Minister Quits in Anger Over Mexico Elections

Interior Minister Jorge Carpizo MacGregor resigned Friday in a move that undercut the credibility of this nation’s planned presidential elections.

“I am more than angry, I am indignant and disillusioned,” he wrote to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in a resignation letter in which he accused politicians of lies and libel in connection with preparations for the Aug. 21 vote. “One has to know when to leave. That moment, for dignity and conviction, has arrived.”

Salinas refused to accept the resignation. He said in a statement that talks with Carpizo--a former attorney general and chairman of the government human rights commission--will continue through the weekend.

But whether Carpizo ultimately resigns, the political salvo he fired Friday “is a serious blow to the whole electoral process,” analyst Jorge Castaneda said.

Mexico is in the midst of its most closely contested election in more than six decades. Analysts have insisted that clean elections may be the most critical means to diffuse the growing threat of social unrest. In the last year, Mexico has suffered a peasant uprising in the southern state of Chiapas, the assassination of the leading presidential candidate and a rash of kidnapings of prominent executives.

Carpizo’s appointment to head the Interior Ministry--which has been the government agency traditionally blamed for questionable or unscrupulous electoral conduct--was considered the best guarantee of a fair vote in a country where election fraud has been so endemic as to almost become part of the national folklore.

That’s because integrity has been Carpizo’s main political asset.

But Carpizo, who vowed Friday to never again accept a political appointment, said he could no longer work impartially with one Mexican political party because of actions by one of its sectors. He did not specify which party.

On the Mexican stock exchange, investors reacted quickly to news of Carpizo’s resignation. The Bolsa stock index, which had been down 20 points before the news hit, plunged to a loss of 55.66 points for the day, to 2,187.27.

The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, an outspoken opposition party, immediately blamed each other for Carpizo’s resignation.

The PRD--whose presidential candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, is widely believed to have lost the 1988 presidential election because of fraud--has been highly critical of measures that officials have proposed to prevent electoral wrongdoing in the August presidential vote.

PRD activists earlier this month applied for and received duplicate voter credentials, then showed them publicly to prove just how easily the system could be duped. Election officials responded by filing legal action against them. In its statement, the ruling party called on the PRD to “get rid of its confrontational attitude and to avoid obstructionist actions.”

But Cardenas, after speaking to a business conference in southern Mexico, told reporters that he believed that Carpizo had “meant the ruling party” had prompted his resignation.

Meantime, divisions within the ruling party have also grown evident as its presidential candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, publicly attacked former Mexico City Mayor Manuel Camacho Solis for failing to get a peace agreement with rebels in Chiapas. Camacho Solis, whom many consider a proponent of more democracy, resigned. “With that, Zedillo’s supporters became determined to seat him in the presidential chair,” said economist Rogelio Ramirez de la O.

Other opposition parties released statements urging Salinas not to accept Carpizo’s resignation.

Mexican election officials have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on voter registration rolls and an accreditation system, as well as a sophisticated computer setup to count votes.

All this effort has been aimed at averting a national embarrassment similar to what occurred in 1988: While opposition candidate Cardenas was in the lead, the computerized national vote-counting system suspiciously crashed; Salinas went on to win the contest by the narrowest margin ever accorded a PRI candidate.

Besides concerns about elections, analysts have said it was critical to have a politician of Carpizo’s integrity in the Interior Ministry because of the agency’s involvement in other delicate issues: The ministry, for example, is overseeing the controversial investigation into the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, which is being conducted by a special prosecutor.

Mexicans have already expressed grave doubts as to whether the investigation will fairly determine Colosio’s killer.