashy charts showing its wins and losses.

“We will fight them poll by poll, if we have to,” said Otto Granados, Salinas’ spokesman. “We will appeal daily to the reason of intelligent people. We will scrupulously respect our defeats and defend our triumphs.”

Many PRI officials, including outgoing President Miguel de la Madrid, warned the opposition last week against inciting violence, reminding them of the 1968 student uprising that ended in a massacre by police that left an estimated 200 to 300 dead. Opposition figures assert that such warnings are meant to frighten people away from demonstrations. They also say they fear infiltration by provocateurs.

Sunday’s demonstrations were peaceful.

Coffins Marked ‘Constitution’

Carrying coffins inscribed “The Constitution,” and waving banners denouncing Salinas’ “usurpation” of the presidency, National Action supporters marched along a main boulevard, Paseo de la Reforma, to the capital’s huge central plaza, the Zocalo.

Cardenas supporters held rallies of several thousand supporters in various parts of the capital and the interior and called on sympathizers, as a gesture of protest, to turn off their lights from 8 to 8:15 every night during the canvassing process. Cardenas is scheduled to speak today at a demonstration outside the National Congress, where the Electoral College will meet.

During that period, the opposition will try to chip away at Salinas’ credibility by proving incidents of fraud and to reduce the PRI majority in the 500-member Congress that was proclaimed by the Election Commission.

Electoral College members have the right to challenge the results from individual polling places, to seek to annul entire districts and to dispute the victory of declared winners. Opposition members previously tried to do this in a special federal tribunal for electoral disputes, but the court--like the Election Commission controlled by the PRI--rejected all but a handful of complaints for lack of admissible evidence.

Ratification Begins Sept. 1

Once the new Congress certifies the election of its own members, the Chamber of Deputies meets beginning Sept. 1 to ratify the election of the president. Technically, the chamber could annul the election or deny Salinas the presidency--although it is highly unlikely to do so. Salinas needs 251 votes, a simple majority, to win certification to take office Dec. 1.

The opposition will lobby PRI members to vote against Salinas, while the PRI will try to divide the opposition, PRI officials and analysts say.

And while the PRI may find it easy to split an ideologically diverse opposition, it must also guard its own flanks. One PRI deputy-elect from the state of Tabasco has already defected to the Cardenas camp, as did the PRI’s candidate for governor of Tabasco.

Salinas, who campaigned on a platform of reforming his party’s system of patronage and political favors, now will have to bargain with some of the most intransigent sectors of his own party to secure his vote in the electoral college, political analysts say. The negotiations are likely to hamper his own efforts at reform.

“Salinas is going to have to give a Christmas tree of goodies to each group in the PRI to get their votes,” said Jorge Castaneda, a political analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a harsh government critic.

‘Dinosaurs Will Extract Jobs’

“They are going to ask and ask and ask,” Castaneda said. “The dinosaurs will extract jobs; the head of the teachers’ union has said he wants to be secretary of education. Do you think La Quina (nickname of Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, head of the Oil Workers Union) is going to say here are my votes and we’ll negotiate later?”