Mexico Voters to Put Salinas’ Reforms to Test

She is a new-era candidate with an old-style political campaign.

An accomplished woman with a corruption-free record, Margarita Ortega Villa, 38, was President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s handpicked choice for the next governor of Baja California.

After proclaiming her dedication to Salinas’ program of political reform and “modernization” last week, Ortega hauled out the pork barrel for a business-as-usual rally.

“I am here to deliver the gifts that President Salinas sends to you through me,” Ortega told 300 members of a farmers’ union affiliated with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Giveaways, Health Checks

The gifts included irrigation works, a new U.S.-Mexico border crossing, a freeze on state electricity rates and land titles to 42 lots. Outside the union hall, meanwhile, party doctors offered free blood-pressure tests and wrote prescriptions that could be filled from a stock of free medicines in a pickup truck. A party social worker handed out bags of food, and a party barber offered haircuts.

Ortega’s campaign illustrates the conflict that the ruling party, known as the PRI, faces in the new era of competitive politics that Salinas embraced last year after opposition charges that his own election was rigged. There are elections in five states today, but the close races in Baja California, Michoacan and Chihuahua are seen as a measure of just how far the party is willing to go in its perestroika- style reforms.

In these three key states, as well as in Campeche and Zacatecas, voters will pick new state legislatures. In Baja and Chihuahua, voters also will elect new mayors, but the only gubernatorial election will take place in Baja. The PRI has never lost a governorship during its 60 years in power, and it does not want to start now.

Salinas, however, lost Baja California last year to leftist presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, and the gubernatorial race has been warmly contested. The three leading candidates are strong and very different personalities with divergent programs.

Polls show Ortega running neck and neck with National Action Party candidate Ernesto Ruffo Appel, the scrappy former mayor of Ensenada, who was born in the United States and worked for many years as a fisherman for a joint U.S.-Mexican seafood processing company.

Although his party, known by its Spanish acronym PAN, represents the right wing of Mexican politics, the charismatic Ruffo has presented himself as the populist choice--a kind of “everyman” alternative to the corrupt PRI leadership.

Running a distant third is Martha Maldonado, the candidate for Cardenas’ new Democratic Revolutionary Party. The daughter of Baja California’s first governor, Maldonado has traveled a singular political route: She studied in the Soviet Union before enlisting in an urban guerrilla unit in the 1960s. She says she then worked illegally in the United States as a maid and seamstress in the 1970s and returned home in the 1980s to work for the PRI. In 1987, she left the ruling party to work for the Cardenas movement.

Maldonado’s poor showing in the polls is surprising after Cardenas’ win here last year, but political observers say that is because the race for governor is based on personalities rather than ideology. The state that voted leftist in 1988 could conceivably vote for the rightist PAN this year.

The campaigns have been remarkably polite given the division in the state and the distrust among the leading parties: Ruffo, like his party, believes Cardenas is a PRI ruse to divide the opposition; Maldonado believes the PRI and PAN offer the same conservative economic program and have teamed up to beat the Cardenas reform movement.

But even the opposition concedes that their candidates have had more access to government-controlled media than ever before.

Political observers are closely monitoring today’s elections to see if the PRI can win these races fairly and, if not, whether the government will concede defeat honestly. Michoacan is home to Salinas’ rival, Cardenas, while Chihuahua and Baja California are strategically important, given their location on the U.S. border. Although Baja is home to fewer than 3 million residents, the state’s tourism and assembly-plant industries are vital to the national economy.

Either way, some observers say the elections put the PRI in a no-win predicament. If the ruling party wins Baja, the opposition no doubt will cry fraud and question Ortega’s legitimacy. But if the PRI loses, analysts are apt to see the defeat as evidence of the party’s decline and to ask whether it signals success or failure for the Salinas modernization program.

Ortega bristles at such suggestions. In the course of her tireless campaign in recent months, observers say she has been transformed from a tentative presence on the stump to an accomplished, hard-charging--and, some say, arrogant--proponent of the new PRI strategy.

