MEXICO : Grass-Roots Activism on the Rise : It’s not politics as usual, as a recent opposition protest march shows.

Mexico’s political opposition is gaining new steam, overcoming the internal dissent and voter apathy that threatened to quash the nascent movement on the eve of last year’s midterm elections.

This week, rural mayoral candidates were able to force authorities to back down from claims that the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has ruled Mexico for 63 years, won elections in their towns.

Converging on Mexico City’s main square after a 50-day march from their hometowns in southern Mexico, candidates and 500 supporters persuaded officials to overturn two disputed elections and to pressure supposedly victorious PRI candidates into resigning in four others.

Their victory is the latest example of the kind of organization and publicity that is spreading through opposition parties in Mexico, a legacy of the local protests that forced PRI candidates in two contested governor’s elections to resign last fall.

Significantly, grass-roots activists in the normally conservative countryside are the ones keeping the opposition movement alive. Facing intimidation that they say includes death threats at home, they are taking their cases to the rest of the nation, via protest marches, press releases and fax transmissions.

Their actions are changing the meaning of political opposition here.

While a host of minor parties historically have operated in Mexico, the opposition could claim little political weight until the economic crisis of the 1980s. The subsequent reforms undercut the patronage system that had sustained PRI support, culminating in the 1988 presidential election--which put Carlos Salinas de Gortari in office but which many Mexicans believe was really won by opposition coalition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

On taking office three years ago, Salinas launched a social service program, Solidarity, that has helped the government regain support. The PRI also made efforts to bring voters back into the fold.

Meanwhile, opposition leaders began squabbling and, as midterm congressional elections approached, appeared to have difficulty keeping their coalition together. The PRI swept the congressional elections.

Seemingly, the official party had once again adapted to change and overcome opposition.

But as demonstrated by the march that ended last week, Mexico has not returned to politics as usual. At the local and state level, voters are continuing to cast ballots for the opposition and to demand recognition of opposition victories.

In addition, they are publicizing their accusations of electoral fraud. Besides voicing their grievances with protest marches, once-remote villages are using fax transmissions and overnight mail to make their cases known across the country.

Opposition activists in Charcas--a town of 21,000 in San Luis Potosi, a central mining state where voters successfully protested fraud in their governor’s election--send out press kits in overnight mail envelopes. The kits document their claims of election fraud and plans to block highways and occupy the City Hall in protest.

Using faxes, citizens of Tihuatlan, a town of 15,000 in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, keep the international press corps posted on violence stemming from an election they call fraudulent. In a recent development, they say, a 72-year-old man was run down in the street and injured in a botched assassination attempt on an opposition mayoral candidate.

The threat of such violence was what persuaded the demonstrators from southern Veracruz and neighboring Tabasco to carry their protest to the capital, said Manuel Lopez Obrador, who heads the left-of-center Revolutionary Democratic Party in Tabasco.

“After the elections, there was violence in the air,” he said. “There was no guarantee we could exercise our right to assemble inside the state. Our (state) government is known to be one of the most authoritarian in the nation. So we decided to leave the state and march to Mexico City.”

Ceferino Chable of Comalco, a town in Tabasco, marched because he believes that the poverty in his oil-rich state is a result of bad government. “The people suffer from lack of jobs, and oil leaks damage our cocoa, everything.”

Local politicians do nothing to change the situation, Chable said, because “they impose a mayor who favors the government.”

“They put dead people on the voter registration lists,” he added. “There is no respect for the vote of the citizens.”

Such arguments are gaining supporters for the opposition, such as a Mexico City man who joined the protesters in the city square at the end of their march.

“The city is the base of our government,” said the man, who asked not to be identified. “If we cannot prevent them from imposing a mayor on us, we cannot prevent them from imposing a governor on us, or even the president of the republic.”

Still, as Chable learned, one major demonstration is not a permanent victory. For every election that was overturned, hundreds remain in dispute.

Despite his long march and the apparent triumph of the protest, Chable will be returning to a hometown that still has a PRI mayor he says was elected by fraud.