PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : The Vote Is PRI Property No More : Inch by inch, political space is opening, most recently with new protections for elections and human rights.

Time seems to be running out for the old political ways of Mexico. A few weeks ago President Carlos Salinas de Gortari appointed a commission of impeccable individuals to monitor human-rights violations in an effort to clamp down, once and for all, on all abuses, whether by private groups or public agencies. Then, congress passed a new electoral law that eliminates all the devious instruments through which the government party, PRI, used to rig elections. If those developments mark the arrival of a new political system, the challenge will be to build a modern structure to give it life.

Given the size of Mexico, human-rights violations have been relatively few, but nonetheless serious, in recent years. Police and government officials, particularly at the state and local levels, have killed dissidents and threatened whomever they deemed stood in the way of their pursuits. The drug war has not helped; both the drug gangs and the police have never bothered to consider whether, in their zeal to catch or escape one another, they were killing or harming peaceful, ordinary citizens. Worst of all, many of those abuses have been condoned or otherwise hidden by the very authorities that should have been prosecuting those responsible for them.

Typical of the style of the Salinas administration, the government response was neither shy nor complacent. Rather than simply solving the one or two cases that have attracted particularly strident public opinion, the president went all the way to create a commission that has no legal hindrances to carrying out any investigation. And its members could not have been better chosen. Among them is a former rector of the National University, the rector of the Jesuit university in Mexico City, the publisher of the left-leaning daily La Jornada, the publisher of the independent daily El Norte of Monterrey, a world-renowned novelist, the editor of the monthly magazine Nexos, and so on. The quality of the commission members guarantees, if nothing else, that they are not going to shy away from anything; each and every member stands to lose more by attempting to side with the government than by denouncing it.

In the realm of elections, there had been so many instances of rigging in the past 50 years that elections no longer fulfilled the democratic role of conferring legitimacy on the political system. Since the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) had never been seriously challenged in any national election, electoral fraud had been largely a local issue. That changed in 1988 when the PRI experienced real competition in a federal election. Though accusations of fraud can easily be pushed too far, particularly when the accusers are all former PRI members, well-versed in the art of political manipulation, those elections showed the limits of an electoral (and political) system that is perceived as based on electoral fraud.

Here, too, Salinas went for consensus rather than a quick fix. The PRI was the the only party to introduce a bill for a new electoral law. Most of the other parties rejected the bill as presented because it still gave the PRI control of every aspect of the electoral process. Passing the law required only a simple majority in congress, which the PRI controls; yet it was obvious that unless the bill passed and became law by a clear majority, it would not enjoy the credibility that the electoral system demands.

Hence the PRI began to negotiate even with the most radical opposition. By the end of the congressional term, literally at midnight of the last day, the PRI had conceded the most fundamental strongholds of electoral control: Voters will have to present a registration card with picture; preliminary election results will be announced the same day, as opposed to waiting a week for the official results; the entity responsible for certifying the results will not be skewed in favor of the PRI by the presence and votes of government people; all parties will share equally in the nomination and selection of electoral supervisors, and so on. The law passed with 365 votes, more than 100 of those from the opposition. Thus ended the PRI’s power to manage the vote as if it were a private club.

These two actions show a clear line of departure from the good old days of easy PRI rule. Most important, however, they demonstrate a clear understanding by the administration that it is impossible to be successful in the new era of economic competition and involvement with the rest of the world if Mexico’s political house is not kept in perfect order.

Clearly, the new constraints in both the electoral and human-rights realms will not be swallowed easily by the traditional PRI strongholds. These, the net losers in the new era, will make every attempt to hold on to their old privileges.

It is in this context that the Salinas government’s political courage becomes so much more relevant. Reforming a nation and bringing it out of 50 years of morass is one tough job.