Mexico Governor’s Race Seen as Key Test for Ruling Party

Long ignored in the bowl of Mexico’s gulf coast, the tropical state that woke up to an oil boom 10 years ago once again finds itself in the limelight, this time because of a boom in opposition politics.

Tabasco state will hold an election for governor today, the first since Mexico’s July 6 presidential vote turned a leftist coalition into a powerful force in Mexico and pushed the president-elect to commit his ruling party to pluralism.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by the initials PRI, has never lost a governorship in its 60 years of rule. In Tabasco, the party has never lost a mayorship, a city council post or a seat in the state congress.

Litmus Test

But when a young and dynamic former state president of the PRI defected last summer to run as the opposition’s candidate for governor, the ruling party suddenly encountered competition and Tabasco became a litmus test for the PRI’s commitment to modern politics.

Although the oil-boom years are over in Tabasco, the small state still produces 40% of Mexico’s petroleum and is one of the wealthiest per capita in the country. It is rich in rivers, rain and agriculture--Mexico’s largest producer of cacao and an exporter of bananas, coconut, watermelon and citrus. Few, if any, of Tabasco’s youth head north to work in the United States; even the poor here have sturdy, cinder-block houses with electricity.

This is not the sort of state where the PRI would like to set a precedent for losing governorships. The opposition, on the other hand, thinks this fertile land is ripe for a change.

“This is an oil state, but people have no money,” said Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the challenger in the race. “It is a state with water, but 55% of the people have no potable water. The budget is the highest (per capita) in the country, but infant mortality is higher than the national average. . . . The other problem is corruption. Much of the money is in few hands.”

A boyish 36-year-old with a crooked smile and a gap between his front teeth, Lopez Obrador likes to portray himself as a David, campaigning in a borrowed white Dodge, against a PRI Goliath who enjoys the boundless resources of the party, PRI unions and even the government. He says the PRI is using time-tested political trickery to win the election against his National Democratic Front, a coalition of parties led nationally by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

“It is a myth that there are two types of PRI politicians, the modernizers and the dinosaurs,” said Lopez Obrador. “There are simply old dinosaurs and young dinosaurs. . . . The PRI has no future.”

PRI candidate Salvador Jose Neme Castillo says the party does not need tricks to beat a fractured opposition run by outsiders from Mexico City. He notes that President-elect Carlos Salinas de Gortari won 75% of the vote in Tabasco last July.

“There is no opposition in Tabasco. They have tried to build the front in three months,” Neme Castillo said. “I am not worried about the opposition. That might sound triumphal, but it’s true.”

But while refusing to acknowledge his competition, Neme Castillo concedes that he has run a campaign like no other candidate for governor here ever has, visiting all regions of the state at least three times to talk to voters. “I have set aside speeches for dialogue,” he said.

At 56, Neme Castillo is as charming as his opponent, a southern-style politician with a deep laugh and a warm handshake. He appears relaxed in striped seersucker pants and a white guayabera shirt, and confident of success. His party is predicting a landslide--victory in all 17 municipalities.

‘Electoral Fraud’

In an unusual public display of internal criticism, however, one of Neme Castillo’s PRI colleagues charged last month that the Tabasco electoral commission “has prepared electoral fraud” to assure a PRI victory in the election. Rodolfo Gonzalez Guevara, a PRI stalwart, wrote in the Mexico City daily newspaper Excelsior that the commission had arbitrarily demanded two years’ residency of all poll watchers in order to limit opposition observers.

Lopez Obrador adds that the commission demanded photos, letters, military service cards and other documents to obtain proof of residency. It all was unnecessary, he said, because voter registration cards carry an address, personal description, signature and thumbprint.

Both Gonzalez Guevara and Lopez Obrador charge that the commission arbitrarily refused to allow the parties in the front to run common candidates for mayor, city council and state congress members, because they had not officially registered as a coalition.

Measures Questioned

They said the commission took it upon itself, in many cases, to decide under which opposition party a candidate’s name would appear on the ballot. In one case, a leftist is listed as the candidate of a rightist party.

PRI officials here say all of the measures were legal. They insist that the Democratic Front did not have enough local support to watch the polls and had planned to bring in outsiders.

PRI officials deny Lopez Obrador’s charges that state funds were used for the PRI campaign or that the party ensured that he could not buy television and radio ads.

Neme Castillo said he was “lucky” to have friends and PRI union supporters--including the bus drivers and radio announcers--who gave him many of the resources for his campaign. It is not his fault, he said, that his name is painted over most available wall space, buses, cabs and on the trunks of city trees. Nor is he to blame, he said, for slogans painted around the state calling the Democratic Front Communists.

The PRI clearly still has support in Tabasco, but there is a surprising show of sympathy for the opposition, given the state’s relative wealth. At Ejido C-21, a collective farm about 50 miles west of the capital, those who support the front said they were “bored with lies and corruption” and believed that Cardenas had won the July presidential election.

But Juan Aquino, 40, a father of seven, said he has always supported the PRI.

“Before, there was nothing here but animals, and now we have roads, houses, kindergarten, primary school and secondary school. We have a small hospital,” Aquino said. “Here, the PRI is the second God on Earth. No one can get them out.”