Ruffo’s Election as Governor of Baja Is Officially Confirmed

Ernesto Ruffo Appel, the 37-year-old San Diego-born former mayor of Ensenada, was formally declared the winner Thursday in the July 2 election for governor of Baja California.

The historic election of Ruffo, an opposition candidate, had already been conceded by officials of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, but a protracted vote count had delayed the official release of the final tally until Thursday. The Baja State Electoral Commission has been supervising the count amid widespread charges of irregularities.

Ruffo, who ran under the banner of the right-of-center National Action Party, or PAN, will be the first opposition party governor in modern Mexican history. He is slated to take office for his six-year term Nov. 1. The election attracted widespread attention on both sides of the border.

“This is something we’ve never seen before; it’s going to be very interesting,” said Lorenzo Meyer, a well-known Mexican political scientist affiliated with El Colegio de Mexico, a Mexico-City-based research institution.

Elected Mayor in 1986

Ruffo, a seafood-industry entrepreneur who was elected mayor of Ensenada in 1986 in his first try at elected office, was reported to be resting Thursday. Son of a middle-class Ensenada family, Ruffo was born in San Diego but spent most of his life in Ensenada.

In final tallies, Ruffo defeated the PRI candidate, Margarita Ortega Villa, a 38-year-old sociologist and federal senator, by almost 41,000 votes. Ruffo garnered 204,507 votes, or 52.4% of the total, to 163,529 for Ortega, who wound up with 41.9% of the vote.

In the state’s four municipalities, Ruffo emerged victorious in three--Tijuana, Ensenada and Tecate. Ortega only won Mexicali, her home town.

Ruffo won Tijuana, the state’s most populous city, with more than 1 million residents, by 38,000 votes, providing much of his margin of victory. The PAN also swept the mayor’s race and six state legislative seats representing Tijuana.

Experts attributed his election to a number of factors, including the selection of weak PRI candidates for governor and mayor of Tijuana, but one principal reason stood out: Voters cast their ballots in protest of what they viewed as corrupt and inefficient PRI leadership. Ruffo has come to personify an alternative to the party that has ruled Mexico for six decades, providing political stability but, in the eyes of critics, little room for dynamism or new ideas.

“People were ready for a change,” said Benjamin Flores Gonzalez, Ruffo’s chief spokesman. “The PRI is now a minority party in Baja California.”

Indeed, the PAN won eight of 15 legislative seats contested in the July 2 elections. The PRI won seven slots. Four others will be apportioned to minority parties.

The PAN also won the mayor’s seats in Tijuana and Ensenada, Ruffo’s hometown. The PRI won the mayor’s race in Mexicali and Tecate.

The final results in the local races could change before the fall. The Baja Electoral College, which is likely to be dominated by the PAN, will rule on PAN challenges that it actually won two other legislative slots, as well as the mayor’s race in Tecate.

Savoring Success

The official findings of Ruffo’s victory capped the most successful week in the history of the opposition PAN, which is now savoring its greatest success ever during its half-century as an opposition entity in Mexico.

Never before had the PAN--or any opposition party--won a governor’s seat or the majority in a state legislature in Mexico.

Apart from widespread dissatisfaction with the PRI, observers credited Ruffo’s personal charisma with helping him clinch the campaign. They also cited the lackluster campaign waged by his PRI opponent, Ortega, a so-called “new-era” PRI politician who speaks frequently about political “modernization” but apparently failed to move the electorate. She would have been the third woman governor in Mexican history.

When handpicked by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari earlier this year, Ortega was relatively little known outside of her home city of Mexicali, the state capital. She is said to have shut out many veteran politicos from her campaign--something many regard as a mistake. Some estimates say the PRI spent more than $4 million on her election effort--more than 20 times the amount that the PAN says it expended.

Much of the discussion surrounding Ruffo’s triumph has focused on why the national PRI--and, specifically, President Salinas--agreed to accept the loss. For 60 years, governors in Mexico’s heavily centralized system have served as the direct representative of the president. In the past, the PRI has relied on fraud to ensure victories in gubernatorial contests and other elections.

However, such fraud would have surely sullied Salinas’ carefully crafted image as a reformist leader eager for a democratic opening. In the eyes of some, Salinas was willing to sacrifice Baja to the right-wing PAN, whose economic policies do not diverge greatly from those enunciated by the PRI leadership.

However, in the interior state of Michoacan, the PRI seemed less eager to lose control to a competing left-wing political movement led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a one-time PRI governor who split from the party and formed the new Party of the Democratic Revolution. That party’s economic agenda is considerably to the left of the PRI and the PAN.

The PRI contends that it has maintained control of the Michoacan state legislature after the July 2 elections there, although opposition leaders say the PRI actually lost and is keeping a majority through electoral sleight-of-hand.

Because of widespread charges of voting irregularities in the Baja race, about 10% of the votes cast were annulled, state election officials said. Officials said about 50% of the state’s estimated 880,000 voters participated in the election.