PRI Faces a Changed Nation in Quest for New Candidate

Leaders of this nation’s ruling party struggled on Friday with a vastly changed political landscape as they sought to come up with a successor for their assassinated presidential hopeful, Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was buried in his hometown.

Among other maneuvers, activists for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, as it is known, appeared to be testing to see whether the planned Aug. 21 national election could be rescheduled.

But their overtures were met with staunch resistance from opposition parties.

PRI strategists, analysts said, were likely seeking new flexibility on the election date so as to widen the field of possible presidential candidates; their options are now limited by a Mexican constitutional restriction.

It prohibits Cabinet members and other top-ranking government officials--the sort of individuals from whose ranks a presidential aspirant might normally emerge--from running for president within six months of leaving office.

But leaders of the PRI, which has governed this nation for 65 years, may want a range of presidential prospects to consider, especially since their candidate potentially will have to deal with a changed Mexico after Colosio’s assassination Wednesday.

In November, when Colosio was named the PRI candidate, Mexico was a country that had moved in a decade from disaster to partnership in the world’s largest trading bloc. Despite its need for domestic political adjustments and its problems with drug trafficking, many analysts hailed this nation as an economic model for the Third World.

The main duty for its next president, analysts said, once may have been simply to ensure the continuity of the present government’s policies.

But Colosio’s successor, experts said, will now be expected to prove that he can lead a nation with an Indian rebellion in its southern state of Chiapas and growing concerns about public safety--fears that were brought home by Colosio’s assassination at a campaign rally in Tijuana.

In other developments Friday:

* Colosio was buried in his hometown of Magdalena de Kino in northern Mexico after his family decided against his planned cremation. “Bullets of hate, rancor and cowardice interrupted the life of Luis Donaldo Colosio, abruptly ending his existence, but not the ideas for which he fought,” said his widow, Diana Laura Riojas, at a graveside service.

* The Indian rebels shelved for now a draft peace agreement, charging that the government is poised to restart the war. The rebels said in a communique that the government is going to use the assassination as an excuse to attack them, the Associated Press reported. “We are on red alert,” the statement said. There was no reaction from the government.

* In the first day of trading since the assassination, the Mexican Stock Exchange closed at 2,520.78, down 22.79 points--less than 1%, compared to Wednesday’s close. The peso held at 3.36 to the dollar at exchange houses. The market dropped just a little more than 4% early in the day, but it quickly recovered. Traders said they believed that this nation’s financial crisis had probably passed, since trading is traditionally light during Holy Week, which starts Monday.

* Mario Aburto Martinez, the suspected assassin, was moved and arraigned in a court near the capital. He now formally stands accused of premeditated murder and carrying a gun without a permit. He was sent to a maximum-security prison near the capital, where he was surrounded by guards carrying submachine guns under the tightest security available. He was placed in a glass cage at Mexico’s newest prison, where small groups of photographers were allowed to take pictures of him as he looked straight ahead, showing no emotion.

* President Carlos Salinas de Gortari appointed Supreme Court Justice Miguel Montes as special prosecutor to investigate Colosio’s killing. A congressional commission also left for Tijuana to begin an independent investigation of Colosio’s death.

The Political Scramble

After a day of grieving, Mexicans returned to their national sport of reading political tea leaves, guessing who the new PRI candidate--and, thus, the de facto next president of this country--might be.

Former Mexico City Mayor Manuel Camacho Solis, at first considered a favorite, appeared to have taken himself out of the running when he was strongly rejected Thursday by the crowds outside Colosio’s wake.

That seemed to open the field.

But the main constraint for PRI strategists appeared to be finding a prominent party member who has not held a high government office in the last month so the individual could meet the constitutional requirement and would have been out of office for six months by the Aug. 21 election.

Speculation in some circles was that, after having fielded a string of economists for Mexico’s top job, the party might opt for a candidate with a law enforcement background.

“People are increasingly concerned about public safety,” social commentator Homero Aridjis said. The assassination, combined with a series of high-profile kidnapings--the most recent one this month--has intensified Mexicans’ general sense of insecurity, especially in cities where violence traditionally has been minimal.

That thinking is believed to favor former Interior Minister Fernando Gutierrez Barrios.

But Sergio Aguayo, a human rights activist, also cautioned that in Mexico, unlike in the United States, public safety is not identified with the police, who are often corrupt. “People concerned about law and order want more control of the police,” he said.

As for the Mexican business community, it still favors a candidate with strong economic credentials. The most prominent PRI economist not in a top government post now is Ernesto Zedillo, Colosio’s campaign manager. While his credentials as an economist are respected, Zedillo had a mixed record as head of the now-defunct Planning and Budget Ministry; he was enmeshed in a scandal over compulsory textbooks when he was education minister.

In addition, Fidel Velazquez, the curmudgeonly leader of the government-affiliated labor movement, cautioned that those handicapping the presidential race should not discount the real favorite of the business and financial community: Treasury Minister Pedro Aspe Armella.

Aspe appears to be ineligible, because he will have been in office too recently to meet the constitutional prohibitions. But, Velazquez argued, “laws can be interpreted.”

The mood of the country, however, also appears increasingly to be turning against such re-interpretations. “We need a greater democratic opening,” Aguayo said. “The proof of that will be clean elections this year.”

The Funeral

Thousands of mourners gathered in Magdalena de Kino, a northern desert cattle town where Colosio was born, to say goodby to their beloved politician.

As his metal coffin--draped in the red-white-and-green Mexican flag--was lowered into the ground, men and women wept, Reuters news service reported.

Funeral ribbons fashioned from plastic bags were strung from road signs. Groups of schoolchildren were among the thousands who lined the highway from the Mexican border town of Nogales to Colosio’s hometown, 50 miles to the south, the Associated Press said. Some held Mexican flags and Colosio campaign posters.

Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

* ACCUSED ASSASSIN’S INTENT: Mario Aburto Martinez says he only meant to hurt Colosio. A14