“It is infantile to condition the existence of democracy on the very improbable defeat of the PRI,” she said in an interview aboard her campaign van. “Baja California has had experience with democratic processes.”

Indeed, Ruffo was an opposition mayor of Ensenada following on the heels of another opposition mayor. But the PRI has long been accused of stealing tight elections, including the 1983 race for mayor of Mexicali, which PAN claims it won.

“The culture of fraud was created by the PRI,” Ruffo said last week in his campaign office in a Tijuana shopping center. “The people don’t believe the PRI.”

While few people question Ortega’s integrity, some observers wonder if she can control a party long accustomed to resorting to electoral fraud to pile up huge majorities. Already, opposition politicians and newspapers have uncovered several voting irregularities.

In the Tijuana squatter neighborhood of Camino Verde, a PRI stronghold, opposition parties reported that voter registration rolls tripled from 8,769 to 29,741 during April, the last month for registration. Among the prospective voters: Pablo Picasso and Juan Sebastian Bach. In addition, the weekly newspaper Zeta published copies of the death certificates of two other registered voters.

Last month, officials announced that the statewide voter registration list had mushroomed by 86,000 names between 1988 and 1989, compared to an increase of 545 registered voters from 1986 to 1988. At the same time, the number of voting stations declined by 173. The opposition cried fraud.

Ortega says the irregularities were discovered as part of the government’s review of the registration list and that they have been corrected. The registration list came down by about 21,000 names, to 883,900, but no booths were added.

“The opposition always cries fraud when they predict they are going to lose,” Ortega said with a clear edge in her voice. “For us, the success of modernization is a clean, democratic fight, independent of which party wins. Modernization was imposed with my candidacy.”

Even without fraud, the race illustrates how difficult it is for an opposition candidate to defeat PRI nominees: The ruling party outspent the opposition by many times, investing large sums in advertising, giveaways and computerized polling. PRI officials say they can’t estimate how much has been spent.

Ortega has served as a state and federal deputy and currently is one of Baja’s two federal senators. Before her candidacy was unveiled, she was considered a dark horse in the race to represent the ruling party, but Salinas picked her apparently for her clean record and lack of political liabilities.

In Mexico’s heavily centralized political system, the governors are considered the president’s personal representatives--like colonial viceroys--and customarily the president picks the PRI’s gubernatorial candidates.

If she wins, Ortega would be the first woman governor of Baja and only the third woman governor in the history of Mexico. The scarcity of women in politics here caused some observers to speculate that Ortega would be a “sacrificial lamb” and lose the election in the name of modernization.

Ortega brushes off that view as sexist and notes that Salinas has vowed to promote women.

Despite the backing of the president, Ortega has been running against the checkered legacy of her own party. Not only is the PRI blamed nationally for the country’s weak economy, but in Baja California, the former PRI governor, Xicotencatl Leyva Mortera, was widely viewed as mean, corrupt and incompetent--a personification of the PRI’s liabilities.

Shortly after taking office, Salinas sent Leyva Mortera into political exile and replaced him with an interim governor. The move was regarded as essential here if the PRI hoped to win the governor’s race.

One of Leyva Mortera’s most damaging acts as governor may have been to make a hero out of PAN’s Ruffo. Leyva Mortera put the squeeze on the Ensenada mayor’s budget, so Ruffo took to the streets with a broom, saying he didn’t have the money to pay city sweepers. When word spread of the confrontation between Ruffo and the governor, residents turned out to help the mayor clean up their port city, leading to a nationwide publicity coup.

The governor’s message, however, was not lost on voters in this election.

“If we have an opposition governor, we’ll never get another thing for this state from the federal government,” said a taxi driver who said he would vote for the PRI today. “We can’t have an opposition governor until we have an opposition president.”

Adela Zaragoza, 65, agreed. A homemaker who voted for Cardenas last year, she said she too would vote PRI this time: “Maybe this new governor will be better. Maybe she’ll think differently from a man.”