The Dinosaurs Wreck Politics : Botched election in Guanajuato raises troubling questions for Salinas

Guanajuato is a key state in Mexico--so centrally situated that all the main roads from the north into Mexico City run through it. There is even a popular old song about the camino de Guanajuato. It now appears the road to political reform in Mexico must follow the same route.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, widely lauded for his aggressive economic reforms, has been badly embarrassed by his political party’s cynical machinations in last month’s Guanajuato state elections. Last week he tried to rectify matters by, in effect, tossing out the results.

Salinas’ political problems stem from the fact that he appears to have very short coattails: His personal popularity among Mexicans isn’t helping carry the powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), to which he belongs. It had been widely assumed that although PRI would do well in last month’s mid-term congressional elections, many PRI candidates, including gubernatorial candidate Ramon Aguirre in Guanajuato, would lose. That didn’t happen--and it now appears that the kind of fraud PRI is notorious for was the reason. For instance, in some Guanajuato precincts Aguirre got more votes than there were registered voters.

That was too much for even a loyal Priista like Salinas. The president “consulted” with Aguirre, who then announced that he had decided not take office. The state’s PRI-dominated legislature--no doubt with a gun held to its head by an angry Salinas--then voted to name National Action Party (PAN) leader Carlos Medina Plasencia interim governor. Plasencia and PAN now have a year to organize new, presumably cleaner elections.

That is all well and good for now, but it doesn’t solve Salinas’ deeper problem, which is making political ethics in Mexico as high a priority as economic reform.

The political mess in Guanajuato is a clear sign that the young reformist president still hasn’t gotten all of PRI’s “dinosaurs,” as they are called in Mexico, under control.

Salinas’ damage control may save face for now, but he must do more to assure that voting in Mexico is clean as a matter of course.