Mexican Official Withdraws Resignation : Politics: Interior Minister Jorge Carpizo MacGregor will oversee August elections. Decision seen as boost for president.

Interior Minister Jorge Carpizo MacGregor on Sunday withdrew his resignation from the Cabinet post that oversees Mexican elections, defusing a crisis that threatened to undermine the credibility of the Aug. 21 presidential poll.

After an intense weekend of talks with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Carpizo released a letter that read, “So that I will not be considered to have acted irresponsibly and unpatriotically, I will remain in the post of Interior minister and fulfill the duties of that post through the next federal elections.”

Keeping Carpizo on the job was a triumph for Salinas, who is attempting against mounting odds to maintain social stability through the last year of his term. With an unresolved peasant uprising in Chiapas, the unsolved murder in March of the leading presidential candidate, a rash of kidnapings and the proliferation of drug-related killings, fear has grown that the presidential election will become a focus of violence.

The furor set off by Carpizo’s angry resignation Friday demonstrated the intensity of concern surrounding what is expected to be the tightest presidential race in six decades. With three candidates fewer than 20 points apart in most polls, any hint of fraud could be enough to set off election-day riots.

“I will continue to act in strict compliance with the law for clean, true, objective and transparent elections,” Carpizo pledged in the letter, addressed to Salinas and the public.

He also reiterated his determination never to accept another public office.

Carpizo rose from university rector to chairman of the government human rights commission to attorney general, then Cabinet minister, all on his reputation for rare integrity and independence. His character is considered the best guarantee of clean elections in a country where widespread vote fraud has been routine. Various political parties, civic groups and politicians had called on Salinas not to accept Carpizo’s resignation.

Carpizo shed no more light on the events behind his resignation. He had said Friday that factions of an unspecified political party were undermining the electoral process with libel and lies.

“I need the support of the society and political parties in halting speculation about which party I meant,” he said in the Sunday letter. “Any clarification on my part in this moment would gravely injure my impartiality and my function in the electoral process.”

Radio and television reporters--who rely on government airwave concessions--said they were pressured by government officials to stop all references to talk about which party Carpizo meant.

In explaining Carpizo’s actions, one government source noted, “He is a very inflexible person, but that is his great virtue, after all.”